Densho Digital Archive - Chester Tanaka Interview (denshovh-tchester-01-0007)

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I: Chet, you were born and raised in St. Louis, and you were in a unique position to... because there were very few Japanese American families in St. Louis, and you didn't have the influence that many of the other urban and rural families might have had, or the community pressure, the understandings. So when you came to Camp Shelby, you were exposed to a lot of Japanese Americans for the first time, and could you describe the Nisei soldiers as, almost as an outsider? Of course, you were Nisei yourself, but you were bringing an American perspective, a very Midwestern look. Could you describe it from that perspective?

CT: Yes, it was a very interesting experience for me. I was born in St. Louis, there were about five Japanese families when I was growing up. The city had about 700,000 people in it. But with only five Japanese families, we got together luckily maybe once a year during Christmas, and even then only two or three families would get together, and I would only see them then. So naturally I grew up with the major culture. Most of my friends were either German extraction or Italian extraction. I went through all, what others go through, in St. Louis I went to grammar school and then high school and college in St. Louis. And my friends that I mentioned were mostly Germans and Italians, of course, there were French and other sprinkling, but that's the majority ethnic groups in St. Louis. When I volunteered and went into the 442nd, that was my first exposure to the Japanese American group as such. I had never seen so many in my life, I said I didn't know there were that many Japanese Americans in the United States. This is to myself. And then I got into the group and I found out that there were two groups of us. There was a group from the mainland, like myself, which had really a subgroup from the mainland, a group from the West Coast who had a little, they were a group among themselves. And then there were a bunch like myself who came from a scattering across the country. Some from Texas, some from Wisconsin, some from Michigan, some from New Jersey. We were like scatterings, and we were all brought together here down in Shelby. Now the other big classification are the Japanese Americans from Hawaii. So you had the mainland Japanese Americans and Hawaiian Japanese Americans. The mainland Americans were broken up into those who were essentially from the West Coast, and those who were gathered up from the rest of the country. So that was the gathering that I ran into, and it was quite interesting when I met them all down in Shelby.