<Begin Segment 21>

MN: But you had, you did have guns personally. You had guns, right?

JM: Oh, I had hunting rifles and everything. And through a chance encounter when I was working in the aircraft industry, I knew this fellow named Red, and Red was a, he's a white guy, he had red hair and he's almost pink in color, white, strangest guy. He was, he turned Asiatic. You know, he's a white man that inside his mind, he's an Asian. What happened was he went through the Bataan Death March. He was in the Philippines, and they ran him through there, then they sent him to Japan in the, to the salt mines over there, or wherever. And at the very end of it, he identified more as a Japanese than as a white man. So when he came back over here, he couldn't, he couldn't fit in into white society at all, so he wound up hanging around J-town in those sleazy old bars with these old... I know this sounds disrespectful, okay? There's no other way to describe the old, old worn-out Mama-sans that had seen too much, too many miles in the cabarets in Tokyo in the Ginza. It was pitiful. But you would have people like that hanging out there, and also Kibeis, because Kibeis never really fit back into American society. I mean, Nisei society. You know, Nisei society was really, it was very conformist. You did this, this, this, or you didn't fit. Kibeis didn't fit, so they were out there, loose ends. So when you went to the bars over here you saw people like Red, the Asian white people. You saw Kibeis, you saw Tokyo renegades that were on the run probably from the yakuza, that if they knew where they were, they'd get shot. So they're all hanging out down here.

But anyway, Red was hanging around there, and we couldn't... the way I ran into him was he was an Air Force inspector, and we couldn't get any other parts sold until he put the stamp on it. And when Red was hung over, he was a son of a gun. There was nothing to do. Until one day I finally, I had to ask him, I said, "Red, what happened? You look in bad shape." He said, "Yeah, I had too much to drink last night." I said, "What in the hell were you drinking?" He said, "You know, I was in those bars in J-town." I said, "Oh." And so I began to talk to him. And he began to tell me things about things, but the main thing was, at the end of it all, he'd buy, he'd put the stamp on there. So the supervisors caught wind of that, and whenever he went on a tear, it was like, "Call Jim over here. Jim, go over there and take care of Red." So I'd go in there and Red wouldn't, you know, he'd look at that piece and say, "No, no." So I'd go over there and work on it a little bit, then I'd call Red over and Red would just, "Oh, okay, Jim." So I remember one day, though, he really got obstinate and I couldn't even, I couldn't even talk to him anywhere. I don't know what happened. So just on (some) crazy thing, I jumped up and I yelled, "Banzai!" And he freaked out, you know. He freaked out. 'Cause he must have been through beatings after beatings, you know, Japanese guards, you know. And he heard this "banzai" coming, and he, his eyes were like that. And I tossed the paper at him, and his hands were shaking, but he stamped it. [Laughs] That was cold, but I know that was the thing to do. We had to get the job done. But, the reason I bring him up was his hobby was gunsmithing. He was a gunsmith. So I got to know him, and when he told me had had a, unlicensed pistols, all of a sudden my eyes went, oh, you know. "Hey Red, can you turn me on to some pistols?" He said, "Yeah, yeah." So now I had my, I had shotguns, pump guns, what have you, hunting things, but now I had a collection of Saturday night specials if we needed it. If we needed it. Like I say, we had our mores, we don't believe in that, 'cause we thought it was cowardly. But, if push came to shove and they're gonna be shooting at us, we're not gonna, I have a whole arsenal courtesy of Red.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.