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TI: Okay, let's go to your military. So you're drafted into the military, and so where were you inducted, where did you go?

YM: I was inducted, I forgot this particular station that's up in Chicago, up along Lake Michigan there near Evanston, whatever the name of that places is, I forgot now. But we went there and I was inducted. And I noticed while there, there were a lot of German prisoners of war working in that camp. Then we were handed our uniforms and given our shots and so forth and put on the plane, train, to go down to Florida. Camp Blanding, Florida, which is near Jacksonville. We arrived there around January, and I didn't think Florida was a very cold place, but I discovered that northern Florida is very cold in the wintertime.

TI: And then this is where you did your basic training.

YM: Basic training, yes.

TI: And when you did basic training, was it with kind of the general population, kind of a mixed environment, or was it with Japanese?

YM: All Japanese.

TI: Okay, so it was a segregated training.

YM: Yeah, uh-huh.

TI: So tell me about that. What were some of your memories?

YM: Well, we lived in huts of, eight person to a hut. And right in the center of the hut was a coal burning stove to heat the hut. And our, the cadre, the trainers, were all Caucasian, of course. And we did our usual, you know, going on the firing range and taking long hikes and all that sort of stuff. Strenuous, strenuous training, yeah.

TI: Now, were you, did you tend to be a little bit older than the other, sort of, trainees, because you had just graduated from college? Or were they about the same age?

YM: I never noticed. I thought they were all about my age.

TI: How about where they were from? Do you recall some of the different places they were from?

YM: Well, some of them were from the San Francisco area. One of my very good friends that I was at the university, Washington University with, he was there with his cousin in the next battalion and I didn't even know that until many years after the war. We roomed together at Washington University and I didn't even know he was close by. There were lots of Japanese young kids.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.