<Begin Segment 9>
Q: Fred, could you tell us a little bit about your plastic surgery and how you were feeling at that time, why you decided to do it?
FK: Well, I did a stupid thing by doing that. At that time, we were undecided what we were going to do, you know, and we were thinking of all kinds of ways so that it'd be easier for me to stay and not be recognized, so that I won't have to get caught in evacuation. And I was discussing it with my girlfriend, and we were looking through the Sunday magazine section of the paper, and she pulled out an article regarding the plastic surgery, how they improve the face and so forth. And she says, "Hey, look at this." And I looked at it and read it, and she says, "Do you think it would work?" And I said, "I don't know." "Well," she says, "shall we look into it?" I said, "We haven't got anything to lose," so we decided to try it. So I went to see the doctor, it was in San Francisco, and he said that he can, said he can do pretty good work on me. But actually, I had a broken nose from playing football and then never had it fixed. And what he did was he just fixed my nose, you know, and whatever little thing he can do, but actually, he didn't do what he said he was gonna do, he just took my money, that's what it was, actually. Because everyone recognized me in camp when I went there, they knew who I was and so forth, so there wasn't anything, change, except I didn't have a broken nose anymore. [Laughs] And I forgot how much money I spent on it, but it was quite a bit. So it was very foolish for me to do that, but I had to make the report in -- no, I take that back. I didn't have to because it was unnecessary for my case, but I did state that. And some papers are picking it up as a big issue, and I don't think it is, regarding to my case.
<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.