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gky: This is tape 2 of Walter Tanaka on October 10th, the year 2000, in Macero, California. Walter, why did you volunteer? Here your parents were thrown in camp, and you've been discriminated against already in the army because you're Japanese American. What made you want to go out and fight for the United States with your language?

WT: Well, I've thought about that quite a bit. And I said to myself that, you know, what's happening to us, my parents and my brothers and sisters, Nisei and Japanese American friends, were all placed in, incarcerated in the camps, internment camps. And here I'm volunteering for service to go to Camp Savage and to learn the Japanese language. Well, I said, it's wrong, the way they're treating us is wrong, and that maybe I shouldn't be doing this. But to me, the climate, the situation at that time, is so much different than at any other time. It's a crisis, there's a war going on. And I thought, well, right or wrong, this is America; this is my country. But at this time, what can I do? I felt that I have to serve my country, and if there's any objections or anything to say about it, maybe it's after the war is over at a later date to complain about losing our rights and the family being incarcerated in the camps. Well, like my dad was separately interned because way back around 1925, my father was nominated and elected to become the head of the Japanese Community Association in San Luis Obispo.

gky: So he got sent to a Justice Department...

WT: Yes. So he was interned and...

gky: Tell me, what did your parents say, your father say, when he heard that you had volunteered to go fight in the Pacific?

WT: I had no communication with my family because, first of all, the army said that if Japanese Americans voluntarily went inland, 150 miles inland from the West Coast, that they would be safe, that they would not have to make any other movement. Otherwise, that they would be assembled and interned and sent to the relocation camps.

gky: Did you understand the United States government doing that?

WT: Did I what?

gky: Do you understand why the United States government said that was "military necessity" and they had to do it for security?

WT: Well, it was just too big of a thing that I never thought in those terms. Whether they had the right to do that or not. I thought it was wrong, actually, that here they had Japanese move out, when my folks, they didn't ever do anything wrong, they were farmers. My dad, that one year that he was the president of the local community association, and my dad, he liked to write, and he used to write local news, in other words, happenings among the Japanese community in San Luis Obispo. He would write articles for the Japanese American news, you know, like the Rafu Shimpo in Los Angeles, and up in San Francisco in those days, I don't remember whether it was the Daily News, Shinsekai, the New Daily News or something like that. But for some time my dad did do some work being a local correspondent to give the local news to the newspaper.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.