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MN: And then when you came back and continued your studies at law school, how was it for you?

KM: It was a little better for me because I was having problems with my eyes. When I left for law school in 1949, I had just gotten my pterygium eye operation at Tripler Army Hospital. And when I got to Washington, D.C., the VA had prescribed beta-ray treatments for me every other week. What they did was instead of operating on the pterygium, what they did was to burn the veins in the eye through a beta-ray treatment. But what happened was that when I would go Fridays for the treatment, I would be basically blind. I couldn't use my eyes for three or four days thereafter until the inflammation subsided. And so I was flunking out of school the first semester of law school. It got to a point that I had a call from the dean asking me to come in to see him. He said, "You're flunking out of school, what's going on?" I explained to him that my problem was with the treatment that I was receiving for my eyes. "Well," he said, "you've got to choose between school or treatment for your eyes." At that point I decided I'll take a chance and stop my treatment for my eyes. And fortunately it was the right decision because my pterysium didn't get any worse. So I was able to survive, but it was a struggle because my grade point average was so low at the end of the first semester that I was always fighting an uphill battle to stay in school the rest of the two years. But somehow, struggling, I got through.

MN: And then while you were at GW, what was, like, your specialized field that you sort of concentrated in?

KM: Well, I didn't, we had, at the point what I feared we were very lacking, and we didn't have enough counseling on, it was basically left up to you. And so trying to survive, I took the courses which I thought would be easiest for me to get out of law school, basically. There were no classes which were really hard courses to take. And so I avoided the hard courses.

MN: And you managed to graduate.

KM: That's right.

MN: So you were working to help support yourself, you had your studies. In terms of socializing, you had this group of vets.

KM: We had very much, what should I say, supporting each other. We were all struggling through law school, but we had, like I gave you the incident, one incident when we were talking stories, and I started to give the incident of France where we also almost wiped out the cannon company to find out John Ushijima, who was my roommate for a year and a half at that point, John turned to me and said, "Hey, Kats, I was there." Later on, as I said, Shadow was also there, and Najo was there, three of our more prominent future political leaders were up in the front. Conceivably, they could have been wiped out.

MN: You know, a lot is made about future political types getting together either during the war or after the war and talking about what's wrong with Hawaii and what they'd like to see changed in the future back then. When you look back at your law school days, and being with men like John Ushijima or Najo, Dan Inouye. Did you folks have conversations of that sort?

KM: No, I don't remember. I don't remember serious conversations like that. It was a matter of getting out of school, but I do recall, however, Alvin Shim, number one, he was very much involved. In fact, he continued his interest in labor. I think he concentrated on labor law, because of Dr. Harold Roberts's influence, who started the law division, labor division at the University of Hawaii back in 1948. And so I remember when Dan, Dan would, every once in a while become unavailable. And it coincided with Jack Burns's trip to Washington, D.C. So even back in 1950, Governor Burns, or Delegate Burns, would come to D.C. and Dan was always meeting with him. Of course, John and I, we felt kind of left out because we weren't invited to join. But Dan was involved in politics from that time. But we didn't discuss what our plans were, what our futures were or anything like that. I guess individually, we all had concerns, but it was not an open discussion matter among ourselves, or with others.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.