<Begin Segment 29>

AI: Well, now, during this time that the redress effort was going on, then something else happened that, that came, brought up some old history. Tell me about your husband's record and what had, somebody had renewed some interest in his wartime record. How did that happen?

LK: Oh, about the court-martial?

AI: Yes.

LK: Well, you know, we go to all, every three years they have a get-together of the 442nd and we are, we, he was with I Company and they're a very close-knit unit. So we've, they've taken turns having reunions in different cities. Seattle took it once and San Fran,- San Francisco hasn't had it, but L.A. and Chicago and, and then each time, in between, you go back to Hawaii for their, and they would sponsor it. And during one of those reunions my husband's lieutenant at that time overheard somebody ribbing my husband about, "Oh, there's the guy that was in the stockades," or something like that. And just kind of ribbing him on about it and my husband gave him a kind of a smart answer back and jibing back and forth. So then he said that it kind of hurt him to think that my husband had taken the brunt of something that he wasn't guilty of and then to be teased about it later. So he kind of thought about it and, in 1985, he approached us when we were in Maui for a get-together and he told my husband that he had written to Senator Dan Inouye and Senator Matsunaga and he, asking for their help "to open up your case, so would you go along with it?" And he was talking to two of the boys who were put in the stockades, my husband and this other guy named Fred. And Fred said, "Oh, no way." He says, "I had so many nightmares over it. I would never want to relive it." And then my husband said, "No, the same thing for me, I wouldn't want to do it, do that." And he says, "Besides, it's so long ago and who... we don't even have a case," and so forth.

So, but later I talked to him and I said, "You know, since Lieutenant Kubota has started the ball rolling, I think it'd be nice if you would go along with him because he's already written to the, to the senators asking for their help." And what Lieutenant Kubota was asking was that, "Would you go along with me and fill out the forms?" It would take his participation. And one of the things that my husband would joke about to the family was, "Oh, I went in as a private, I came out as a private and when I die I'll be, my marker will say Private Shiro Kashino." And I think that's, a little bit bothered my daughters, you know, that he wasn't treated right and he took the brunt for somebody else. So when they suggested that they rectify his record, they were all for it. So I told him, "Being that we have all daughters and they're a little bit sensitive about it, I think it'd be nice if you would go along with him." So I kind of urged him to do that, and so sure enough, about a month later he got a letter from Dan Inouye and, with a form and asked him to fill it out and send it back to him and he would process it through the army. And it took him a long time to formulate his rendition of the whole incident, and why he wanted to have his records opened up. So he wrote about a four-page narration, with the help of some of his friends, and told his story. And then, so we submitted it to the army through Dan Inouye's office, and then...

AI: Excuse me. Was this then the first time that you heard the whole story?

LK: Well no, I didn't hear the whole story yet.

AI: Oh, you still hadn't?

LK: No.

AI: That, this was still only part of it?

LK: So he did write it out and I think I learned some by what he wrote out. And I still never knew really who is the one who was the cause of it, 'cause he wouldn't come out and say it was such and such a person. And he... so anyhow, we processed the letter, got it going. And then Dan Inouye's office wrote back to us and said that they had gotten communication from the army saying that because his records were burned in a fire in 1973 that they would not be able to open up his record, I mean, open up the case, because with no records, that's it. So we knew that there had been a fire of the archives in 1973 in St. Louis so we accepted that answer and that was it. So we kind of forgot about it and every time we'd see Lieutenant Kubota he would keep saying, "You know, we just gotta do something." He just, he just couldn't accept the fact that they had denied him completely. So then we were there in 1993, he said that he was talking with Patsy Mink's office. She was a representative for House and somehow through their digging or what process they use, all of a sudden, I think it was in (October) of '95 or so, that we got a letter from her office saying that they had discovered some of his records and so they were enclosing Xerox copies of what they could salvage and so what they gave us was, you know, kind of, you could tell that it had been in a fire, edges are burned or holes in things. So then, when they copied it, they said, they apologized they didn't have the whole record, but they sent us what they could.

Well, among those papers was a copy of this special court-martial that was signed and so forth and read the charges and who, who was the charging party. And for the first time we found out the name of the person, the MP officer and then the fact that it said he was guilty, that he had pleaded guilty. And that kind of upset my husband because he said he never pleaded guilty and the, he said that's the first time he's ever seen this piece of paper with the special court-martial or details. So then with that in handm Lieutenant Kubota just felt that here, we have something to work with. So that's when they started their pursuit, and he and many of his other friends got together and worked on trying to find enough evidence to put in another appeal. So we, they resubmitted appeal in August, or let's see, I think it was June of '96. And they had quite a bit of evidence that they could -- and they had affidavits from a lot of people that were there. And they also got an affidavit from the fellow who did the actual hitting the officer. And so -- also, this Lieutenant Kubota testified that the reason he wanted to pursue this was, he knew that the MP officer had requested that they not be charged. He thought that it was a minor incident and he told the officers that be that they should not charge them. And so he just figured, you know, he had made the request that they not be arrested so... and then he was transferred somewhere else, another area and the 442 was also sent on to Italy so they, he thought, he thought it was settled. In the meantime, the boys got put into the jail and so forth. So...

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.