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gky: And then, so you didn't have any experience being a teacher?

SK: No. I had never gone to school in Japan. I wasn't able to read a Japanese language newspaper, let alone a Japanese military document, the training manuals and the like.

gky: And none of, none of the other people with whom you were instructors, John Aiso or, were any of them trained as teachers?

SK: None of us were trained as teachers. In anything. And Aki Oshida had graduated from Meiji University in Tokyo, was good in Japanese. Tets Imagawa had graduated from a middle school in Japan and he was good in Japanese. Aki Oshida had taken ROTC in Japan, so he knew military terminology to a certain extent, but he had never taught Japanese to anybody before.

gky: It seems like the other instructors, because John Aiso was also, also studied at Waseda University, right?

SK: No, he went to a special school in Japan after he finished high school in Hollywood, to gain some rudimentary knowledge of Japan, of the Japanese language, and then later on, after he had graduated from Brown University and Harvard Law School, he gained a job on Wall Street in New York. But his pay was only twenty-five dollars a week. That's how bad the Depression was. And he didn't see any future there, so acting on advice of family friends, including people from Japan, he went to Japan and wanted to study law for one year at the Imperial University, but he being an American citizen, he was not permitted to go to the Imperial University in Tokyo. So he went to another school, another university, for one year, and studied Japanese legal terminology, and then he was employed by the British American Tobacco company in Manchuria. So all the three other instructors, beside myself, had some Japanese training, but not as teachers.

gky: So how'd you know what to do? I mean, do you just do what John Aiso said in terms of, copy these readers, and this is what the instruction schedule will be?

SK: Well, Aki Oshida, being the best in Japanese, was given charge of Section A. Tets Imagawa, being good in Japanese, was given responsibility for Section B, and I, being the least competent in Japanese was given charge of Section C. And then John Aiso whipped up a schedule, a course of study. Section A will go through volumes one, two, three of the Naganuma readers in about one week. Mr. Imagawa's class would probably be able to go through reader, reader one, reader two in about two weeks' time. Then the third section, Section C, my class, would probably go through reader one and two in about two weeks' time. So as the printers printed up volumes one, two and three and delivered them in one hundred copies, I had my own copy of the Naganuma readers that I could study and prepare for teaching, and I had two weeks' time to do that. And although my Japanese was very elementary, I could handle book one, book two, book three without too much problems. Then my strong aspect of my education was English, so it was very simple for me to develop a translation exercise for my students, and for English to Japanese exercise I could write them up with no trouble at all. So in the beginning I had to get used to the Naganuma readers one, not difficult, reader two, not too difficult, then with reader three the language became a little bit more complicated and I had to study one day ahead of my students to be able to teach.

gky: Yeah, the, after you started teaching, what were your students like, the first, that first class of students? What was that first class of students like?

SK: Well, it was a strange situation for the teachers and the students. It was the first time in our lives that Oshida, Imagawa, and John Aiso and I were ever attempting to teach the Japanese language to English-speaking Japanese American Nisei soldiers. So the students were very skeptical and very critical in their minds, however, they were soldiers and they were gentlemen and they never questioned the instructors regarding their competency, education, or things like that. In my instance, I didn't know Japanese that well, so I said, "If there's any question that you may have regarding the Japanese that you're studying that I'm not able to satisfactorily answer, let me know. I'll have the answer for you the next day." And so that's the way it went. If I didn't know the answers I would hurry back to the faculty room at noontime and ask my colleagues, "What is this, what is that," and I would get their advice, look up dictionaries, and the next day I would go back to class and inform the students. And I had very little problem teaching my students in that way.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.