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gky: That's pretty rigorous training. Why didn't you just say, "Oh, I can't do this," or, "I don't want to do this," or stop trying so hard? It seemed that everybody seemed to want to excel. That's just because it's a Japanese attitude towards education, or was there a stronger sort of personal pride or country pride?

WT: Well, there were some that I think rebelled, like were not too happy, and gave the school supervisor, who was a judge, later judge, John Aiso, gave the school a bad time. There were some of those that were transferred out. And so when they were transferred out, they were transferred out to various units, military units.

gky: Can we jump ahead a little more, can you tell me what it was like to go to Angel Island when you were sent out?

WT: Yes. I was assigned to a air corps team. We were linguists, but we were sent to the air corps. In those days there was no air force like we have today. In those days there was an air corps which came under the army's jurisdiction. So like General MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, he was the commanding general of the Southwest Pacific, and under him was the 5th Air Force. Well, anyway, those were units. Now, we were at Camp Savage when we graduated, assigned to the... well, maybe I shouldn't say assigned, maybe we were attached to the air corps. And they formed, at that time, in December 1942, upon graduation, there were two ten-man teams. And one was under Sergeant Goda, I was on that team, and incidentally Harold Fudena was in that same team that later had done some work in the shooting down of Admiral Yamamoto's plane. But our team was under Goda, and we went to Australia. The other ten-man team was under Sergeant Shunji... I forget his last name. But anyway, this other team, under another sergeant, they went to New Caledonia.

gky: Can you tell me about being on Angel Island, what it was like being so close to San Francisco and yet being isolated on that island?

WT: Yes. Well, incidentally, when we went to Angel Island it was by way of Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, where the two air corps teams were sent. And then we entrained and went from Jefferson Barracks to Angel Island. You know, it was called Fort McDowell, and we were at Fort McDowell, so the twenty of us were there. One thing was comical in that the first sergeant would call roll call in the morning, and he was having a devil of a time pronouncing Japanese names. So he would call the roll and he would come to the Nisei names and couldn't pronounce it well. So he struggled to call our names and have us answer. And finally he got to the point where he didn't bother to call our names, he says, "Well, you Niseis in your unit, are you all present?" something like that. And somebody said, "Yeah, we're all present and accounted for." So then some of the guys wouldn't even get out of their bunks, five o'clock in the morning, and it's cold out there, and getting up for roll call, well, there were some of the guys that didn't get up. And the others would announce that we're all present, and that's how we got by.

One thing on Angel Island, to give ourselves a little exercise, every day we hiked around the island. So that was our exercise, but at night, we would look across the bay, and we'd see the lights shining in San Francisco, and it made us think about Chinese food. So boy, we sure wanted to eat some rice and China-meshi or Chinese food, but we couldn't get it. Then finally our sergeant negotiated or talked with the officer in charge, and they finally approved for us to go into San Francisco with the officer in charge of the group. And as a group we had to stay together, and even when we caught the cable car and went down to Chinatown and all that, we had to stick together so that we wouldn't get lost or separated. But there was one time that we did go into Chinatown, and we enjoyed it very much that we were able to eat Chinese food.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.