Densho Digital Archive
gayle k. yamada Collection
Title: Ted Tsukiyama Interview
Narrator: Ted Tsukiyama
Interviewer: gayle k. yamada
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: January 5, 2001
Densho ID: denshovh-tted-01-0003

<Begin Segment 3>

gky: I heard that at Camp Shelby there were a lot of fights between mainlanders and Hawaiians because of this feeling of difference.

TT: Yeah, there were fights, but that was part of this initial cultural shock that occurred between these two groups. The army thought yeah, they're all Japanese Americans, throw them all in together, but they didn't realize there are differences. Part of what contributed to that is that the army had a lot of Niseis in the service left over from the prewar drafts, and they didn't know what to do with them until finally this 442 project came about. And so they gathered up a whole bunch of them, sent them to Camp Shelby in January or so of 1943 to train them as cadre, meaning the leadership structure of an infantry regiment. So that meant from private first class, corporal, sergeants, staff sergeants, all the way up to first sergeants, master sergeants, they were all mainland boys. Then the whole bunch, 2,500 or so volunteers from Hawai'i went over there and we're all buck privates. So right there is again a stratified arrangement, and I think that contributed a lot. I mean, a lot of us, like myself, I was already a first sergeant in the ROTC, ready to become a second lieutenant in the reserve. And yet when I went to Shelby, I'm back to buck private again. I had enough military training and all that, but those kind of things didn't matter, see. But I'm sure that a lot of the others felt resentment of this kind of arrangement, but that's how it was. And so, when the Hawai'i boys got to Shelby, they had to be trained and ordered around by the mainland cadre. And I think that, you know, there's a language difference, cultural difference, and, of course, this, I don't know what you want to call it, a sort of an inherent characteristic of the local Nisei that they don't take crap from anybody, and sort of chip on the shoulder thing. That kind of attitude contributed toward these tensions that may have erupted into these fights.

gky: You're saying the Hawaiians had that "we don't take crap from anybody" attitude? It was the Hawaiian Nisei that had that attitude?

TT: Yeah, and usually they stuck together in groups. There's a, this is another distinguishing characteristic. The local guys are group-oriented whereas on the mainland it seemed like they brought up, you know, each had to fend for themselves type of thing. And if some Hawaiian got in trouble, especially with some haole soldier from the Texas division that wanted to hassle, all the Hawai'i guys would jump in, you know. They wouldn't let the one guy go and fight his own battle; they all jumped in and helped him. Well, eventually, I think the mainland guys got to appreciate that, that if any outsider insulted them or called them "Japs" or anything like that, the Nisei in the 442, as a group, would react and wouldn't take that kind of crap.

gky: What do you think turned the tide and made the mainland and Hawaiian people work together?

TT: Well, I would think it was the... the turning point, I think, would be the decision, whether it was official or not, to send groups of Hawai'i guys to visit the relocation camps in Jerome and Rohwer. Dan, Senator Inouye mentions that in his book that that was a turning point and, well, I was one of them. I was invited by one of the mainland guys to go with him to visit his family at Rohwer. And when we went over there, we approached the gate, we're in American uniform and yet they practically searched us and treated us with great -- they were security conscious, I guess. But we could see everyone is behind barbed wire, guard towers, the machine guns and everything are turned inward, not outward. So we realized, hey, these people are prisoners, you know. We had no idea. We in Hawai'i had not suffered that kind of experience, being forcefully evacuated and incarcerated for no reason other than your race. And so the realization hit that, hey, some of these mainland volunteers volunteered from this kind of place, from behind barbed wire. They had to sneak out at night to volunteer to escape the wrath of the diehards. And, there was not only this appreciation that this great, great injustice that was done to the Japanese Americans on the mainland, but the fact that nonetheless these guys still volunteered. There was I think a lot of newly-found respect for the mainland Nisei who did volunteer from behind barbed wire.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2001 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.