<Begin Segment 7>

gky: Harry, would that speak to you as the kind of family values you were raised with?

HA: What was that again?

gky: What that says to me, what Ken's story says to me, is the kind of family values you were raised with. You're the two oldest kids in your family, and yet you have the same kind of desire to work together as a family, even though you hadn't seen your family for years in Japan.

HA: I just felt responsible for the family. They lost their mother, and it was difficult for my older sister. She was a very, very wonderful person, and she died. So when you think about all she did for us when we were kids, you know. So, in a way, we were just kind of carrying over what she was doing for us earlier. So I'll probably say that our mother and my sister probably had a great deal to do how our family stayed together.

gky: Do you think that's a Japanese trait?

HA: Yeah, I think so. I believe that I've seen other families sacrifice their own personal goals for their family. I've seen that. So it's really not an unusual trait, I think.

gky: Is that a trait that helped you during the wartime period? In other words, was it important to you, like, for example, you signed for Ken and you were very supportive of Ken as well.

HA: Well, I thought, when I signed for Ken, was because if he thought that much of wanting to serve and to prove something, I couldn't deny him that opportunity.

gky: Okay. Ken, how did that make you feel?

KA: Well, I figured it was natural that he should, you know. [Laughs] No, it made me feel good that, you know, there was somebody there to sign up for, you know, for me, because if he didn't, I probably would have been, really, a real hell raiser. No, but really, I felt real good that he had enough confidence in me to let me go.

HA: I know he was young and everything too, but, you know, the conversation we had -- I've forgotten all the people who were involved in it, but just recently, I had heard this one person, Bert Kuya, telling me about another of our hometown friend, Jim Udo, told his parents that he wanted to go too, and they were really upset. That's what I found out later, so he never went, you know, he was very, very, upset. And another person, Giro Saisho, who was too young to even go, cried when he couldn't go. I remember that too.

KA: In fact, Harry was saying about this Jim Udo, the lady, they were fairly close friend of the family, but, anyway, when she heard that we signed up and the son Jim wanted to go, boy, she really let me have it. She called me a bakatare and, "What's the matter with you?" She says, "You're nuts. Who says you're an American citizen? You're no different than we are. You're in the camp like we are. You're restricted from doing all the things." And says, "On top of that, you have families in Japan. What would your Dad say if he was here?" She says, "You know, for you to go into the service under these condition," she says we're damn fools." That's when I told her, I says, "Obasan, if we didn't do anything now, you know, we'll be forever in this kind of situation and now's our opportunity to do something about it. If we don't take advantage of this situation, you know, we could never live it out, you know, after the war is over, because one day the war is going to be over and we want to be able to, you know, hold our head up high and say we're an American like anybody else, and nobody's going to be able to tell us that didn't do our part." And so she sort of quieted down, but I know she was very, very upset and, in fact, I think she is one of the ladies that told this Giro Saisho's mother something to the effect that it's not your sons, therefore you allowed them to go in, you know.

HA: They were like family to us, see.

KA: Yeah. They were my guardians and they said that how could you let them go, they're not even your family. You're congratulating us to go and how could you do that, you know. And, so, I know that these people took a tremendous amount of verbal assault after we left. I didn't know that until way much, much later. I was told that they really, you know, took a lot of abuse from the neighboring people because Harry and I left. Harry and I, I mean, once we left, I mean, we were away from it so we didn't even know things like this was happening, but I tried to apologize to the Mrs., you know, the Mrs. Saisho later, and said no, don't worry about it. But I heard from the kids in her family saying that there was incidents of that type that happened. But, like I said, this lady was very old-time Japanese, you know. They were from Kumamoto, and they're very hard-headed like my parents' country, and, so, when her son really wanted to go, in fact he wanted to go. He came with us, and I think he was about a year older than I and he had to have the mother or father's consent before he could join in. So, when they refused to sign it, of course, when he went to ask, I think that's when he got chewed out and was called all kind of names, and that's when we got involved, you know. But, there was a time like that.

HA: Yeah, it wasn't a very popular decision, yeah, because we were the first volunteers out of internment camp.

KA: Yeah. And, above that, like Harry said, we were both somewhat educated in Japan, and for us to take that first step before anybody else, you know, I think that was a real shock to them.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.