<Begin Segment 24>

TI: And when you're in Japan, occupation, you talked about a linguist. So what did you do in Japan as part of the army?

RY: Well, I was attached to the MI group in Tokyo, they had the NYK building in downtown Tokyo and that was the Military Intelligence headquarters there. And they had linguists but then everybody can't be a linguist so I was working in the Military Intelligence side as a research and information clerk, that was my job. But it was nice because we lived in the building and we worked in the building, we ate in the building, everything was in that one building. And it was downtown Tokyo a block away from the main Tokyo station, so it was nice.

TI: And so how many years were you in Japan doing this?

RY: At that time I was there a year and a half, yeah and then my enlistment was just about over and so I told my wife, I said... see in the meantime I had... there was another problem when I went to the language school. Because I graduated in nine months but we couldn't ship out because it was Military Intelligence. You had to have a security clearance in order to ship out and since I had been moving around so much of my life, it took the American government a long time to get me my interim secret clearance. So in the meantime I met my wife in Monterey and I got married. And it took me a couple of years before I could go back to Japan, it was the occupation and then I finally got my interim secret clearance and so that meant I could ship out.

TI: Okay, do you think it took longer to get your clearance because of going to Tule Lake when you left?

RY: Yeah, plus I went to Japan.

TI: Japan, right.

RY: And they were supposed to check all the places I've been to, I don't know how they did it.

TI: But then I guess the good thing is that gave you time to meet your wife and get married.

RY: Yeah.

TI: Now did she go to Japan with you?

RY: Well, when I was there and my enlistment was just about over after a year a half, I said, "Do you want to come to Japan?" She said, "What's faster, you coming home or me going to Japan?" I said, "Probably me coming home," so she said, "Come home." But I said, "If you come to Japan you could stay here for about five, six years." But she said, "No, I want you to come home," but she should have gone because she could've met all her family over there in Kagoshima and all that and so she never went to Japan.

TI: So you returned to Monterey?

RY: Yeah, I returned to Monterey and got stationed in Monterey.

TI: Now did you get stationed with the language school there?

RY: Yeah.

TI: Okay.

RY: And then that's when the Korean War started but I was... I got my orders to go back to the Far East and I was waiting for a ship from Camp Stoneman, which is a shipping camp, and the Korean War broke out. And so they took everybody that was waiting to ship out for the Far East and put 'em on the ship to go to Korea. And I think there was like sixteen of us, they dropped us off in Tokyo and when... before we shipped out they stamped our duffle bags with the address that we're supposed to go to and everybody had this one APO number. And when I came there they stamped mine with a different APO number. I said, "How come?" And it was APO 500 because that was Tokyo. And they said, "Well, you're going to Tokyo because you're in Military Intelligence and Military Intelligence has top priority, and they want you to go to Tokyo." And so when the ship got to Yokohama, sixteen of us got off and went to Tokyo and the rest of them went over to fight in Korea. So I got out of that one very luckily.

TI: And then how long were you then stationed again in Tokyo after?

RY: Well, when I went to Tokyo that time, they were looking for Korean linguists and so they figured they didn't have... there were very few Korean Americans, there were a lot of Niseis but they couldn't find any Korean Americans to do the intelligence work. And so they said, "We need interrogators. So we'll take all the Japanese linguists and send them to school," it was called a conversion class from Japanese to Korean because grammatically Korean and Japanese are exactly the same and you can make a direct translation from one language to the other. But you had to learn the language plus the sentence structures and all that, and so they sent us to school for like fifteen weeks in Japan. And they wanted us to go to... while we were going to school they had the peace conference, the armistice and they signed the armistice and the war ended so I got out of that one too. But they still sent us over there to the peace camp and we were supposed to listen to the Korean, North Koreans talking to the prisoner of war and we're supposed to make sure they wouldn't threaten them and forcing them to return to North Korea. And with the amount of Korean that we learned, we couldn't do that 'cause it was just like I could barely speak Korean. And you had to be born and raised in Korea before somebody's yakking away, you don't know what they're saying. So we went over... I got assigned to an intelligence team but I was still a Japanese linguist, but there wasn't anybody to interrogate so it was good.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.