Densho Digital Archive - Shigeya Kihara Interview (denshovh-kshigeya-01-0010)

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gky: What was Colonel Rasmussen like, or I guess he was Captain Rasmussen at first?

SK: At first Captain Rasmussen, then when the school moved from San Francisco to Camp Savage he was jumped from captain to full colonel. Colonel Rasmussen was born and raised in Denmark, and in the Depression the family had no employment in Denmark and as a young man he immigrated to the United States. And conditions in the United States were so bad that there was no job, so he enlisted in the army. Food and a place to sleep each day.

gky: What kind of a, what kind of a person was he?

SK: Well, he was Danish and a very warm person, but he always spoke with a strong Danish accent. I remember distinctly when he was addressing the incoming students and graduating students that he always used the expression, [inaudible], and then he would begin to talk. He was married to... let me go back a minute. He was a private in the United States and he was assigned to be a driver for the commanding officer at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, at Honolulu. And it was his job to drive the general around, and the general's wife and the general's child to school and so forth, and the child -- I forget how old he was, must've been about eight, nine, ten years old -- would talk to Private Rasmussen. The general's son said, "What do you want to do when you get out of the army? What would you like to become?" And then the private, Rasmussen, told the general, "I want to go to West Point." And so the son told his father and the father got him an appointment to West Point, and he went to West Point, graduated, and got married to a wonderful person, and one of his assignments was to go to Tokyo to study Japanese as an American attache at the Tokyo embassy language school. Then he came back, assigned here and there, and one of his early assignments was to be Coast Guard Commander at Fort Scott, right adjacent to the Presidio of San Francisco. So he had a certain amount of knowledge of Japanese, and he advised his bosses in Washington periodically on the urgency and the need to start a Japanese language school because in a survey in the spring and summer of 1941 the army found out there were only about two dozen people, officers, in the army, navy, and the Marines, and in the graduate schools in American universities who could handle Japanese language intelligence. And so he wrote to his bosses in Washington urging that the army set up a Japanese language school, and he was instrumental in interviewing over three thousand people in the training camps up and down the Pacific Coast to select students. And later on Colonel Weckerling did the same, then Major Dickey did the same and established the Presidio of San Francisco school and moved to Savage. Colonel Rasmussen was a gentleman and his wife was a lovely person, and he and his officers on the staff, Colonel Stewart, Major Dickey, Colonel Pettigrew, treated the faculty like family. It was the first time in my life, at least, that I had dinner, a sit down dinner with Caucasian people, and periodically they would have cocktail hours on Friday afternoons, and it was a very, very pleasant, truly friendly relationship with these West Point officers. And from Savage and from Fort Snelling, Presidio of Monterey and [inaudible], the commandants have been, they have gone out of their way to befriend and work with not only the Japanese faculty but the Russian faculty, Chinese faculty, Korean faculty. A wonderful educational atmosphere.

gky: Did you have much contact with Colonel Weckerling?

SK: No, I did not. The school was just starting. There was no atmosphere or environment or condition for socialization between the faculty and Colonel Weckerling, then Pearl Harbor occurred and it was just total confusion.