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gky: What do you think was -- you've done some, you did some unusual things during the war. What do you think was the most important contribution you made during the war?

KY: You mean other than military?

gky: No, military.

KY: Well, I think the contribution I made in the military is as explained. But during the war, after the war?

gky: During the war.

KY: During the war. Well, I think during the war, I think during the war is four years of military, so it's almost strictly military. Although on furloughs, you know, from Camp McCoy or Camp Ritchie, or whatever, maybe it's about furloughs. We made a lot of contacts with the residents over there, the area where we went furlough, you know. And I made some very good friends like Sparta, Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Chicago, all in that Midwest area, La Crosse. We got to went into the families and we corresponded with them for years, you know. And their generation we understand. The parents got on real well with us, and the kids were teenagers at that time, but even today they still correspond sometimes.

gky: How do you think the Nisei, what the Nisei did during the war, helped Hawai'i with statehood?

KY: Well, actually, the war, the war, see, one is the war record. Secondly is the -- after they got discharged, the veterans, they got GI Bill, that is a tremendous help to the Nisei in getting the education which they could not afford before. And after they got the education, they came back, went into politics, got into business, economics, and so forth, education. After they returned, because of their war record, there was no question about their loyalty anymore. There's no doubt. And from there, we got, politics were tremendous, we got we really got fine in politics which in developed into statehood. Then you got education, you got professors, and you get schoolteachers. We just abound with schoolteachers and all the professions like attorneys, and so forth, they all spread into that field quite a bit. Before the war, in contrast, before the war, Niseis weren't accepted to take a lot of the government jobs. Only government job available, not only, but you know, the government work, that was more or less what the Nisei went into was education, schoolteachers, and so forth. Not like today.

gky: Would you just repeat that again, that truck was kind of noisy.

KY: It's going into education like university professors, so forth, doctorates, PhDs and so forth, but the political field, it's obvious that the war record, the education, the GI Bill, went into our achieving statehood. And that record, the people of Hawai'i, multiracial, other than Japanese, have more accepted the Japanese, you know. Whereas before the war, as I said, if you're Japanese, you can't get a government job. You can't get into Pearl Harbor jobs, you can't get utility jobs at the telephone company, Hawai'i Electric. The electric company won't hire Japanese. And all the good paying jobs were barred. They weren't accepted. So they had to get into the field like going into business on their own, things like small business, so forth.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2001 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.