<Begin Segment 19>

TI: At Jerome, Jerome, after a few months, the government had you fill out, like, a questionnaire. Do you remember the questionnaire that you had to fill out with the "loyalty questionnaire"? You know, like with "yes-yes" or "no-no"?

NM: What do you mean? You go out?

TI: No... to go, well, you had to fill out a form. Do you remember that, when you had to fill out a form about whether or not you're willing to serve in the United States Army or forswearing allegiance to the Japanese emperor?

NM: You mean people going out, out of the camp?

TI: Well, no, everybody in camp had to fill out the form. Do you remember? All the adults. You had to fill out the form, other people filled the form out. Do you remember that? A questionnaire?

NM: Questionnaire?

TI: Yeah, do you remember?

NM: Oh, you mean "yes" and "no"?

TI: Yeah, yeah.

NM: Oh. Oh, yeah, we filled it all out.

TI: Yeah, tell me about that. What was that like?

NM: There's two group of guys. There's one for it, you know. Like us guys was, I was "yes-yes." So we didn't do nothing. "No-no" boys, they don't want to go in the army. They want to go back to the nani. Boy, they were mean. Boy, they called all kinds of names. "You guys, if you guys come back to Japan, we're gonna get you." Yeah, they threatened us. And then what happened? Some main guys that stand up, head guys, they went to Tule Lake, and what do you know? These leaders backed out, and they let the other guys go with them, they went back. Four guys, they can't come back. When they went back, they thought they're gonna get everything. They said, "Oh, we got a lot of things they're gonna give us, gonna be fed," and this and that. "We're gonna get you guys," they said. And what they did was terrible. They got hachimaki, "Yassa, yassa," they're training for the... yell, they're training every morning, every day, in camp.

TI: This is at Tule or at Jerome?

NM: No, this is at Jerome.

TI: Jerome, okay. So Jerome they were --

NM: Our friends. They're the one that, I went to see, "We're gonna get you guys." They were mean. And then when they found out, they went, nothing. They said they got told, "What do you come back for?" That's what they told me. Then, in fact, when I went Japan, I went as a soldier. And I was stationed at ATIS, that's right there by the emperor's, right next door, anyway. Emperor stays there, our building is right there, and we could see the emperor's yard. We had a good place, ATIS. Allied Interpreting or something, Section. And we go up there on the rooftop and we see everything. We see this side, Tokyo, Ginza, so we were in a good place when I first went there.

TI: So this is like McArthur's headquarters, right?

NM: This is in Tokyo.

TI: Yeah, Tokyo, like, headquarters?

NM: Huh?

TI: Is it like headquarters? Like ATIS, right? ATIS?

NM: ATIS, yeah. That's why... Allied...

TI: Right, I can't remember what ATIS stands for, but...

NM: Allied Language... Allied, something anyway. I forgot. Interpreters Section.

TI: But we'll get to that later. Let's go back to Jerome.

NM: Okay, Jerome.

TI: In Jerome, you said that, were there fights between the...

NM: Those guys, they were training. They were Japanese now. Yeah, hachimaki, they're training. Then, "You guys come back, we'll stab you," talk like that. Geez.

TI: So did that cause fights? Were there, in Jerome, were there fights between...

NM: No, we didn't fight, no. Nobody fought. But they threatened. That's what... you couldn't go close to them. So I stood back. I went back. I wanted to see what happened, anyway. That's the way it was there. Boy, they were in hachimaki, and yell, "We're gonna get you. You guys are gonna be sorry." Okay, we go back.

TI: Now, did some of your friends from Fresno, did some of them join that group? Were there, like, some childhood friends of yours that you knew that maybe went to Tule Lake?

NM: Yeah. But the main one was the trained, that had education in Japan. They're the ones that were, they got all the other ones going. And then, okay, everybody was gonna go, they went to Tule Lake. Then I didn't come back right away, see, I stayed in Japan. I stayed another seven years. So when I come back, I heard a lot of this.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.