<Begin Segment 25>

BH: All right, so this is the third tape with Mary Jane Kinoshita, Brian Hashisaki on the interview, Tom Ikeda on camera at the Densho. And we were talking about Joe Hashisaki. So you only dated for a very short time...

KH: Yes.

BH: ...before you decided to marry.

KH: You mean the hoboing?

BH: Oh, no, when you and Joe dated.

KH: Oh, yeah.

BH: And so...

KH: But as far as my parents were concerned, the president of the college visited Seattle, so she stopped by to meet my mother and father. And my mother took her over and introduced her to the bishop, Bishop Shaughnessy, and then when Mother Antonius, the president of the college, came back to campus, she said, "I met your mother," and she says, "she wanted to know about your, about Joe." [Laughs] Before I married him, whether he was an okay guy. And she had, all the nuns were interested, they would all take turns coming down to meet Joe. And when Joe came to visit, they would come into the parlor and meet, meet him. They all were impressed.

BH: I apologize, I'm going to have to backtrack a little bit. I missed a question. So Joe was, he graduated from the University of Missoula?

KH: [Sneezes] Excuse me. Yes.

BH: And when did he, he graduated before he met you?

KH: Oh, heavens, he was, he graduated in 1941, I think.

BH: Okay. So long before he met you.

KH: Yeah, way before that, because after that, he went, he couldn't find a job after he graduated, then they talk about war started coming around, so he went and taught in the ground school for pilot training.

BH: And what was he doing in Minnesota when you met him?

KH: This is the tail end of his army career, when he went to Minnesota. He, somehow or another, he was never sent overseas, and he was given jobs like escorting troops back and forth across the States, I think he went about three times back and forth. And then while he was doing that, one of the commanding officers said that Joe was material for Officers Candidate School, and he tried, he talked Joe into applying to Officers Candidate School, and he applied to the Signal Corps. And Joe could fall asleep in an instant, so all, all these lectures that they had in the service, in the signal corps, he was falling asleep. So all his fellow candidates for officer school said that he's gonna flunk out. And one of the tests that they had to do was carry a, I don't know, ten pounds or something in their hand, and climb up the telephone pole and take that ten pound weight and cross over to the other hand and then come down. Joe was able to do it. I don't know, I think it was more than ten pounds, 'cause it was, it was quite a feat. Some flunked out from Officers Candidate School because they couldn't do that, but Joe, Joe did it. And you know, he's small in stature. And he graduated... then after he graduated Signal Corps, they didn't know what to do with him, so they sent him for Chinese language in San Francisco. He got to San Francisco, and he found out he's not supposed to be there because he's of Japanese ancestry. So he asked for a transfer, and they transferred him inland someplace. And then from there he eventually ended up at Fort Snelling to learn Japanese. And his Japanese was terrible. The other people in his classroom, very elementary, but they knew that his Japanese was very Anglicized, and they would tease him. He did make it, though.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.