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gky: Will you talk a little bit about John Aiso? You had said that this extraordinary, well educated young man from southern California came into the radar screen of the army. When, what did he do to prove himself? How did he become the director of programming and curriculum?

JM: John Aiso was from southern California, highly educated, Brown University, Harvard Law School, had trouble finding a job in an American law firm. He landed a job in New York City. Within a few months they had some business in the Far East and they sent him to the Far East. He came back from that disgusted at what he'd seen of the Japanese militarism and expansion in the mainland, and came back from that and got drafted. He had no business being a private in the army, but that's what the army did with him. They didn't know what to do with him, and when he was approached to join the language school as an instructor he was getting ready to be discharged. And General Weckerling, then Lieutenant Colonel Weckerling, made a personal appeal to him and said, "John, your country needs you." He had to make that appeal because John, because John Aiso, this young Nisei attorney, he was about to walk out of the army, and he made a decision at that point that he was going to, he was going to serve his country that way.

gky: So it was only because there was a personal appeal by Lieutenant Colonel Weckerling?

JM: Yes. This is a technical point of the minutia of army personnel history, but in the fall of 1941 the army had been drafting people for about a year. They were constantly changing the rules of who was eligible for the draft and who was not, and in the early fall of 1941 they changed the rules and anyone over the age of twenty-eight was to be discharged, and John Aiso at that time was in his early thirties and so he was about to be administratively discharged. He had a get out of jail free card, if you will, and was getting ready to walk. That's why John Weckerling appealed to him personally and said, "John, your country needs you." And John Aiso thought for a minute and no one, certainly no white man had ever said that this was his country, and that was the real turning point in his life. And this was just a few weeks before the school opened, and a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. John Aiso was a member of an older generation of Nisei, born in 1909, was, had a real different experience growing up, I think, in the teens and '20s than the Nisei that grew up maybe ten or fifteen years after him, so he was almost a transition figure between the Issei generation and the Nisei generation. Born in America, educated in America, no question, but he had some of the conservative social attitudes of the Issei, and frankly, I don't think he had much regard for these young, hell raising Nisei who'd grown up in Seattle or Los Angeles or the, or the dockyards of Honolulu, and they didn't much appreciate some of the discipline he tried to apply in the school. But he was almost an elder statesmen among the Nisei generation.

gky: How did he help make the school successful, Aiso?

JM: John Aiso provided the driving energy behind the school. It had Caucasian officers on top. The commandant was Colonel Rasmussen, but John Aiso was the spirit of the school. He's the one who disciplined the instructors. He's the one who gave the students reason to study, because if you didn't study you would have to face him, and he could discipline you, he could even have you court-martialed, or he could have you sent overseas. So he was the driving force behind the school. He was also able to appeal to the Nisei in their own terms. He was able to appeal to them about their parents. He was able to make it very clear to them that if they didn't produce, if they didn't serve honorably, that there would be consequences on their family, there would be consequences on their community, and he had no qualms about telling 'em at every opportunity that this is what we're fighting for.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.