Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Akira Otani Interview
Narrator: Akira Otani
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: March 3, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-oakira-01-0013

<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Okay, so we were talking about the, you were with the Hawaiian Territorial Guard, you know, after the war had started, and I was just going to ask you, you know, after about two months or so they disbanded or they told Japanese Americans that they could no longer be with HTG? Can you tell me about that, what happened?

AO: Well, my memory on that isn't as good as Ted's, but we were I think we were sent to the firing range and toward Hawaii Kai and so the whole organization more or less was assembled at one point. But according to -- and I can't remember at all -- but according to some of the reports that Ted Tsukiyama and others made, they woke us up real early in the morning, they gathered, the whole organization told us we're out, that this HTG was being disbanded and in essence all the Japanese boys were let go and the next day they were reorganized without the Japanese boys and we were classified as 4-F or "enemy aliens" or whatever it is, you know. And then we were out.

TI: Do you remember that period when you were out and how you felt about that?

AO: Well, it's hard to say except that we were all so mad, you know, here we are we volunteered our services to do whatever we were called upon to do and not knowing what we were going to do and all of a sudden... we did all we what we were asked to do... and all of sudden we're out and naturally the boys were all very unhappy, some of them go very mad and everything. But things settled down and a lot of the boys went back to school again. And that's where some of the boys got together again and started talking and getting together with people like Hung Wai Ching and Shigeo Yoshida and so forth. So that's a development that --

TI: And so for you, when did you start hearing about this new group that was being formed and how did you hear about it?

AO: Well, like I say, I was a senior so I still had one more semester so I went back to school and sitting around with some of the people and then you hear that some of the guys that are in the HTG were getting together and then so I went to look into it and first thing you know I was with the group. And then you read all about how somebody got to write up an offer to the (military) governor to offer our services or whatever. If they don't want to let us carry arms and then we'll carry picks and shovels we'll do whatever is asked of us. And first thing you know we're in the labor battalion.

TI: Now do you know how the name came about, the Varsity Victory Volunteers?

AO: Pardon?

TI: Do you know how the name came about?

AO: No, I don't know how it came about but I guess somebody figured that, you know, we were at the university which is associated with varsity, but well I don't know victory volunteers, but we were volunteers anyway, we volunteered for the labor battalion as such.

TI: And how did that feel to you, you know, just a few weeks before you were being asked to, you know, carry a gun, guard things and now you can't do that and they just give you now a shovel to carry. I mean how did that feel for you?

AO: Well, we thought we were doing something anyway, you know, even if we... naturally like I said, it's pretty disappointing when you were offered yourself to do anything, and you had arms for a while and then they take it away from you. But then we offered to do whatever that would be required of us even without arms, well again, we said we would serve in whatever capacity were asked to do, that's what we did.

TI: So when you did that did you have to then again drop out of school?

AO: Oh, yeah.

TI: Okay, so you could never finish that last semester of college. And so they attached the VVV with the 34th Engineers as a kind of, again, work helper group.

AO: Correct.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.