<Begin Segment 12>

TI: So I want to ask you, you mentioned earlier about your uncle Hiroshi or Uncle Heek, joined the 442. Do you know any stories about him going from Poston into the army? Any stories about any difficulties with that?

HY: No. I think he wanted to go. I read the book Facing the Mountain, and I think that's one part of the story that wasn't really told is the role of the JACL. I mean, maybe because we were pro-government or pro-U.S., the family and all, I guess we kind of had the view that they were troublemakers, the "no-no boys" were just troublemakers and yogores. My father said that, during times of stress, that the good and the bad come out, right? You know who your friends are. And so there were a lot of things that happened that were just senseless. I mean, they would stuff toilet paper down the toilets just to make things difficult for everybody. Whereas, I guess our families wanted to make life as good as possible, plant gardens or fix things up. And if the government wanted us to sign a "loyalty oath," I guess there was no question about doing that. So I thought we were in the majority but maybe we weren't. [Laughs]

TI: No, I think in general, people who -- looking at the "loyalty questionnaire," the ones who signed "yes-yes," they were in the majority by quite a bit.

HY: I guess there was no question about it, everybody just wanted to do, make things cooperate and make things go well.

TI: And I think your family got maybe a more... what's the right word? A stronger sense of what was going on in terms of that conflict because you were close to Saburo Kido, who was, he was head of the JACL. So I think if there was some kind of opposition, it was very much focused on him, and by proximity, I think, you may have seen it more. I think a lot of it may have been actually focused towards him because of his role with the JACL. But I was wondering if you knew if your dad and Mr. Kido were friends? I think when I went back and looked at Mr. Kido's records, he was from Hawaii also, and I wondered if there was any of that connection.

HY: That could have been. I mean, he knew him and spoke highly of him. And I think my dad was in JACL and might have been an officer in the JACL at that time.

TI: He was actually, you reminded me, he was the president of the Salinas chapter of the JACL right before the war.

HY: Oh, before the war, even?

TI: Yeah.

HY: Okay, yeah, he was very, very active in JACL at that time.

TI: So I'm sure he was probably pretty close to Mr. Kido, especially if they were...

HY: Where was Saburo from? What part of the...

TI: I don't think he was from Maui, I think he was from... I want to say Oahu, but I'm not quite sure.

HY: But when he was in the States, was he in the Central Valley or Central Coast?

TI: I know he was a lawyer, I don't know exactly where. I'm sure I can find out. But it's really interesting because he is such a, kind of a prominent person in Japanese American history in World War II because of his role with the JACL, and in because in that role, there's a lot of documentation about some of the things he had said and done, which very much was the JACL stance during the war. And I think, from your story, it's clear that, yeah, there was opposition to it directed at him.

HY: Yeah. So Facing the Mountain didn't speak much of JACL's role in camp. I think they played a bigger role.

TI: But in Facing the Mountain they talked about another kind of attention which this is maybe a good place to get into. So you mentioned Uncle Heek going to the 442 from Poston. Were you... or I guess about the same time, or maybe even a little bit earlier, you had, I think your dad's, one of your dad's brothers in Hawaii was joining the 100th Battalion.

HY: Yeah, my dad's nephews.

TI: Oh, nephews.

HY: Nephews, yeah. I think it was, he had a sister that married a Yoshida, so it was kind of a different Yoshida family, but his nephew, Sho, Shoichi, joined and was in the 100th. So they came and visited us. He was quite a, you know, he was a Hawaiian, outgoing, very good looking guy, tall, came to visit us. When he was going back to Hawaii, he stopped off and visited us in Denver. And his cousin Mako, Mako was in the 100th Battalion, but Mako was, he didn't look Japanese, he looked more Polynesian, very husky looking guy. I don't know if he was our cousin, too, or he was just a cousin on Sho's side. But he went by the name of Al, short for Alabama, because, I guess, that's the name...

TI: This was Mako?

HY: No, Sho, Shoichi. He actually, we knew him as Al, short for Alabama, because when he played football at Maui High, he was known as Alabama for some reason. But he was that kind of guy. He was very outgoing, both of them were very outgoing. In Facing the Mountain they described how the Hawaiian boys were so different from the reserved mainland boys. And after I read that, I thought, yeah, that's true.

TI: Because, in some ways, your Uncle Heek was kind of the mainlander, and you had the nephews of your dad's...

HY: Cousins, actually.

TI: Yeah, I guess, cousins, Shoichi and Mako.

HY: And they were just so different. Very happy-go-lucky.

TI: And by any chance was your uncle Heek around when they came to visit you in Denver?

HY: No, they didn't meet then. I mean, afterwards, many years afterwards, they did meet at some of our family funerals and things. But they were quite different. I mean, my uncle Heek was a farm boy, very serious, more serious than the cousins from Hawaii.

TI: On either side, did they ever talk about, kind of... yeah, the other side. So your uncle Heek talking about the Japanese Americans from Hawaii, or your uncles, or your cousins from Hawaii talking about, kind of, the Japanese Americans from Watsonville or the mainland? Did you ever hear stories about...

HY: Not from my uncle Heek, but I know that my cousin Shoichi Al, that's when I first heard the word kotonk. [Laughs] And they explained because their head was empty, mainlanders were the kotonks.

TI: So he would kind of regale you with stories about that?

HY: Yeah. And he would tell me, if you see you're going to get beat up, you know, how to protect yourself and all that. It was just all kinds of stories.

TI: Now did your uncle or cousins, the ones who served in Europe, did they ever talk about fighting in Europe, any of that? Any stories from Europe that...

HY: No. Neither of them really talked about that, but I do know my uncle Heek was wounded at Anzio, and he was shot, rifle wound. I think it was in the arm, and he had to make his own way back to the aid station. Al, I don't know, I don't know what he did, but I heard they did a lot of heavy fighting with the 100th. No, they didn't really talk, give me war stories. I would have loved to have heard that, but no, they didn't, he didn't talk about it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.