<Begin Segment 26>

MA: So you were in Fort Snelling, right, working in clerical, clerical work at the language school. Oh, yeah. Did you, were you able to go out into the city, into Minneapolis or explore kind of that area?

GY: Oh, yes. The Scandinavian descent Norwegians were really open-hearted, I thought. I don't know if you could compare them to Europeans, say, for instance, but I thought the Norwegians, Scandinavian people were very open-, open-minded. They welcomed us with open hearts. We literally, they really wished us well, the Japanese community. And I think at one time, there was a, it was a good gathering place for people from, I mean, Japanese in Minneapolis. They had the University of Minnesota there along with a lot of other colleges. They, it was a large metropolitan area. They had the schooling, the education, whatever you wanted to pursue, nursing. I met a number of nursing students, they were all tops in their field. They graduated number one.

MA: So did you notice a lot of, say, Japanese Americans who resettled into Minnesota, who came right from the camps?

GY: Yes, uh-huh. We had a bowling team, the post, they had a bowling team, and we used to bowl against a lot of other people, including the WACs, the Nisei WACs, and sometimes against other leagues. And we never encountered, when we went against the Caucasians, we never encountered any problems. We just, we just had a good time together. Chinese food, we, there was one place called John's Restaurant, John's Chinese Food, upstairs on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, and we went there all the time for Chinese food. All the time.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.