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BY: So now I want to talk about your decision to, how you left camp. You left Tule Lake and went to Denver, and then you eventually decided to go to, apply to medical school. So talk a little bit about leaving camp, going to Denver, and what Denver was like.

HY: Okay. When I stop to think about it, I'm not really sure how I got into the University of Denver. But this is what I think. I think that my older brother, Choppy, Ray Tsuyoshi Yasui, he was married. And my mother decided that, since my big fight with the Hawaiian yogore, they said, "This camp is no good for this young boy." You know, you're running around dancing and getting in the fight, one fight, and playing around, playing baseball, and who knows? Bad influence. "So we've got to get him out of here." So I think that my mother and brother colluded together and decided they should get me out of camp to go to college. But what I don't remember, I don't personally remember applying to go to college, the University of Denver. So what I think happened is that there was an organization called the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. You ever heard of that?

TI: Yeah.

HY: Okay. That was a volunteer group of educators, Quakers, I think, Quaker leaders got together and they decided in May or early on '42 that there's going to be thousands of young Nisei, young men and women that are going to be deprived of college if something doesn't help. Anyway, this National Student Relocation Council decided to help the Nikkei, and they helped by finding colleges in the Midwest and the East who would accept Nikkei because not all of them did. In fact, a lot of them did not. So they did that, but I think more than that, they also helped apply. And in a few instances, I've heard that they even gave them a little bit of money to help them get there. And that's what I think. I think that Choppy went to the National Student Relocation Council and had them apply with my consent, of course, to University of Denver. The reason for that is because Shu... Shu is my next older brother whom I admired immensely, and Michi, my next older sister, were already in Denver because they voluntarily left the West Coast before they were captured by the evacuation. They left on their own, Shu first and then Michi. They were already there, so that was probably another reason why I applied to the university, because both of them were going there. So anyway, in September of '42 -- so I was in camp from, Tule Lake from mid-July to mid-September of '42, and I left around September 19th or so with three other young men from the camp. And in those days, the Western Defense Command extended to Reno. So for the four of us who were all going to Denver, an armed guard with a pistol very prominently displayed on his hip, rode on the bus, the commercial bus, to Reno. And then from Reno he left us, because that was outside the Western Defense Command. But from Reno, we caught a train and then went into Denver. So I still remember the name of the guys I went with. John Ishizuka, who remained a lifelong friend, and Fumio Nishida, who was a chemistry major at UC Berkeley, and Sam Takagishi who was a would-be theological student and he attended the Iliff College of Theology in Denver. So those were the four guys. I kept in contact with John Ishizuka who died a couple years ago, but we've been friends ever since then.

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