<Begin Segment 34>

TI: And how did it feel for you to be able to come back to Berkeley?

NH: Oh, I said, "Wow." [Laughs] Here I am, back in Berkeley again, and we're all together in this house. And everything from there on was pretty smooth sailing. I was getting ready to go to summer session at Cal, so I had made an application, I went up there the next day or two days later and got ready to go, getting ready to go, and I think I went to the first summer session. And by the time the second summer session came around, the army says, "Oh, it's your turn to go into the army," so I was drafted in late summer 1946.

TI: Now, how did you feel about this? Now, you had just gone --

NH: Said, "Holy mackerel, what's the matter. What's going on?"

TI: -- to Topaz, and then they put you in Santa Fe, and you just get out, and you come home, and then they draft you.

NH: Then they drafted me. And, "How come I have to go for the draft? The war's over. Well, the draft is the draft so you better go," so I went. I mean, what can you do? You either go to there or else go to jail. And by that time, my ACLU papers had gone to the attorney Wayne Collins, so that was being processed.

TI: And so at this point, were you sort of a man without a country?

NH: That's right. Actually, I was...

TI: Because you had officially renounced your citizenship.

NH: I had not gotten it back yet.

TI: And had not gotten it back yet. But yet, in the eyes of the U.S. military, you were a U.S. citizen because they were drafting you. Okay.

NH: They were drafting me. Well, they were drafting aliens anyhow. It was anybody over eighteen was registered. So I went into the army, yeah, and I went and had basic training at Camp Lee, Virginia. [Laughs] Why? I don't know why.

TI: I'm curious, in this time after Santa Fe and before you went into the military, did, did people ask you about where you were and did you share that you were at Santa Fe?

NH: No, I didn't care. Nobody asked me that.

TI: So no one asked.

NH: Really, I was at Cal for one summer session, and you're just another student, you know. But at that time, Cal's student population was very old. Freshmen were not eighteen years old. They were all the way from twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-five, even thirty year old freshmen, 'cause they were all GIs that had left the services, and there were a lot of them. And then it was after that that the age, well, after all the GIs had left, then the age dropped down so that the freshmen were eighteen years old. So I went into the army, served my time in Germany, and came back in spring of '48, I think it was.

TI: And when you were...

NH: Or maybe late '47.

TI: And when you were in Germany, what kind of duties did you have?

NH: Oh, just clerical duties.

TI: I'm curious, while you were in Europe or Germany, did you ever hear about what the 442nd had done when they were, during the war?

NH: No, uh-uh. No, I hadn't heard, I didn't even know about the 100th and the 442nd. There was so little publicity on that, that bunch. It was only afterwards, several years afterwards that they were, made, was really publicized.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.