Densho Digital Archive - Shigeya Kihara Interview (denshovh-kshigeya-01-0004)

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gky: Can you tell me a little bit about John Aiso, describe what he was like?

SK: John Aiso was thirty-two when he became chief instructor of the Fourth Army Intelligence School. He was a very intelligent and bright student. He finished Hollywood High School when he was sixteen years old, I believe, or seventeen. Anyway, he was on the Hollywood High School debating team, and he was scheduled to go to Washington to participate in a national debating contest, but the principal and the authorities involved in the oratorical contest didn't want him to represent Hollywood High School and the state of California in the national oratorical contest, so on some kind of excuse they let him go to Washington as a coach to the other student who did the debating. And in Washington he met with the Japanese ambassador from Japan to the United States, and this ambassador, Matsudaira, knew the president of Brown University on a personal basis, so the ambassador talked to the president of Brown University and got a four-year scholarship for John Aiso to go to Brown University. His parents were not that wealthy. His father was a gardener, and this intervention by Ambassador Matsudaira proved to be a godsend. And after he finished Brown University cum laude, he entered Harvard University and then, as I said before, he got a job on Wall Street. Then he proceeded to Japan for one year of legal studies, then became the legal counsel for the British American Tobacco company in Mukden.

He was a mature individual, impeccable English, a gentleman, and very scholarly type. In Mukden, Manchuria, he became sick with hepatitis, and from the hospital in Mukden he wrote to his mother saying that, "I'm sick, but I hope to get better and get back onto my job." His mother said, "John, you come home right now. I want you to come back to the United States and recover." And John said, "No, I'm gonna stay." So his mother, a small woman, less than five feet tall, booked herself on a steamship from San Pedro, sailed to Tokyo, by train went up to northern Japan, crossed over to Korea, took a train all the way up the Korean peninsula and then down to the city of Mukden in Manchuria, and grabbed John Aiso by the ear and brought him home. And in the late months of 1940 he was drafted, and when he reported for training at Camp Han in the Los Angeles area, the sergeant who looked at his papers said "another damn lawyer" and assigned him to become a parts worker in the motor pool. And about that time Colonel Rasmussen, who was a graduate of the American Japanese language course in Tokyo, had been tasked by the army in Washington to start interviewing potential students for Japanese language training. This was in the late spring of 1940. Colonel Rasmussen interviewed John Aiso at Camp Han and immediately recognized that he had come upon an irreplaceable individual for the new school, so John Aiso was given orders to proceed from Camp Han to report to Colonel Weckerling at the Presidio. Standing at attention before Colonel Weckerling with the American flag in the background, Colonel Weckerling told John, "John, I'd like for you to become the chief instructor of the new school that we are going to establish." John said, respectively, "Sir, I'm not a young person anymore and I'm engaged to married, and I want to start my law practice in Los Angeles as quickly as possible. My one year draft term is coming to a close, so I decline to accept your offer."

[Interruption]

SK: Private John Aiso was transferred from Camp Han in Riverside and reported to Colonel Weckerling at headquarters, Fourth Army, in San Francisco. John stood at attention before Colonel Weckerling, Colonel Weckerling said, "John, I want you to become the chief instructor of the Fourth Army Intelligence School that we are going to organize in a couple of weeks." John said, "Sir, I'm not a young man. I'm over thirty years old. I'm engaged to be married, and I want to start my law practice in Los Angeles as quickly as possible, so I decline to accept your offer." The Colonel stood up from behind his huge oak desk, came around and put his right arm, his right hand on John's left shoulder and said, "John, your country needs you." This was the first time in John's life that any person of authority in the United States had ever referred to America as "your country," and when John heard this, he had no choice but to say, "Yes, Sir, I'll accept." And so this is the way Private John Aiso agreed to become chief instructor of the Fourth Army Intelligence School.

gky: Do you remember any anecdotes about those first, that first year, before, the first class before Pearl Harbor?

SK: Well, the four instructors worked like crazy and prepared for the reporting of students on the first of November, 1941. By that date the Naganuma readers had been reproduced in San Francisco in one hundred copies, enough dictionaries had been purchased in San Francisco, UC Berkeley and Stanford, so that the students would be able to look up terminology and translate them Japanese into English and from English into Japanese. There was no problem with the start of the school. Everything went smoothly. But John Aiso was very busy organizing everything. He had a schedule for the first week of instruction but not the second, and Colonel Weckerling would come in every day, in the morning and many times in the afternoon, to check with John. He would say, "John, what are you going to do next week? What are you going to do about this?" And so forth. John would express his ideas and the Colonel would approve or disapprove or suggest changes. And then Colonel, excuse me, Captain Kai Rasmussen, who was commander of the coast artillery at Fort Scott, would come in periodically, also to check with Colonel Weckerling, with John Aiso to see how the plans for organizing the school were proceeding.

Then the commanding general of the Fourth Army, General John DeWitt, under whose command the school was being organized and taught, came in to inspect the progress that Colonel Weckerling had been able to achieve during the one month of operation. And he said, he checked Section A, checked Section B, checked my section, stood around for a few minutes, observed how things were going on, then he moved back to Section A and he sat down close to Private Iwao Kawashiri, and while Aki Oshida was teaching he whispered to Iwao, "Private, if there is anything I can do for you, just let me know." And then after the inspection was over he left. In about two months later General DeWitt was greatly responsible for the evacuation of Iwao Kawashiri's family, families of all the instructors, families of all the students, plus a hundred and twenty thousand other Japanese Americans into American concentration camps in the interior. Then instruction proceeded.