Densho Digital Archive - Walter Tanaka Interview (denshovh-twalter-01-0005)

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gky: Can we jump to Camp Savage? So you said you were there, you went in June of '42.

WT: Yes.

gky: What was it like? Describe the barracks, can you describe it physically to me?

WT: Oh, that was certainly a shock to see the condition of the camp. The barracks were just filthy. Apparently it was a place for an old folks home, old men's home, they were dirty, like the screen door on the barracks were falling off, and we had to go in and clean up the inside of the barracks. The latrine was filthy and dirty and all that, and we had to clean all that out before we could occupy it as our barracks when we went to school at Camp Savage for a period of six months.

gky: That's pretty unusual also, you go in the army, go back to school.

WT: Well, the thing is... you see, the thing is, prior to World War II, when the army decided to train soldiers for linguistic duties, they went around to all the various camps to recruit, and they were amazed to find that there were very few that would qualify for the language school. And so there were not too many available. Within the army they were still recruiting, and sometimes recruiting people that went to Camp Savage and still didn't, they considered unqualified for linguistic duties. And they ended up as overhead, working in the mess hall or as cooks or KPs or different jobs instead of continuing with the language studies.

gky: Can you talk a little bit about... it was so rigorous, it was so hard that you... how did you study after the lights went out?

WT: Well, compared to some of the Nisei... of course, the top linguists with knowledge of Japanese and both reading and writing as well as speaking it, were the Kibei Nisei, those that got a part of their education in Japan. Outside of that, those of us who were Nisei had never been to Japan ever before. We went to the Japanese language school, but the problem was that, in my family -- this is during the Depression, mind you, during the Great Depression of the 1930s -- that my dad farmed, and because of the hard times and the crops didn't bring the price for the stuff that we grew, my dad was on the verge of bankruptcy and he couldn't borrow any money, nobody had money to lend, and the banks wouldn't lend money. And so we eventually, as a family, we all had to work. My mother, my sisters, my brothers and I and my dad, and we were out in the country so that we couldn't even pay tuition to go to Japanese school. So that compared to many other Niseis, I didn't get that much Japanese language school education. But although my dad was from a village in southern Japan, in Kyushu, from the Kumamoto prefecture, he was a farm boy. But my mother was a city girl from the city of Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, and she spoke the standard language. But my father, dad, were very determined to study and do self-education through correspondence courses from a university in Japan. But I would say that I might have had four or five years of Japanese language school studies compared to others that went pretty much through high school in the study of the Japanese language. So I was rather weak in my knowledge of Japanese, particularly the reading and writing of Japanese. Because my mother spoke pretty good standard Japanese language, and therefore I think I obtained the knowledge of the Japanese language as an interpreter.

gky: I've heard it said that people who... some of the people who weren't as proficient in Japanese, when lights went out, they still had fifty kanji a night to learn.

WT: Exactly, and I did that for that six months I was there. And I was in one of the lower classes that still taught the written language, to read and write the written language, the kanji characters. And to keep up with that, memorizing fifty characters every day, I was among those that burned the midnight oil. We went into the latrine, and the latrine lights were always on. So we always studied 'til midnight, sometimes beyond that. I think most of those that went to Camp Savage never forget the kind of studies we had to do at that time.