<Begin Segment 9>

FK: Now, you did end up in the service. Were you drafted, or what, how did...

SO: Yeah.

FK: You didn't volunteer, huh? [Laughs] Okay.

SO: Well, that, that phase of my life is a little, got a certain funny thing to it. I was going to school at that point, Oberlin College in Ohio, and when the draft notice came up I took my physical and so forth, and I can remember going into the dean's office sometime during that early period and said I was gonna be drafted, and the dean looked at me, said I owed him whatever amount of money I had to pay for that short, fairly short duration in which I was going, attending school in second semester. I said, no, that's not correct, because I'm exempt from any kind of financial liability for my situation because I am, I am prevented from going to school, and therefore I should be, that shouldn't bother me. But in a kind of strange way, after the war I was going to school, one day I noticed I got a letter from the college saying that I didn't have to take the requisite foreign language that I was then studying, studying Spanish, because they had given me credit for the weeks of training at the military internal language school in Japanese, and they said that sufficed in terms of the college's requirement, so I didn't have to take a second or third year of Spanish and got away with what was then my limited Japanese.

FK: So, so when you were drafted and eventually ended up in MIS, Military Intelligence Service --

SO: Right.

FK: -- well, tell me something about that, about going through that program.

SO: I think it was a very rigorous program, but I think they had very, had limited field of people that they could call upon. First of all, the Niseis were miserably poor in Japanese, and the Kibeis, trained in Japan, they were miserably in English. I had a teacher who could barely speak English who knew Japanese, and I could barely speak Japanese, and here we're in this classroom. It was a rigorous program, but I think they should've had a better control of the material they had. But at one point I think Fort Snelling had three thousand students in this program, and I, it was simply just a matter of voluntarily saying yes, I will study. There was no other way by which they could test you or give you any kind of reading of your skills. The one that had been publicized had been in Southeast Asia when some of the war was going on there, of incidents in which one was asked to be a translator or interpreter, I eventually ended up in Korea long before the Korean War, and what was I doing? I was putting in time so I could get out, but one of the limited things we had to do was to interpret for the military officers who wanted to go shopping, and that was kind of the postwar use of language people. I know there were, there were those soldiers, the language people, who secured pretty good positions because Japan was badly in need of people who could speak both languages in the postwar period. It wasn't all just in the wartime, but it's true, what we learned in this school was military language, not civil language, and if you get trained saying your name, rank, and serial number, you can't very well go out and start talking about the market situation or things like that, so then everyone said we were in the wrong place and the wrong time, I guess. But no, the military, I've never really looked at or studied what my performance was about, but I certainly was not the top one in Japanese. It was a case where, in fact, it's kind of interesting, where I live now in Leland, Michigan, there's a Caucasian fellow who, I think, was in the same group that I was at that point, but here's the interesting thing: this friend of mine was, happened to be born in Germany and lived in Japan, so he was quite fluent in Japanese, but he was taking the language cycle to become one of our potential military service, the leaders of our group, but even to this day his Japanese, I think, is beautiful. I mean, he knows Japanese. By contrast, I don't know Japanese. [Laughs]

FK: Now as I'm -- [clears throat] excuse me -- it sounded like all four of you ended up in the service.

SO: Right, my two oldest brothers, Sets ended up as a part of a service unit, that is, Stateside service. He never went beyond someplace in Texas, Camp Wolters, and he was connected with, like, being a clerk or what have you for the service. Takiro ended up in Camp Carter, Missouri, in the medical unit, and he became, I guess like an assistant to the ear nose throat business doctors. And Mas went abroad with the 442nd and he was, I think, over for a fairly short period of time and either he did or he got hurt in a very minor sort of way on his arm somewhere. He never told me exactly how it happened, but he hinted at -- and this may be partially true -- it was like a self inflicted wound that would not harm him but would allow him to be, return stateside. At that point I think he had two kids. That, I could be totally wrong, but even to his last days he never told me about that. He was saying, well, it happened. Oh, I know why, at one point he said, while he was in the hospital, they came around to award him the Purple Heart and he violently rejected it, because he told me about that, so that much I know is true, so that there had to be a reason, maybe... and then when you asked about the four of us, well, obviously I come at the end of the line and got in the language unit, did very little use of the language. I guess at the time of entering the service I was pretty much saying, maybe, very positive about our role, that is, I'm gonna go out there and do my job and, by golly, no one's gonna stop me and wave the little red and white flag. But I think the other part of the military service is I was able to see my relatives, my uncles, couple uncles who were still living at that point. One of my cousins took me around into Japan -- this is long before, soon after the atomic bomb, but long before Japan became on its own feet, so it was pretty primitive. And I can remember talking with some of my friends and relatives of the effects of the atomic bomb, but I knew nothing about it. In fact, I can remember when we heard of the news of the atomic, dropping of the bomb, it happened when we were, my particular ship was heading for Hawaii, so we were halfway between the States and Hawaii. We talked about this bomb and they didn't know what to call it. I think it's called genshi bakudan. I don't know what it means, but they had to invent a new word to take care of, method of warfare that wasn't around.

FK: Do you have any feelings about the bomb, the atomic bomb?

SO: Do I have any feelings about it?

FK: Yeah, as far as it happening?

SO: Well, I... yes, I do, in fact. I think for the number of lives that were lost as a result of the bomb, and I know the counterargument is the number of lives that were saved, but you ask the first question, why was this even necessary? If people are gonna act like this, doesn't sit well with the people who are involved in making the decisions, because it raises the first question, why do we even have to have this war? Because we dropped the bomb, we won. I'm not quite sure if the war is won/lost situation like a baseball game, 'cause I think -- maybe this is where I can editorialize somewhat -- one of the questions you asked, Frank, earlier, or maybe in your sheet, was, had to do with what kind of lessons have we taught our youngsters. In this, in this time, have they learned anything? Have we learned anything? And I like to think the bottom line is we have to respect one another, and my own experience is that the things I went through is no different than what a lot of other people have gone through. How we ended up is a different story. Some of us ended up in whatever shape or form, some of us really took advantage of it, some of us maybe didn't. And if we can teach all our kids, both Japanese and, as we say, non Japanese, that you have to respect the other person, respect them for their views, their politics, their, whatever it is, give them the right to that kind of positive thinking. Then we won't have all this business of wars that occur, unfortunately, all too frequently.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.