<Begin Segment 2>

AD: What did you think about, during your time of service, relative to your sacrifice for the country?

GM: What did I think of what?

AD: How did you think of yourselves relative to the country that you were serving?

GM: Well, you know when you're young, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, they're very adventuresome in a way. You like to be in a particular crowd, and being in the service was a part of it. Being patriotic or something, that comes naturally. Being loyal to your country, you weren't born with it in the sense that when we went to school, we saluted the flag every morning, we'd pledge allegiance to our country, we thought of ourselves as true Americans, and when the time came for you to fight for your country, it's no problem there. I don't think there's a problem today with young people going into the army, but there are so many things today that you can do other than going in the army, or in the service, that they have to make a choice. In those days, I don't think there was a choice for young people. You either got accepted to go in, or didn't go. I think... times are different. It's hard to explain that, but you've got to remember, there's... from the very time you go to school in the first grade, you start saluting the flag and pledge allegiance to the flag, and told you're Americans, and you believe in America. It's no problem to go in the army. It's kind of a hard problem to tell somebody today why he should go in, but at that time, I think all young guys all wanted to go in.

JS: Being that the country was, your country was at war, too, and it was your country that you were defending or taking part in. So it was just natural that that's the way we were brought up, and that's the way we felt. It was not a matter that we were, our parents were from Japan or whatever, it was, we were brought up in the American way of life, and that's how we all felt.

GM: You also have to remember that unlike most young Americans, we had something taken away from us. We had our house, our business, we had our friends, everything was taken away from us. Our money, we had nothing. And we had to fight to get it back more or less. And we understood the problem a lot better than a lot of young Americans, but that didn't deter us for some reason or other. But it did make some people mad who lost more than they can stand. There's a lot of people that lost thousands and thousands of dollars of business.

JS: Lost their businesses and livelihood.

GM: Yeah, we lost our car, all of us lost our cars, our homes and friends. Well, main thing, we lost our freedom. And you don't understand freedom until you lose it. It's very, very big. It's hard to explain what freedom is 'til you lose it.

AD: Why did you serve for a country that had taken your freedoms from you?

GM: Why did I say that they took our freedom from us?

AD: No, why did you serve for a country that had taken your...

GM: Because it's my country. Where else could I go? Did you belong to do Japan? No. Which country do you belong to? You're only Japanese in blood. You're American by any other way. It's taken for granted today, but until you get this taken away from you -- and I don't mean put in jail because you committed a crime or something, you lose your freedom -- but you haven't lost your true freedom. You can go to court and everything else. We couldn't go to court, we didn't get any trial, we're picked up, thrown into, behind barbed wire fences, we had guns pointing at us. If you tried to leave the area, you'd get shot at, you'd get killed. But the main thing is this: born as an American, you had that freedom, and it was taken away from you. And how'd you explain freedom? You can't explain it until you get it taken away from you.

AD: I think that's real important, that we do take it for granted.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.