Densho Digital Repository - Katsugo Miho Interview VI (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1022-6-13)

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WN: I'm wondering, why was it important for you folks to have a club?

KM: Because the members wanted a place to meet and get together with each other. We were... how shall I say it, very jealous of our contacts, of our eyes with our fellow veterans. We wanted to maintain that for some of us... for some of us, the basic activity that ever got involved with was the 442 activities. Of course, I got involved with all kinds of other activities but for the majority of the boys, the contact, lifetime contact activity was 442.

WN: So when did you start thinking beyond just meeting at the pool hall in downtown, even beyond that to include more people?

KM: Or when we decided to meet, he didn't know who I was, Club 100. It started off with a beer bust that we used to have at Sandy Beach, but that was a regular. And then we started to want a place where.. Sandy Beach was more beer drinking and carousing, singing, but the meeting was more formal. Because we started to get involved with, we started a softball league, softball activity. We had a 442 softball league, and then we had a basketball, very early we had basketball league. Subsequently, we had bowling. Bowling was, for a long time, a big club activity. Softball, bowling, those were the primary activities, I think. And in that respect, in the beginning, the 522 Battalion was a single club, single chapter, when Dan Kono and I were basically in charge. But we dominated all of the sports, the battalion. Basketball, we dominated, softball, we dominated, bowling, we dominated. So when I was gone to law school, during that period, I came back, three-and-a-half-years later I came back to find out that the infantry boys had successfully split the 522 Battalion to three different chapters. Instead of one 522 Battalion chapter, they split into A, B and C. The five chapters were, five batteries were divided into A, B and C, which, from the infantry point of view, equalized the competition. But it was that kind of, we had all of these activities now, as a club. And the picnics, all of those years, picnics, individual chapters. We had Christmas parties, individual chapters. So there were enough things going on with the club that many of the boys restricted their family activities to activities of the club.

MN: To put the club's activities in a context, I'm not familiar what it's like for Mainland veterans. But on the Mainland, do the veterans have clubs like this, like a Club 100 or...

KM: In Los Angeles. Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco, had a veterans group. But in Los Angeles, you had both 100th and 442. San Francisco it was basically Niseis, majority of them were 442. Seattle, I think, was the same thing. But when we started to have these reunions in Hawaii, a lot of these Mainland boys started to come. And we started out with Hawaii, and then three years later we talked about... the first two occasions, I think, it was in Hawaii. But then the Los Angeles group became better organized, and so we had reunions alternately, three years in Hawaii, three years in, later in Los Angeles. And did we go to Seattle? I forgot whether we went to Seattle. Basically it was between, alternating between L.A. and Hawaii. But they got organized because of these reunions, and so we kept very close touch with the Mainland boys.