<Begin Segment 30>

TI: And so where did you finally end up with your group?

JY: Oh, finally we wound up in this camp in Musberg.

TI: And explain this one. Is this probably even a larger camp?

JY: Oh, it's the largest we've been in, just soldiers from every country, it seemed, they had them from Africa, from India, British, of course, Australians.

TI: So when you say really large, the previous one was about five thousand, this one was about what, how many?

JY: Fifty, seventy.

TI: Wow, so it's like ten times...

JY: It's a city.

TI: And so what was that like? How was it organized? I mean, what kind of things did you do...

JY: [Laughs] You wonder if it's organized at all.

TI: So what did you do on a day-to-day basis?

JY: Well, I was, again, I lucked out, because I was assigned to be the sanitation officer, checking all the latrines. Of course you can imagine, a town that size, with sort of an ad hoc kind of assembly of men. And so I'd write my report every day.

TI: And so what kind of reports would that be?

JY: Just that the latrines were filled to capacity kind of thing. But then at the same time, I'm looking still for my Buddhahead friends, and they gave me leeway to go through the whole camp to look around to see. So I thought that was a break. At least I wasn't confined to one unit.

TI: And so did you find --

JY: Yeah, that's when I found the 442 guys.

TI: And what was that like? They probably looked at you and you... at that point, what garb do you wear? Do you still have the old 106th stuff on?

JY: Yeah, maybe. I can't recall. But by then, our garb was pretty well tattered, underwear is just hanging on to us because we didn't ever get a new supply of underwear.

TI: And so the 442 guys were probably looking at you and probably not understanding who you were or where you came from.

JY: Yeah, well, there's no jubilation or anything, just explain where you're from. And they asked about my food, when did I eat a good, when I ate a meal last and all that. They said they would fix me up a meal. Come back in two or three days and they'll have something ready for me. So they did.

TI: It's so interesting, because before, you didn't know these men.

JY: Oh, absolutely no one.

TI: They were just Japanese American. But here you're in a situation in the most difficult situation, and it's funny, you see another Japanese American, it's like going to another city or something. It's kind of interesting how Japanese Americans would...

JY: Yeah, you felt like you finally bonded again.

TI: When you see that or think about that, are there times that you, perhaps, think what it would be like if you were, sort of, assigned to like the 442 and fought with the Japanese Americans?

JY: Yes.

TI: Have you thought about that versus the 106th in terms of what the experience would...

JY: No, I never thought about that for some reason. But I knew that seeing them, we met somebody that we had shared some common life experiences, and we had some feeling about the war that you can't put into words. And this is the way things turned out for us, I guess the unspoken kind of things that we shared.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.