Densho Digital Archive - Shigeya Kihara Interview (denshovh-kshigeya-01-0012)

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SK: The army had difficulty recruiting students for MIS. Based upon our teams doing combat intelligence activities in Guadalcanal, the Solomon Campaign, and in Alaska and in New Guinea, the commanders were being, beginning to clamor for MIS graduates. The atmosphere in the camps in 1942 was not conducive to young men volunteering for military service, and so the army sent Colonel Stewart to Hawaii, and he came back with three hundred good students. Lot of these men after the army became Supreme Court justices in Hawaii, regents of the East West Center at the University of Hawaii, hospital administrators, legislators, and so forth. Still, the response from the men in the relocation camps was not good. Colonel Rasmussen sent recruiting teams to each of the ten camps. In some camps men would volunteer, but they had to be snuck out of the relocation camps or be subjected to beatings by the pro-Japan group in the camps. So in June of 1943 Colonel Rasmussen sent Mr. Imagawa and myself to Camp Shelby, where the 442 was training, and we came back with two hundred fifty more good men, both from the contingent from Hawaii and then from the mainland Nisei who had volunteered for the 442. And then in the fall of 1942 Sergeant Kawahara, an original 100th Infantry man, was sent to Hawaii and he came back with three hundred more. So all during '43 and even '44 the army had a difficult time getting volunteers from the relocation centers. One factor was that the pool of Kibei, those competent in the Japanese language, was getting smaller and smaller. And so in 1944 the language course was extended from six months to one year. Then in the spring of 1944 the draft was reinstated for Japanese Americans, and that was a factor in the number of students volunteering for MIS.

gky: Wait, when you say the draft was reinstated, when did the draft, was the draft stopped for Japanese Americans?

SK: Right after Pearl Harbor. It began on an informal basis. In many, many instances Japanese Americans already in uniform were discharged from the army. It was a matter of local preference by commanders of different units, and slowly the Selective Service boards throughout the United States, especially in California and Oregon, Washington, began to tell Nisei who were classified as 1-A that they were now 4-C, "enemy aliens." Then on a national basis, in the fall of 1942, General Hershey ordered that all Japanese Americans have their draft status changed from 1-A to 4-C, so it started out in an informal way, then it became an official Selective Service policy in the spring of nineteen, excuse me, in the fall of 1942. Then, because of the record of the MIS men working in the Pacific area and because of the record of the 100th Battalion fighting in Italy, the Selective Service reinstated the draft for Japanese Americans in 1944, and Japanese Americans in the camps and outside the camps had to report for their induction into the army after that.

gky: Okay. Now can you tell me about WACs and, WACs?

SK: The need for MIS trained linguists, combat intelligence operators, became so intense, every commander, every division was clamoring for MIS men to do intelligence work. The MIS men were attached to the United States army, the navy, the Marines, the air force. They served the British army, Canadian army, the New Zealand army, the Australian army, the Chinese army, and the Indian army. There weren't enough MIS men. And so the command in Washington decided that WACs, Japanese American WACs who could handle the Japanese language should be trained to take the place to do desk jobs behind the lines at intelligence centers in Brisbane, in Honolulu, in Ceylon, that these WACs should be able to do desk jobs and free men for front line duty. So in 1945 a contingent of fifty WACs was recruited in the camps and in the areas where the Japanese were not imprisoned, and fifty WACs reported for duty to Fort Snelling in 1945. And the interesting thing is that one Chinese private was in the group. The army felt that since the Chinese language was written in characters and the Japanese language written in characters, the Chinese would be able to pick up Japanese with no problem. But it's quite different. This Chinese girl joined the WAC group and was trained in Japanese, but she had a hard time.

gky: So what happened with the war ending and the WACs being trained? What happened to the WACs?

[Interruption]

gky: Okay. What happened with the WACs?

SK: The one year training of the WACs was completed after the war ended in August of 1945, and so there was no place that the WACs could be sent to relieve front line MIS combat intelligence operators. And the occupation had started in Japan already, so those WACs who volunteered for duty in Japan were shipped to Tokyo and they were given clerical type jobs to do in Tokyo and in other parts of Japan.