<Begin Segment 22>

KH: Now I have to tell you an incident that Joe ran into when he reported to Fort Snelling, the military language school. He reported to Major Aiso, and he says, "Lieutenant Hashy-sack reporting, Sir." And Major Aiso looked at him and said, "It's Lieutenant Hashisaki." So that's how he found out it's not Hashy-sack.

BH: That's how Joe found out?

KH: Uh-huh.

BH: Through somebody else?

KH: Yeah.

BH: Wow.

KH: He, he wrote his name out as "Hashisaki," and everybody said "Hashy-sack," but it's not, it's Hashisaki. And you know, that reverberated through the whole, bachelor officers' quarter, that this fellow came reporting, and reported as "Hashy-sack." So you know, you catch up with somebody like Steve Momii, whose father was in, at Fort Snelling at the time, his father was a captain, Captain Momii, and he says, "This lieutenant came up and says, 'Lieutenant Hashy-sack." He heard that it was Hashisaki. That's kind of interesting, you know, when you catch up with somebody like that from past history, because Steve Momii knows about it. His father told him the story.

TI: So where did Joe learn Japanese? I mean, how, because to get in the MIS, you were supposed to know Japanese, so where did he learn Japanese?

KH: Well, his Japanese is what he learned from his father and mother, and it was very colloquial, Sendai dialect. But apparently his mother, his mother was educated, she was a teacher back in Japan. And his oldest brother, I'm surprised, he speaks better Japanese than Joe. Tosi, Aunt Tosi's Japanese is terrible. It's got a lot of colloquial Japanese in it.

TI: Well, it's interesting to me that she uses Tosi instead of Toshi...

KH: Toshi is more Sendai dialect.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.