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PF: Okay, and today is March 26, 2012, and we're at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i. I am the interviewer, Pam Funai, and today we're going to talk to Ted Tsukiyama about his, the ending of World War II and his postwar experience. So can you tell me a little bit about how the war wound down for you as your work with MIS?

TT: Well, actual combat duty, I ended up with the Military Intelligence Service, although I started out with the 442nd. And it was during the basic training period that the MIS desperately needed Niseis who had some, I wouldn't say competence, but some knowledge of the Japanese language which they could convert into ability to conduct an intelligence war against Japan. So I ended up the war, the last year and a half in the MIS. And was ultimately sent over to the India-Burma sector to, well, conduct... I was assigned to what they call the radio intelligence field, signal intelligence, and this essentially was, we're trained to eavesdrop on the Japanese enemy communications. So I was out in India and Burma the last half of 1944, and up to, I guess August of 1945. And I was out in Burma when we got news that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and thankfully the long, terrible war was over.

One of my fears at that time was that they were trying to recruit Niseis to serve in the occupation, and that is something I didn't want because I'd had my education interrupted, and I wasn't about to spend four or five more years prolonging my education. Somehow I avoided being selected or drafted for occupation duty and I was able to come home. This was at the end of 1945. And I was able to pick up where Pearl Harbor had interrupted.

PF: So you went back to the University of Hawaii?

TT: I was a junior on December 7th, and so I had, say, a year and a half left of college education. I did spend one semester at the University of Hawaii, the first semester of 1946. But I found that with all the veterans coming back and all veterans, I think the heaviest of scholarly pursuits was reading comic books for four years. We were not in very good shape to pick up our education. [Laughs] The university was not a good learning place. And so I decided to go to the mainland. And one of the professors there, Professor Alan Saunders, he helped me get into Indiana University, which was one of the few universities where they took out of state students. I found out later that it took the action of the Board of Regents of Indiana University to decide to admit a Nisei.

PF: Why was that?

TT: Apparently during the war they didn't. I got the feeling somehow that I could have been one of the first if not the first Nisei to enroll at Indiana University. You know, it's out in the Midwest, and not in the mainstream of the education, Chicago or New York, East Coast. So I spent my final year there at Indiana University and got a degree in, well, economics and government. Basically a pre-law curriculum, and through a professor at the University of Indiana who was a very highly regarded figure in the legal circles, Professor Oliver P. Field. When he wrote letters of recommendation to law schools, I got admitted to all of 'em. I had my pick.

PF: Who did you apply to?

TT: Well, the Big 5 at that time was the University of Pennsylvania Law, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. And during Easter vacation, I toured and visited every one of them. And I decided that Yale Law School was the place where I'd like to get my legal education.

PF: What about Yale was, made it your favorite?

TT: Well, one thing was that during the war, there was a professor Eugene Rostow at Yale University, and he was the first, I think, public figure to come out in 1943 or '44 with an essay or article in one of the leading periodicals in the U.S. criticizing and condemning the evacuation of Japanese during wartime, and criticizing it from a legal standpoint, I think, you know, a violation of constitutional rights. And so in a way he was my ideological and intellectual hero. And if he, if that was the kind of professors they had at Yale, well, that's where I wanted to go. I think that would be at least one reason why I selected Yale, other than it was outside of the big city, it was in New Haven, sort of the sticks as compared to New York or Boston. And I thought in a quiet atmosphere I might be able to study better, so I picked Yale. And also, Yale... there's a big difference between Yale Law and Harvard Law as far as legal philosophy, legal education philosophy. And Yale Law at that time had just... well, the dean, the former dean, Hutchins, was a proponent of the Progressive Education approach to education as applied to legal education. And so that was, whereas Harvard was more traditional, the Ten Commandments on the wall type and you memorized that type of approach.

So I selected Yale and I have no regrets. It was progressive. Some of the stuff was kind of far out, a little beyond comprehension, but it taught that law is not a written set of sanctions by itself, but it is really made and administered by human beings. So the application of law really depends on by whom it is administered and shaped. And so that's why, for instance, if you look at the Supreme Court, what used to be outlawed, like segregation, in the course of the years and with the changing of personnel of the Supreme Court justices, that whole thing was reversed. Law is an instrument of human relations and human action, and it's more realistic and you find that it's true. And like, for instance, even now, we have a five to four definite schism in the Supreme Court where there's five conservatives and four liberals. So actually there's one swing vote on the Supreme Court that decides the law of the land. It's maybe lamentable, but that's the way it is, you can't help it. Personally I'm kind of apprehensive about the present issue before the Supreme Court, the legality of, the constitutionality of the so-called "Obama healthcare law."

PF: What are your thoughts on that?

TT: And so the legal result or decision is going to be shaped by nine justices who are human beings, and it's kind of almost inescapable that their personal philosophies are going to color their interpretation of the law. And I'm afraid that we're gonna get a conservative result.

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