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BN: And then you said "we," so were there a lot of other Nisei at Tule Lake who were working there?

NK: There were Niseis that got stranded there during the war, had to spend their time in Japan during the war, I mean providing they were young enough to evade the draft, because a lot of friends, now, I know, were there during the war, and they had to suffer through the shortage of the food and so forth.

BN: Did you have much, any interaction with Nisei who were in the MIS at that time?

NK: Not really, because the soldiers kind of looked at us as civilians, non-military, and so we were kind of a class in itself. In between a Nisei, they knew that we existed, and they classified us as a foreign national. And there was a whole hotel of people like myself that worked at the offices and so forth that spoke Japanese and English. (In fact), in Kyoto, there's a hotel called Station Hotel, and that housed, back in 1946 and '47, that housed all the foreign nationals that were working for the army. And we got... they board right there.

BN: And the foreign nationals were largely (Nisei, right)? Did you have much interaction with Japanese nationals also? I'm just wondering how they viewed the Nisei.

NK: Well, I think, like myself, I took advantage of the fact that we were not a Japanese national. And so, like in '46 and '47, like going on the train, the conductor would ask for our ticket, and then we just tell them, in English we'd say -- purposely in English -- we'd say, "We're foreign nationals, so we don't have to pay." Well, Japan was still organizing, trying to get the government straightened out, and a democracy working, I guess, you might call it. And so the police didn't know what to do, the conductor didn't know what to do when we told him that. So we used to go on the trains from Kyoto to Tokyo, don't pay for it. And I'm sure they, in their mind, they're looking down on the fact that these 'son of a guns' are really taking advantage of us. Didn't like it, but they had to go along with it.

BN: So you had a little bit of privilege as kind of...

NK: Yes, we had a perk that really wasn't there, but we made it.

BN: You were still U.S. citizens, right?

NK: Yes, at that point we were.

BN: I see.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.