<Begin Segment 5>

LD: She was concerned about... you haven't told us about Buddy. Can you tell us about that?

KK: Okay.

LD: Tell us about your two brothers Howard and Buddy.

KK: Well, you want to tell them? Buddy is twenty years my senior. And what I remember of him is he was always an adult that came and visited once in a while with presents always for me. But when he, after he graduated high school, he was always interested in writing, and he wrote for vernacular Japanese newspapers, the English sections. He wrote the Nisei Story, Nisei Melodrama, and he'd write little articles which were published. And I think you should tell about this part, because this is before really when I was still a little girl, when he decided to go to Japan and cover the Japanese-Chinese war for the vernacular papers.

LD: Being a journalist, he tried very hard to get a good job. But in those days, a Nisei writer couldn't get a job, the L.A. Times or the examiner, that was an impossibility. So the best he could do was write articles for the Rafu Shimpo, and what could they pay you? Not much. And so he went to San Francisco and he wrote for the New World Sun, and I think they gave him room and board probably and maybe some pocket money. But he got passes to the theaters and things like that. And he used to enjoy writing for the papers, and he met Japanese celebrities when they came to San Francisco. And he conducted -- this is kind funny -- he conducted a "Dear Auntie Susan" or something like that, column, in either the Hokubei Mainichi or the New World Sun.

[Interruption]

HS: There were ten of us in the family, there were six boys and four girls. I'm the oldest girl. My oldest brother Buddy was in Japan, and three of my brothers... let me see. My brother Buddy was in Japan. Howard, Stanley and Ernie, volunteered for the services from camp. That was Amache, Colorado. Ernie was too young, but he became of age, and he volunteered for the 442nd, and he went to Shelby, Mississippi. Howard and Stanley kind of spoofed their way through the exams, and they were able to pass the stiff exams that the Military Intelligence gave, and they went up as... they were going to be interpreters and went up to Camp Savage in Minnesota.

LD: Why do you say "spoofed their way"?

HS: Well, neither of them were very good in Japanese. So according to Howard, he had to memorize something in Japanese, you know, and they took him, and he had to work the hardest to get through the Military Intelligence School. Stanley had been in Shanghai, so he had a smattering, Chinese and Japanese, which helped him, I think. But he wasn't very good in Japanese either. When you compare them with the Kibeis, who were really very good in Japanese, my two brothers probably were at the bottom of the class. But they made it through, and they went overseas. And Howard served in Australia, in the Philippines. The funny part of it is that before the war, Buddy, who had been a journalist in San Francisco working for the Japanese papers, decided that there was no future working for the Japanese papers for just room and board and just pocket money. And somehow or the other, he got the idea that maybe he should go to Japan and see what it was like there. And I don't remember... do you, Mae, how he happened to go to Japan?

MM: Buddy?

HS: Uh-huh.

MM: I don't remember. Wasn't it on a steamer?

HS: Oh, he worked his way over, that's right, on a freighter, that's right. But he had a letter of introduction to some distant relatives. And it so happened that one of the distant relatives, one of the Japanese government agencies, and Buddy went to meet them, and they were impressed that he was a journalist and was fluent in English. Of course, he knew very little Japanese, that didn't matter. And so he got the job. And evidently, because Buddy, being a journalist and being very articulate, was able to impress a lot of people because they, through him, they set up a program where they would invite young college graduates from the United States, Nisei graduates, who had degrees in mathematics and journalism, this, that and the other thing, to Japan to study. And I guess it was kind of a program where the Japanese thought, well, they'll bring them to Japan, and if they could offer them an opportunity that they don't have here in the United States, that these young men would say, and it would be to Japan's advantage. So he came back to the United States to recruit some of these people, and he recruited quite a few bright young men, Niseis, from the United States. And it was quite a program as I understand it.

LD: Was it hard on your family, the way you see it because you were the oldest, and you looked at it from the viewpoint of the oldest sister, kind of responsible for the family, was it hard on your family? Do you feel it was hard on your family? Do you remember, was it hard that Buddy was serving in the Japanese army?

HS: He wasn't serving in the Japanese army in the beginning. In fact, actually, he was just attached to the army as a correspondent.

LD: Was it hard on your family that he was even doing that?

HS: We didn't really know about it until... when was it we found out? I don't even remember when we found out.

LD: You knew he was in Japan. What did you know, what did you know about what Buddy was doing?

HS: That he had good connections, that he had, that he was doing all right. And as a correspondent, he had made a lot of Americans and British, and correspondents from all different countries, and he was mostly in Shanghai, really, that's where he was working.

KK: So he was covering the Japanese-Chinese war, and so his writings would be pro-Japan. But he was writing them for the vernacular papers in the U.S., sending the articles back to Rocky Mountain Shimpo, the Rafu Shimpo, all the various papers here. And then at one point he came back and he did a lecture tour. And I remember that one because I was a little girl, but he had some military paraphernalia like a helmet and bullet... what do you call those things? Bandolier, bandolier, and those belts that people put a thousand stiches in, with a little coin in the middle to protect the soldiers.

HS: He was telling the Japanese side of the Manchurian Incident.

LD: All this is before the war. At the point that the war starts, between Japan and the United States, your brother was in a very different position. So that's what you're talking about when your mother had this dream. She had something on her mind.

KK: Well then when the war began, before the war started, he married a Japanese national.

LD: "Before the war, my brother..."

KK: Before the war, my brother Buddy -- before the war, my brother Buddy, who we are talking about, married a Japanese national, so he decided to stay in Japan. 1938, Hana went to Japan for two years to visit relatives.

HS: And friends.

KK: And friends, and worked... where did you work?

HS: I worked for the Japanese government in the foreign office as a typist. And that was through friends of the family. And there were a number of Nisei who were there, and we had fun.

KK: And then my brother Stanley, who was about sixteen, and kind of a teenager who would get in trouble at home, fight and everything, so they decided to send him to Shanghai, and he worked for my cousin's import-export business there. So he learned some Chinese and Japanese. But Buddy was concerned that they not be... he kind of, being in the business that he was, knew that there was tension between the United States and Japan. So he wanted to be sure that they came back to the United States before anything happened.

HS: Also, the American consulate sent out messages and said, "All American citizens, you should go back. If you want to go back, you better go back now, because we don't know what the situation is going to be." And I said, "I'm going back," so I came back.

KK: Nineteen-what?

HS: 1940. I came back in 1940.

[Interruption]

KK: I think what happened during World War II is that we were all concerned about relatives in Japan.

HS: My mother had a sister, two sisters.

KK: How they were faring, if they had enough to eat, were they being bombed, you know, that sort of thing.

HS: And no communication.

KK: Yeah, there was no communication at all. Of course Mother would be concerned, because her oldest son was over there. He was married. If he was married, his wife may be pregnant, hopefully would give her grandchildren, you know. I think those were real concerns. And not knowing what role he played. Was he in the army? He's of military age, of course they would conscript all males of military age in Japan. So the chances that he would be in the army were good. But what we learned later was that he was more attached to the army. They used him in special ways because, I think, of his being bilingual and being a journalist. After the war I found out things about him and ways that he was used by the Japanese army, by the Japanese government. We didn't know he was in the Philippines, we didn't know the brothers had met. I mean, when my mother spoke to me about the boys, we didn't know those things. That's why I said it was so odd that she would even mention it to me. I don't think she mentioned it anybody else, but she mentioned it to me because I was so close to her. That they were okay, that they would meet, but it would be okay. And then later on we find out, yes, they did meet in the Philippines. Howard met Buddy, but Buddy was a prisoner of the U.S. Army and he had tuberculosis and he was in the hospital. And Howard went over to the hospital and met him and talked to him. That incident was documented in a book but they used my cousin's name instead of my brother's name. Because my cousin also had been on the island, was in the MIS, Roy Uno.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.