<Begin Segment 33>

TI: Okay, so you get your U.S. citizenship and then you get -- I'm sorry, did you volunteer or drafted into the Air Force?

HN: There was a draft going on, and I didn't want to... I saw these army guys coming back from Korea, crippled and all that. "Jesus Christ, if I get drafted that means I'm going into the army, and I don't want to go through that darn thing. Why struggle yourself to get killed or hurt, you know? I wanna, I'll go into the Air Force, and if I'm gonna get killed it'd be a clean kill." That's the mentality. So I said okay, I'll volunteer for the Air Force because of the draft. If I didn't volunteer then eventually there's a strong, real strong probability that we'd be drafted in.

TI: And where were you when you volunteered for the Air Force?

HN: I was in Tokyo.

TI: Okay, so you were in Tokyo when you volunteered. And so obviously they accepted.

HN: Yeah, they accepted me. And with minimum training. Just administrative, just get the idea you're in the Air Force. Okay, when you meet an officer you go like this [salutes]. That's about it. Then one time go out to the firing range, you know, taught us how to handle the guns and that's it in Tokyo, because they didn't have the training facility. They didn't have the time. They want us to go right in and start working.

TI: Because did the Air Force need interpreters?

HN: Yeah, interpreters.

TI: Oh, so right away you were a valuable asset to them, and so they wanted to dispense with all the normal training and...

HN: Yeah.

TI: Okay, and so what did you do in the Air Force?

HN: Well, mainly administrative type work, and then eventually I got into the industrial engineer function type of work. My commander used to encourage -- Air Force is different type of service than army or Marine. They encourage you to improve yourself by GI bill, go to school, take course, get your degree before you get out of the service type mentality. They were pushing me, so I started in Tokyo with Sophia University. It's a Catholic university there. Then I finally, before... I made a career in the Air Force, twenty years, and before I got out I was able to, on the GI bill, I was able to get my undergraduate bachelor degree and my graduate degree before I got out of the service.

TI: And then you joined the civil service?

HN: Yeah. When I got out of the service I, for a year or so I started working for this international accounting and consulting firm in L.A. Then, they were... that was a high pressure job, working from, I started working from about five in the morning then get out of the office at ten, you know. I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "I got twenty years, I got a pretty good retirement going, and if I go back to civil service, probably get a good job," so I said, so -- but they promised me in L.A., "If you go through this understudy and if we're satisfied you'll be able to take over the office, we're gonna open up an office a year and a half in San Francisco, and we'll want you to take over that." But there was too, the workload from five-thirty to ten at night, working seven days a week, maybe get one day off every three weeks... it was too much, so I switched over to the civil service and got into the industrial engineering function.

TI: So I'm curious, when, going back to your long career with the Air Force, did you ever have a conversation with your father about getting back your U.S. citizenship and then working in the Air Force?

HN: Yeah, my father says, "It's your life, and we did what we had to do during the war and this is a new stage, a new stage. It's a different environment. If you want to go into the Air Force, do so." And he more or less encouraged me in my decision.

TI: So he was okay with you doing this, how about his personal resentment towards the U.S.?

HN: No, he didn't, he didn't... he met some nice Americans. The colonel... he was, my father was on this bicycle going to someplace. Coming back that evening, he saw this American couple with a flat tire on the countryside. They stopped by and with his English, helped them. And it was too late for them to go to schedule hotel, probably another seventy mile, and then this road wasn't that good, so my father invited them to stay in his own house. Upper second floor rooms were open, so they stayed with him. I wasn't there at the time my father got to know them. They got to know him, and they, this couple were from Northern California, Monterey area, and they treated him real nice and so forth. With that kind of experience he more or less forgave what happened before. And he, his life was stable, you know. No agitation from other people. If he would've stayed on the mainland after the war, being the resisters and confrontation with the government, I think he would've gone nuts.

TI: Interesting. Good.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.