<Begin Segment 12>

TI: And after your discharge, do you come back to San Jose?

LP: Yeah.

TI: How did the war change you? When you think about, graduating from high school in San Jose, and then several years later coming back to San Jose after the war, how did...

LP: I went to work for a new car dealership and their body shop as an apprentice body man.

TI: No, but in terms as you as a person, were you changed? Do you think you changed very much? That if someone saw you before the war...

LP: It was over, and let's go on to our life ahead of us. Let's go to work, raise our families or whatever you do. It never bothered me at all. I know I read and see a lot this stuff about these guys that are over there now, and Vietnam, and I don't know. I don't know what... I went through probably as much as most of 'em, but it didn't affect me mentally.

TI: Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask. Because they talk a lot about Post Traumatic Stress syndrome, and here you were in a situation where, heavy fighting, you thought you might get killed, you're a prisoner of war, so that was pretty stressful.

LP: We were there to do a job and we did it. And that was it as far as I was concerned. It didn't bother me at all. After I got out of there, I was fine. I see this and I read it in the paper all the time. It's pretty bad, they're killing each other, huh? How about this guy that just shot... something goes wrong up there. Is it a different war than we fought?

TI: Well, that's what I was asking. Did you see other, maybe other soldiers go through that that you would watch? Like maybe in the prison camp in Germany...

LP: No problems. I don't know. I don't know what's going on now, but nothing happened then.

TI: Okay. So now back in San Jose, I'm just curious, did you see any of your Japanese American friends after the war? I was just curious --

LP: Yeah, Jim. [Laughs]

TI: Did you ever share, did you tell them that you were a guard at Tule Lake, at one of the camps?

LP: He's the one that told Channel 11, "I know a guy that was pulling guard duty up there." [Laughs] They were looking for someone that was in the military. They had all kinds of Japanese Americans that they could talk to and so on, but for some reason or other they couldn't come up with GIs. Because the GIs over there were from all over the United States. They leave and there's no... I don't know if they could trail 'em or track 'em or what, but he's the one that said, "Well, know a guy," so that's how come they came up here. Because I didn't have a clue about what they were doing, and then they come up here and started talking to me about it. That's how that started.

TI: No, because it is, I don't know, I think you're maybe the third GI that we've interviewed, guard. I've interviewed hundreds --

LP: There's two other guys here in the valley?

TI: No, there's one up in Portland I interviewed, and someplace else, I can't remember.

LP: There's not that many that pulled guard duty there evidently. There was close to, what, couple thousand soldiers up there? I don't think there was that many. Maybe... but I didn't see that many.

TI: Now, when Japanese Americans find out that you were a guard, what kind of reaction did you get from them? Like from Jimi and others, did they...

LP: You mean afterwards?

TI: Yeah, afterwards.

LP: We were still the same as we always were before. I wasn't pulling guard duty because I wanted to, and they weren't in prison camp because they wanted to be there either. So it was a mutual thing. I never thought anything about it. You had to do it when I was there. There was never any being mad or mean at each other.

TI: Okay, good. So here's my final question I have written, and there might be some others, but I found out that you're a supporter of this museum, the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. Why is it important for you to support this museum?

LP: You really want to know?

TI: Yeah.

LP: No, I don't have a big reason like you'd think. This guy Tim who, you know, he takes care of a lot of my assets. And I have had times where it was either Uncle Sam or donate it. So I'm not really a nice guy, I just... I donate, but he said that this was a good place to invest in. And it was either these people or Uncle Sam, and Uncle Sam will just start another damn war. I won't give 'em an extra dime for what they do.

TI: But you could donate to other nonprofits, it doesn't have to be this one.

LP: Yeah, I do, I know. But he's the one that told me what they were doing. And he explained to me about your organization. He's actually the guy you want to pin a star on.

TI: Okay. So is there anything else that you want to talk about in terms of World War II that comes to mind that maybe I didn't ask about?

LP: I don't know. I think what I ought to do is I ought to bring you that book that Beth wrote. We went, it took four months to write that book, and her and I spent a lot of time in [inaudible], and she had her computer and we were getting all this information and she wrote this book. It's not very, it's not a very big book. You can read it all in one day. And it's got a lot of information about... she put it into words a lot better than I could because she could write somewhat. And she took all this information and made it so it's interesting to read. But it was agreed that we wouldn't put anything in there that was not a fact. When we started, it had to be facts. But she took it, and I don't know, maybe you want to read it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.