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HS: During the war there were ten of us in the family. My oldest brother Buddy was in Japan, and there were nine of us here, and all nine of us evacuated from Los Angeles. Howard, the oldest, was married, so he had his own household, he had a wife and baby. And in Amache, Colorado, Howard and Stanley volunteered for the Military Intelligence. And they went to Camp... was it Camp Savage? Camp Savage in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And then from there they went to the Orient. Howard went to Australia, and Stanley went to the China-Burma-India theater. And then Ernie, who was too young to volunteer yet, had to wait for his eighteenth birthday. And they would only take him after he had a double hernia operation. And it was surprising because he was always the runt of the family, and after his operation, my goodness, when he came back from the service, he had grown quite a bit. I was surprised at how much he had grown, and I think the operation is what did it.

LD: You think he was changed by his war experience?

HS: Oh, very much.

LD: You were surprised by how little?

KK: No, by his height, he had grown so much. You know, in school, he was always, he took tumbling, and he was always the little one who was on top. But when he came back, he was nice and tall. [Laughs]

LD: Do you remember Ernie that way? You were, how old were you during the war?

KK: When I went into camp I was nine, and then that year, 1942, I turned ten in October. And yes, I remember Ernie as being my shortest brother, but of course Bob and Edison hadn't grown yet. They were, let's see, Edison would have been twelve and Bob would have been fourteen. Ernie was the oldest of those three boys, and he told me that when he was in the 442nd and in the army, he had to have three changes of uniforms because he kept growing. [Laughs] And the Uno boys were considered tall for Japanese, and my brother Howard was six-feet-three when I knew him, he was already an adult. I'm the last of the ten. And when he came to visit us in Crystal City, by then I had grown, because from eleven, and those were your growing years, adolescent years, when I saw him, one, he had suffered an injury falling into a hull of a ship and had suffered injury to his back and his legs, so he was on crutches. But besides that, I walked up to him, I said, "You shrunk." [Laughs] Because I had grown. But as I said, for being Japanese, the Uno boys were considered tall. They were 5'8" on up, 5'10" to 6'3".

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.