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SY: And at the time that you graduated, did you have any idea of what was going to happen after that, where you were going to be going? Were you thinking that you --

YN: No, I knew that I would be eligible to be asked, I'll get an invitation from the President to serve. And I didn't know at the time, but I know that this happened, that they wanted to recruit Japanese Americans to form a replacement battalion and train them to go to Europe to fill the ranks of the Nisei soldiers who had become injured or been killed in action. So until they had a battalion of people they could not call, they didn't call, so I had a small window of time. One of my friends who was living at the time in Des Moines, Iowa, came back to see his family, and he came over and talked to me and my father and said he would like to sponsor me to go to Des Moines, Iowa, for a few months before I was destined to be in the service. And my father -- my younger brother and my sister were there -- said, "Sure, why don't you go?" (My older) brother was already out. He had a work permit and was working in Gering, Nebraska. So I thought, well, it's an opportunity to know what it's like to be outside for a while. So I was in Des Moines, Iowa, and stayed at the Des Moines YMCA and worked at the Hotel Des Moines as a busboy. I took some technical classes in the evening. I joined the Methodist church there. In this process of becoming a Christian, my family had a Buddhist tradition, so my father was a Buddhist, my mother was Buddhist, but when I was growing up in El Monte, periodically I would help this banker's mother. Whenever they had to go traveling somewhere they needed someone in the house to kind of be sure that she's okay. So I would go there and do my homework and we would talk. She was a devout Christian, and so she would tell me all kinds of things that sounded very good to me. So when we got into camp I met Reverend John Yamazaki and some other clergy, and finally I was baptized in Gila. So when I went Des Moines I thought, well, it'd be a good idea for me to be affiliated with some church, and so the Methodist church was fairly convenient and seemed okay, so I joined there.

SY: And you were able to support yourself while you were in...

YN: Yes, I was able to support myself. And before long I received this little invitation to report for induction. I went to Fort Des Moines and was inducted into the enlisted reserve. So the enlisted reserve was set up so that there was a waiting period until there were enough Nisei soldiers to form this battalion, so I felt I had a little bit of time. At that moment I decided I better go back to camp and be with my father and my sister and my younger brother. So I was there for a little over a month, and that was a good experience to come back and greet people. They were all quite appreciative of my going into the service and wished me well and all those kinds of things. I was able to be with my family there.

SY: Would you have had the opportunity to go to college had this not, had this...

YN: Well, at that particular time it didn't seem that I had enough time to be in college. You know, I didn't know when I would be called and I felt maybe I had two months, maybe a month, maybe three months, whatever it might be, so that didn't quite reach me. So when I was inducted then I was called for active duty in August of 1944 and reported to Fort Douglas, Utah. From there we went to Camp Blanding, Florida, where there then was a battalion of soldiers. I believe there were about a thousand of us there. So we would be training there, and the one thing I remember about that training was that in this particular part of Florida, which is near Jacksonville, you can almost count on rain at two-thirty in the afternoon. The clouds would come over -- unlike the Tonda cloud -- cloud would come over and there would be water, and then it would disappear. But to give you some idea of how the military works, as you're marching, the command comes from the front. The commander or the platoon leader, the person in charge would say, "Raincoats," and "Raincoats on," and then you'd go this way and you'd repeat that order, and if you're in M Company, or excuse me, if you're in the rear like I was, by the time the order came, the sun was out, so you're marching in the rain and so the sun was out, we still had raincoats on. [Laughs] Then we'd wait for the order to come to remove the raincoats, so this was a sort of a funny thing. And the other thing is Japanese names are not that easy to pronounce for most Caucasians, especially if they haven't been introduced to Japanese names. So you can imagine in roll call, calling, "Matsushita?" [Laughs] And you can imagine the way the pronunciation might go, and so that provided a little bit of internal humor for us. These people who wanted to command things, make big noise, would try to pronounce your name and they would have to stutter all the way through. It was kind of funny.

SY: [Laughs] So did you have an inkling of what was happening as far as the 442nd was concerned?

YN: Well, yes, we knew that the 442nd had established itself as a really fierce fighting force in Italy, and by the time we were in Camp Blanding they were fighting in France and they were rescuing the "Lost Battalion," and eventually that's what they would be doing in the forests in France. When we finished our basic training -- and one of the nice things about the training was that I made connections with a fellow who nominated me for the Lion Squires in El Monte. His name was Bob Berlin, and he happened to be stationed near Jacksonville, Florida. We had been corresponding and we said, "Well, why don't meet together?" So we did, but the meeting, to be short, I got there in time and I decided to have breakfast in Jacksonville and then I'd go see him, I was in this restaurant and had my uniform on. And I was eating, and when I got up to leave to pay, the cashier said, "You've been paid for." And, "That's strange," I said. "I don't know anyone." Says, "Well, you see that guy walking out there? He said, 'I'll pay for it.'" So that was a (pleasant surprise).

SY: It was a Caucasian person who had been eating there?

YN: (Yes). Anyway, I met Bob Berlin and we had a nice reunion. Something else had happened when in Camp Blanding. There were fellows from Hawaii there and from the mainland, from Pocatello, Idaho, and from California and one guy from Oklahoma, one guy from North Dakota. I mean, I didn't know Japanese Americans were that widespread. Some of the people got these care packages from home, and we were warned, there are these wild pigs in Florida and if they smell food they'll come after it. Well, some of the fellows didn't believe that, so one night we heard all this yelling and, "Get the heck out of here," and all this. You can imagine a wild pig kind of brushing his nose against you and finding the See's candy or whatever it was that was sent and going off with it. So those kinds of things happened. We began to believe what the noncommissioned officers said (after that).

SY: Who would tell you, but you started to believe it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.