<Begin Segment 30>

DG: And so, he went back to Hawaii?

SS: He wanted to go back to school under the GI Bill. You know, without the GI Bill I don't think lot of the Niseis would have gone to college because I think the families were not that well off. And so, Ken didn't want to lose his GI Bill.

DG: Had he volunteered for the service?

SS: He got drafted, and he went to Fort Snelling, after his basic. And that's why he's (an) MIS.

DG: MIS stands for -- ?

SS: Military Intelligence Service for the U.S. One of the secret weapons as they called it.

DG: When was he drafted?

SS: He must have been drafted in '44. Yeah, must be '44, and '45 he was at Snelling.

DG: When lot of the guys came from Hawaii, they didn't get along with the stateside people, so much.

SS: That's what I hear. And I think, it's because we didn't speak good English. Ours were all pidgin, right, whereas the stateside people were fluent in English. And like Ken said, eventually when the Hawaii people found out the way the stateside people were forced into camp and all... and they...

DG: First of all, the... Hawaiian guys got mad because they were treated --

SS: Kind of looked down by the stateside guys, the kotonks, right?

DG: So they were larger in number, right? So they sort of...

SS: Yeah, 'cause the Hawaii came as a group. Right, the 442nd....

DG: So they were kind of aggressive and then they found out... that...

SS: Yeah, 'cause no one, in Hawaii, only because only a small percentage were sent into camp. You consider, I think it was a group that went to Topaz. The first group. And the second group went to Jerome. Other than that, none of the other Niseis were interned. So when Ken and I first got married, he couldn't, I think, understand why I was so bitter. And then having lived here, having heard all about the concentration camp and all, he can understand, right now. But I think when we first got married it was difficult for him to really picture 'cause there was no, nothing like that in Hawaii. So long as you were a citizen, you were able to go out, go everywhere.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.