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MN: And sometimes men have told us that when they came back, they also visited the families of men they had served with. How about in your situation?

KM: In my situation, the artillery boys, one of the first things after meeting with the family, reunion with the family, the boys were always trying to locate each other. Because we scattered, although we had no idea where so-and-so was living. But a lot of time was spent hunting down who was where and the telephone numbers to get in touch with. In my case, it also involved finding out when the university was, second semester was opening up. I had come back January 14th, January 13th or 14th '45 or '46. And the second semester started three days after my return, and I registered to go to school, come back to University of Hawaii three days after discharge. Don't ask me about my first year in college because to this day, it's a vague memory of what happened during the first semester, especially the first semester after I returned. But as veterans, as soon as we got settled, somehow we agreed to meet downtown, we're down in the old Mitsukoshi Building, right on Bethel and King. At that time it was the Mitsukoshi Building. It was the first building in Hawaii that had an escalator, the Mitsukoshi building. And right alongside, on the mauka side of the Mitsukoshi Building was a cafe called Owl Cafe. And in the back of the Owl Cafe had three billiard tables. And so somehow, especially our artillery group, we said let's meet every day. For a while we would meet at the Owl Cafe around lunchtime and just spend our time playing billiards, and just talking stories, finding out what each other was doing, where we were located. But even after I enrolled in school, three days after I got discharged, I know that I would spend almost every day at Owl Cafe with the rest of the boys. It got to a point that almost every weekend, every Saturday, we would have a barbeque and beer drinking at Sandy Beach where the park is now located. It was a very nice area for barbequing and picnicking. And so for a good, I don't know, probably a good year, every Saturday, every weekend we used to have a get-together at Sandy Beach.

WN: How many in the group?

KM: Oh, we would be, my recollection is that probably at that point it was twenty-five to thirty or more.

WN: Were these boys, did you know any of them before the war?

KM: No, no, these were all my battery, boys that I got to know after joining up with the 442. These were all our battery boys. And so pretty soon, I think 1945, pretty soon the battalion group wanted to get together. Like the infantry boys, different companies, and at that time, the infantry companies were much larger than us. And so the 442 boys as a group, various groups, started to meet each other at various places. In the beginning, most of the boys used to meet at Nuuanu YMCA. Not the now Nuuanu YMCA, but it was located where the highway, the vineyard highway is now. But we used to meet at the, most of the group used to meet at the Nuuanu YMCA. And the group's meeting started to evolve in different company boys meeting with their own company boys, like the artillery boys would meet with just artillery boys, 2nd Battalion now. You got to remember, at that point, when we came back, the 100th Infantry was already a club. They had formed a club where they started to save money from Wisconsin. They had formally allocated that club was to form and then they were assessed so much a month, which was put into the kitty. And before our, the 442 returned, the Emergency Service Committee, which was in charge of community relations between the AJAs and the community. You must remember that veterans of the 100th Infantry started to come back after the hospitalization, those who had so-called million dollar wounds, back from 1943, Battle of Cassino, all these people got wounded and injured, spent maybe six months, maybe one year. But they had already come back to Hawaii way ahead of us, even before the end of the war. And so I don't know when it was, but they didn't properly custodian which was a federal organization that managed all of the confiscated property of Japanese citizens like the Iida Shoten. Iida Shoten owner's grandpa, the property of the wholly-owned Japanese national was confiscated by the Alien Property Custodian. And all of the Japanese schools in Honolulu and throughout the islands were all confiscated. Years later we have all these court cases to return the properties and that, but at that time, the Nuuanu Japanese school, which was located up in Nuuanu and I think it was either Judge Street or right there in your place, across the street from the gas station, had been confiscated by the Alien Property Custodian. And the powers that be thought that we got to take care of our veteran boys, AJA veteran boys, because those were the only group coming back as such. And so the Nuuanu Japanese language school was giving free and clear, lock step and barrel to the Club 100, which was already organized and being. And so this valuable piece of property was turned over to Club 100. And so when we started to meet, in the beginning we were meeting in the YMCA and other places. The 100th heard about our difficulties and so they said, "Hey, come on over to our place, we have some meeting rooms and you can utilize the place for meetings."

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.