<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Let me set this up a little bit. So Mrs. Hirota, you mentioned earlier a Dr. Hirota, a dentist that you knew in Berkeley, and so this is the wife of the dentist?

JK: Yeah.

TI: And so you were going to visit Topaz to visit Dr. Hirota?

JK: Well, Mrs. Hirota and daughter in one pass.

TI: All right, so Mrs. Hirota and their three year old? You said three year old daughter?

JK: Yeah.

TI: Okay, we're on one pass.

JK: And so we went to, when we went to the sentry at Topaz, why, the sentry looked at it and he says, "Well, you have to have another pass for the child." Said, "Well, it says on the, on the pass, 'Mrs. Hirota and daughter.'" But he can't read, see, the guy was illiterate, that is, the soldier there that was conducting the entries of people going into the camp. But anyway, he called in another fellow that could read, and we were able to go in. And I talked to Dr. Hirota, and there was another fellow there, Dave Tatsuno. Now, does that name ring a bell?

TI: Yeah, because he, he...

JK: He just died.

TI: Yeah, but he took film footage inside the camps, and that's how I know.

JK: Well, Dave Tatsuno was, he was going to Berkeley in the College of Commerce at the time that I was going to dental school. And I knew him because he, his family had a little store on, right on Buchanan, right in Japantown in San Francisco, and I remember him quite well because I remember he had, gave the obituary to a friend of his that had just died, and he couldn't finish the obituary because he broke down and cried. But I talked to him after he'd gone back to California, and he'd opened up a store in San Jose. And then I just heard that... when was it, about, within the last six months or so, that he'd passed on, too.

TI: Yeah, we earlier have an interview of him talking a lot about his, the film footage he took, 'cause he had a, a movie camera inside, inside camp. So you visited Topaz, I'm curious what your reaction was when you saw Topaz. What were you thinking?

JK: Well, I was really disappointed that Topaz was as decrepit and as... it was just a whole bunch of, or just a row of buildings, tarpapered roofs, and just the wooden buildings, and they all looked like sheds to me, they didn't look like homes or anything. But where all these people were confined... now, Topaz being in the Delta desert, why, this is a place where it gets real cold in the winter, real hot in the summer, and when the wind blows, it blows sand and everything all through the houses, and it's, it's hardly a place where, in the one case where this, I forget his name, but he crossed over the fence, and evidently, he saw a seashell and he wanted to pick up that seashell, and he went and he got shot and he got killed. And I saw the picture of his funeral that they had for him at Topaz, but thereafter, why, I think the military took away all the, all the ammunition and guns away from the sentries there.

TI: How much contact did the people, the Japanese Americans in Salt Lake City, have with the people in Topaz?

JK: Very little.

TI: How aware do you think the Japanese Americans were in, in Salt Lake City? Did they know about Topaz?

JK: Oh, yeah, they all knew about it. As a matter of fact, there were two dentists from Fresno, a doctor Sam Namba and a Dr. George Tsuda, and they, they were just newly married, and they each had a child, and they came to Salt Lake looking for jobs. Well, I hired Sam Namba as my lab technician, and he did a lot of work for me in the lab. And we had not contracted, but then I'd talk to Dr. Hirota and Topaz where he needed dental services for the patients down there that had broken dentures or broken bridges or anything that was replaceable, that he would send them up to me and I would repair 'em. And I had Dr. Namba repair 'em in my office, and we'd send it back to him down in Topaz. And that's the only connection I had with him, except that he decided his wife and child were living up here on First Avenue with another family, and they were living there on sort of a... oh, I think they were paying a little rent at the same time she was helping with the household duties. And Dr. Hirota was the organizer of the health clinic down in Topaz. Well, I asked him, I says, "Why don't you apply for the army?' And so he applied to get into the army, but somehow he, his application was held up.

And so he called me one day and he says, what can you do about this holdup of his application for the army. And so I called this Dr. Robinson, who was the, he was the head of the dental, you might say, inductees into the, into the Army Dental Corps. Now, I had, I had met with a Dr. Fairbanks, a general, he was the head of the army dental program, the entire army program, and he, and this is in 1939. And he says, "All you young fellows had better apply for your commission, otherwise you might be drafted as buck privates in the army." And so I went up to Fort Douglas with three other fellows, and we all applied for a commission in the army, and I'm the only one that passed the physical. The other three fellows didn't pass the physical although they got called in and I was left out. And they changed my draft, my draft status from 1-A to, I think it was 4-C or something like that. But then at the same time, I would get a notice from the Department of the Army to pack up my bags and get, and wind up my business 'cause I would be called in.

TI: So Jun, let me summarize this a little bit, 'cause you've covered a lot, let me just summarize to make sure I'm following. So before the war in 1939, you volunteered, or you, to enter as a dentist, so you could be commissioned as an officer rather than be drafted as a private.

JK: Yeah, that's right.

TI: And you passed the physical, but then once the war started, your draft status changed from 1-A to 4-C, so that's where we are. Okay, and then -- you know, I think I know where the story's going, and if you don't mind, I'm going to come back to it later when we talk about when you actually did enter the military service. Instead, I want to go back to Mrs. Hirota and Dr. Hirota. I want to get clear why they were, they didn't live together, why Dr. Hirota was in Topaz.

JK: I don't think that Dr. Hirota wanted his wife to, to experience that life at Topaz, and he was in a position to set her up in a home someplace where the child wouldn't be exposed to all that that was in Topaz. Because he, and he tried to get out of Topaz, but it was about a year and a half that he was in Topaz, and at that time, I finally talked to this Dr. Robinson, and I asked him, "How come you're holding up the enlistment of Dr. Hirota?" And he says, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't want any Japs in my army." And I said, well, so I talked to Dr. Hirota, I called him, or I wrote to him, I think, and he wrote to the War Department. And the War Department wrote to Dr. Robinson and says, "Get him in the army right now." And so he and Dr. Takahashi, who was interned with him down at Topaz, they went, they got their commission as first lieutenants and went in the service. And Dr. Hirota came and picked up his wife and the daughter, and they went back east. I don't think that, I don't think that he ever went overseas, but he was stationed at Camp Shelby or one of the, the camps back east someplace before he was able to go back to San Francisco.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.