<Begin Segment 17>

SY: After you left basic, you went to...

FO: Snelling.

SY: Snelling. And that's where they set up the schools for the training?

FO: Yeah. It used to be, before Snelling, they had it at Savage, a little town outside of Minneapolis, but we became too large. So Fort Snelling was a recruiting station. And all the guys in that area went to Fort Snelling when they were recruited in the army, and then they were sent to various camps. So we took over that. So, you know, it was nice brick buildings and stuff, classrooms. And that's where I met George Aratani. He was my kanji teacher.

SY: He was teaching there?

FO: Yeah. And, you know, we had a bunch of sharp guys in our class. I don't know how I ended up, but I ended up in the top class, and I struggled.

SY: You had to study hard, though.

FO: Oh, god. And this guy in front of me, Kozo Fukuda, he had a photographic memory, and he would just flip the pages like that, and he would know what was written in there. And here I was on the first sentence and struggling with that. Then he would turn around and... I did judo with him, see, so all we did was talk about judo.

SY: But they gave you tests, though, right? So you obviously had to pass tests?

FO: I don't know how I did it, but, you know, I passed.

SY: And then they separated the better ones from the, from the ones who were...

FO: Yeah. Some of the better ones went to OCS, Officers Candidate School, and some of them were sent to Washington, D.C. and the State Department.

SY: But you were among, you were among the better ones, though.

FO: I didn't say better ones, but I was among those guys, anyway.

SY: You were in the top of the class, and so you didn't get a choice in where you were going to be sent, though.

FO: No. We finished class, and we had, what, eight hours of class a day, and then we had to go back for two hours, from seven to nine to study. In order to keep up, you've got to study hard, and all these guys were going to the latrine after the lights-out and they would be studying. And if you read this book First Class, have you read that book?

SY: No, uh-uh.

FO: It's the first group of guys that graduated MIS, and they trained at Presidio San Francisco, and John Aiso was the head. See, the army was not ready for these Japanese classes. So according to that book, Aiso sent all these so-called instructors to go to Berkeley, Cal Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco to see all the bookstores to get dictionaries and reading material. So that's how the class got started.

SY: And the competition was probably pretty...

FO: Well, the thing is, yeah, the competition was great, but the thing is, they weeded out the weaklings right away.

SY: They did. So they let people go who weren't...

FO: Yeah, they sent them back to the infantry or the medics or wherever they came from.

SY: Wow.

FO: So I don't know why I lasted, I really don't. Because on my final exam, I pulled a blank. You know when you study so hard and you can't remember anything.

SY: Right.

FO: The only kanji that I could remember was my name. I answered all the questions in hiragana, the simplest form, and George Aratani came by, he looked at it and he laughed and he walked away. So gosh, I thought, "I'm gonna flunk." But evidently, I passed. But we used to, once a month or twice a month we used to march to the Post Theater, and we used to watch Japanese movies so that we can get the language, the speaking part of it all set. So we used to look forward to that. Half of the guys would be sound asleep, they'd be so tired. But competition was keen, it was really keen. And some of the top guys in our class, they became officers.

SY: So when you... you were there for how long?

FO: I was in a nine-month class.

SY: Nine months.

FO: The first guys were three-month, the first group at the Presidio. Then it became six months when they moved to Savage. And then, later on, it became a nine-month course because the weaker guys who had problems with Japanese, it took us longer to learn Japanese, right? So we were in the nine-month class and then we had six weeks of training, infantry basics.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.