<Begin Segment 49>

MA: So you, I know that you have spent a lot of time talking with school groups and with people about your experience. What types of things do you want them to take away from what they hear from you, or learn from what you're saying?

GM: Well, many things about the speeches I make is, one is that I want to get some benefits for our side because I'm there talking to 'em, and I want to teach them something. Both sides going to benefit from what I say, and I like to spread the legacy of the 442nd. And to do this, you have to tell the kids your basic previous life before you went into it, the good life, and then you get thrown into barbed wire concentration camp. And I always use the word "concentration camp" in my talks because they can understand it better than "internment." "Internment" has no meaning to it, where "concentration camp" has some meaning to it. And the, going into the army, and talking about the 442nd, and not about numbers of decorations and things like that, because they know this. We talk about things like the camaraderie and the, you know, the, not leaving any dead or the wounded man behind, and be proud of your records as far as winning all the battles. But then I go into the Gothic Line in the final part of my, my talk, and build up the story there for the conditions and what we got to do and how tough it was and everything. And they're all sitting on the end of their seats listening to you, wanting to know what happened. And you finish it off, because it's easier to finish it off because it only lasted thirty-two minutes after we attacked them. And we won that part of the war, okay. But then I, from there I switch over to why we were so good.

MA: What do you tell them?

GM: And I say it's not because we're Japanese, but because, basically because we're Japanese American. And, and it is that the Japanese Americans in the 442nd had the highest IQ of any organization in the army, okay, that's one. So I'm building this up for the kids, now. And we trained real hard, that's another... and we knew our equipment and everybody knew what they're doing. And then I say, tell 'em that the grades in high school and everything were real good, because we studied real hard and everything. And basically, I bring in this thing, this story about what our parents told us: "If you were born a Japanese in a white man's country, when the day you're born, you got two strikes on you from the very start. So the only thing you can do is to study, study, study and be on par with everybody else." And I tell this to the kids. And so I tell the kids in my own terms, "If you don't study today, you're not going to make it later on. And if you do study today it's going to be a lot easier for you." That's the only way to look at it, because when you get old, there's no time to study and try to correct your mistakes. And this is the thing that is part of our culture, Japanese culture, that our parents told us that, "You have to study." And one of the studies happened to be -- I disagreed with it -- that you have to learn to be able to speak good Japanese, because when you grow up, you may have to do business with only the Japanese. So that Japanese language was... so a lot of kids went to Japanese schools, and of course that helped during the war because they went into military intelligence and helped the war there. But Olaf Kvamme, the person that got me this job at Fort Lewis, when we grew up, he didn't know how to speak Japanese at all, and sometime I wonder how he managed to through MIS and did quite a bit of work for MIS without knowing how to speak Japanese. Evidently, he learned how to speak Japanese in college.

MA: But some of the things that you try to tell the students that you talk to is emphasizing studying and things like that.

GM: That's what I want to emphasize: that if you don't study today, you're not going to make it as well later on.

<End Segment 49> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.