<Begin Segment 18>

SY: So when you decided to enlist, or I'm sorry, you were drafted then can you tell that story about how you ended up where you ended up?

FK: Well, we were drafted and we were shipped to Fort Ord, and in those days it was a sixteen week training, basic training. Today it's only eight or nine weeks but we had eighteen weeks and I always seemed to have lady luck on the other side of the street. When we got there there was no room in the barracks so they put us because there were so many draftees they put us in the boondocks. In other words there's no barracks. We had to pitch our tent and for every practice like shooting range it was on the ocean front right by the beach and we had to march maybe about seven, eight miles just to get there and because it took so long to get there we'd have to camp there. Whereas the other ones they would just march there in the morning and come back. We lived in the those tents a number of months and then finally put into the barracks and we went through the whole sixteen weeks and that's where I... the first time on the firing ground, we learned how to shoot everything from forty-five pistol to a bazooka and so forth. But I have this physical problem with my ear because the first round I shot with a forty-five pistol, it blew my eardrum. So this ear is just about gone. I could only hear about maybe thirty percent, so if I sleep on my pillow on my left ear I can't hear anything really.

SY: And you knew that as soon as it happened?

FK: As soon as I pulled that trigger I knew that something's wrong. Today they teach you how to shoot like this and I'm sure now they have ear plugs. But they told us to shoot like this and that's right in line with your right ear. And as soon as I pulled it I blew my eardrum and to this day... from that moment to this day I have this twenty-four hour ringing in my ear and it's a loud ring. And right now I can't hear it too much but in the still of night it's --

SY: Really bad.

FK: You would think you would get used to it but this is when I was eighteen and here I am seventy-eight so it's sixty years.

SY: Is that called tinnitus or what is that?

FK: It's tinnitus. There's nothing you could do I've gone to several ear nose and throat specialist and they said don't waste your money on the hearing aids because it's not going to help.

SY: Amazing and thanks to the Korean War. So then basic training was probably the worst part of that experience for you?

FK: Well, I wasn't the only one so it's everybody so it's not that bad. They didn't expect you do things and not the others, so I never felt... but you have the yamato damashi, where you when you're marching and you're tired, you don't say you're tired you just keep up with everybody else. Yes, we, all the Japanese Americans, we kept up with everybody. There's always stragglers and people that say I'm tired and then they sat down and they quit. Not us we would always encourage each other.

SY: It wasn't segregated then?

FK: No.

SY: But there were other Japanese in your unit.

FK: Yes.

SY: And you sort of stayed chums, friends with the other Japanese Americans during the war. So then were you sent to Korea?

FK: No, right after I was drafted in July, the following month, August, they signed the armistice so the war was over. So my dad and mom felt very much safer that now it's okay and so it was not that bad. But I do remember after basic training was over that I came home for leave before I was going to be sent to Japan and I came home and normally I'd just say, "Okay, goodbye," and I'd go. But this time I was flying out of Burbank to go to San Francisco and that just happened my father, my mother, my sisters, they all came to see me off, my brother too. And I still remember this day as I got on the plane I looked back and they're standing there waving and then I left and then I landed and then I called and said that my sister answered the phone and she says oh, that I had landed safely and she said, "We just got home from the airport." Dad refused to leave, he stayed there until the plane was out of sight and then he stayed there and he looked and looked and then that was the last time I saw him. There was something there that he felt that, "That's it, I'm not going to see my son anymore," and he just stayed just on and on and on until they forced him to, "Come on, let's go." So he just got home just before I landed in San Francisco.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.