<Begin Segment 24>

TI: Okay, so we're going to start again, and I want to go to Minnesota.

NM: Minnesota.

TI: Minnesota, so tell me about Minnesota.

NM: Okay. As we went Minnesota, we stopped at certain places. We'd go eat, we fall in line, march certain places, and then a lot of people thought we were prisoners, I guess. But they found out, the way we walk and this and that. So we go back and then we kept going. Then, I knew the minute we, they called me, I knew, I think it's MIS, I thought. That's the only, why they called all Japanese. There was about four in my company, all four of us all went, yeah. And there was one fellow that I was really close to, George Kumagai. He lives out south, but he passed away, I heard. He's the only one that I knew, you know, and we met in Japan one day, the office where we were. I was going in, got a lieutenant, you know. "George Kumagai, where did you get the lieutenant?" He said, "Nori, why don't you re-up another year? You get this." He was a lieutenant. I said, "I had enough." I said, we're gonna get stripe, we didn't get it, we're gonna get two stripe, we didn't get it. I said, "We're not going to get nothing." I said, "No thanks, I got a job already." So I took a job.

TI: Okay, but let's go back to Minnesota. Tell me about the training. [Laughs] So tell me about the training.

NM: Training, okay, when we're first there, we went to the, what they called chicken farm. It's a shack, only about four or five get in there. And then there was a one belly stove there, you got to tend to it all the time, fire, you got to have somebody to do it for you. And sometimes you have to do that, too. You got to do not just your own, somebody else's, too. They called that chicken farm or something.

TI: I think it's "turkey farm."

NM: Turkey farm. Okay, you know more than I do. [Laughs] Turkey farm, yeah. That's what it was, yeah. We stayed there about a month. Said, "Where are we gonna go in there?" Okay, finally we got in Company H, okay, we got a good building. And sleeping quarters, nice building, that was more like it, yeah. Then we went to school. I was in E-9 or something. It was pretty high class. We were supposed to know quite a bit, yeah. Anyway...

TI: So when you were a kid, did you go to Japanese language school?

NM: Yeah, I went to Japanese school in Fresno. Only up to about sixth grade. Once I was in ninth grade, I play basketball at school, I can't get back.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2010 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.