<Begin Segment 22>

SY: Then after the war, you left Tokyo, and where did you end up?

FO: No, I was always stationed in Hokkaido.

SY: Oh, that's right. You had visited Tokyo on a leave. But when you left Hokkaido, you were able to get discharged?

FO: Yeah. We all went to this replacement depot in Japan, and then we got on the ship. Most of the guys that went with me overseas, we all came back together, and we went to Seattle, and we got discharged in Seattle.

SY: I see. And what did you do from there? Did you spend time in Seattle before...

FO: No. My dad had asked me to come down to L.A. to look at the property that we had. So I told my friends that I was coming down.

SY: Oh, I'm sorry. The property you had, you actually owned, your family owned property before the war?

FO: Well, it was under Father John's name.

SY: Father John actually kept the property in his name, but it was your father's?

FO: Yeah, it was our house.

SY: I see. So that was lucky. So did Father John do this with many families?

FO: I don't know. I don't know, but he was about the only guy that was of age that could own property.

SY: I see. So whatever the Yamasakis owned, Father John's, it would probably be under Father John's name?

FO: Yeah. Marion Wright was the attorney, and he fixed everything up. So he helped the Japanese out quite a bit.

SY: Marion Wright. And then you then had to come back to Los Angeles to check on them?

FO: Yeah, came back to Los Angeles. There was a Chinese group that trained with us in Snelling, and I ran across these guys in Hokkaido. So we got along fairly well. Most of these guys kind of looked down on these Chinese people because their Japanese was poor and English was poor. But I got along good with them. So I told the guys that I was coming down with, "I'm gonna look up this guy, Lim P. Lee." And he said, "Why? He was a foul ball." I said, "Never mind. He's a friend of mine." So we went up to San Francisco, and I called Lim P. Lee. And he says, "Hey, Frank, stay where you're at, I'll come right over." So he came over and he took us through Chinatown. See, there was four or us. He took us through Chinatown, and he said, "If they barricade us, we got telephone in Chinatown that we can talk." And every now and then a sly Chinese guy would come walking in and look us over, but they disappeared in the alleys. And then Lee tells me, "Frank, my wife is sick, I'm going to have to leave," he says. But he says, "I'll give you a note and I'll tell you where to go after this," this and that, so he told me. Well, we went to this Chinese nightclub, Charlie Loew's, Chinese nightclub, and it was on the second or third floor. And it was packed. We had to climb up some stairs, and people were standing on both sides of the stairs. But I pushed my way through, and a big Chinese guy grabbed me, "What are you doing?" I says, "Mr. Lee sent me." "Okay, come this way. Where's your party?" I said, "Right behind me, I think." I got my three friends together, and we went to this, we got into the nightclub, and he gave us a table right on the dance floor. And he says, "Drink up," the guy tells me, "drink up. Because if you're Mr. Lee's friend, we'll take care of everything." So I said, "Thank you."

SY: So it paid to have friends in the army.

FO: Well, you know, after all these years, I ran across Lim P. Lee when I was at Sumitomo. And he was the postmaster general of San Francisco. Everybody thought he was a foul ball. But when I went to see the guy, "Hey, Frank," he says. He opens up a drawer and pulls out a picture of himself, and he writes, "To my friend and fellow soldier, good luck." He signed it Lim P. Lee. I showed it to these guys, they laughed like mad. But he was a very astute politician. So he had the Chinese vote. He said, "Why don't you guys down south get organized?" So I talked to Taul Watanabe when I got down. "Ah," he says, "those guys don't know anything." Okay.

SY: So you mean you actually met up with people when you came back to L.A. Now, how did you know Taul Watanabe?

FO: Through the bank.

SY: Oh, this was much later then.

FO: Yeah.

SY: Okay, so we're still, you're getting out of the army, and you came back to Los Angeles, checked up on the house and it was fine.

FO: It was fine.

SY: People were living there, people were living there during the war.

FO: Yeah. So Hide Matsunaga and I, we took the plane to go to Chicago and we got bumped off at Tucson because there was a plane strike. So we took the bus from Tucson to Chicago. And the interesting thing was the fact that there was a young couple on that bus, and we started talking, and the guy was a POW of the Japanese. So we used to save each other a seat. The first guy on would save. So we did that all the way to Chicago. We often wondered what happened to that guy.

SY: So he was a Caucasian who was a POW.

FO: Caucasian, yeah.

SY: And he had no...

FO: He had no bitter feelings against us.

SY: Wow.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.