Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Clyde Tichenor Interview
Narrator: Clyde Tichenor
Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier
Location: Independence, California
Date: March 23, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-tclyde_2-01-0007

<Begin Segment 7>

KL: When you first arrived at Manzanar, what did you think of the camp? Do you remember your reaction?

CT: Well, we definitely thought it was an enclosure, a camp, and it was very obvious it was an entity. But we were accepted with open arms involved in the judo stuff. All Japanese weren't in judo. As a matter of fact, it was a fallacy in the American way of thinking, government and the military, that all the Japanese soldiers know judo. Because when I was overseas, I met a number of Japanese soldiers because I was in the hospital corps on Guam, and when they were injured, some of them would end up in the hospital. Then again, there were other things when we were building the hospital there, they had a work detail that included some of the Japanese prisoners, and I would talk to them, some of them would speak English, I spoke a little bit of Japanese, and I would talk to them, and very few of them took judo, where practically none of them, I knew more about it than almost all of them. There might be one or two in the group that had some kind of rank. And so it was a great fallacy that the Japanese soldier was an expert in martial arts, because it just wasn't so.

KL: But there was a big fear or concern about that in the United States.

CT: There was a big concern about it, but it was all mistaken ideas soldiers I talked to, and there were quite a few of them on Guam there, they were very impressed with the fact that I had a brown belt in judo at that time. Because that was more than most of them had, and it was more than most of them had, and it was the same judo association, the Kodo Kan Association, which Dr. Jigoro Kano headed up. He was an educator and doctor in education, and he became the tenth degree black belt, which is the highest anybody was at that time in judo. He was by far the world expert at judo.

KL: And how did people think about him in the judo community?

CT: Well, he was royalty. [Laughs] And I never got to meet him personally or anything. Because you have something that's significant like judo in your life, your life is much bigger than that, and you can't spend all your time just with that one thing, at least very few people do.

KL: We talked this a little bit last night, but in some of the newspapers, there were charges that at this tournament at Manzanar, people had bowed to a Japanese baron.

CT: We might have bowed to a picture of, photo of Kano, Dr. Kano, who was the father of judo, but it had nothing to do with a religious theme or anything like that. And the reason they bowed at judo was because it took the place of shaking hands. It was just simply a salutation, a greeting, of, "I respect you," and vice versa, and that's all there was to it. So it didn't have the significance of anything religious or anything that the Americans attached to it.

KL: The word "baron" was not something I had heard a lot about. Does that mean anything to you, if they would accuse people of bowing to a baron during the war?

CT: No. As a matter of fact, that's a misnomer. Nobody in judo or even in Japanese kingship, kingdom, they didn't have barons to my knowledge. They would have some other name for some other rank, and I have no reason to have learned those names, so I don't know.

KL: Was there a picture of Kano in most judo dojos?

CT: Well, no, because very few judo dojos were orthodox. They were usually places where you could get gym mats to put on the floor, and so you could practice judo there. And by the way, the mats were all we needed to practice judo. And the practice of judo made it so that you developed a technique of falling that was instinctive after that. If you did judo for six months, you became instinctively able to fall. And I have been fortunate all my life since then, whenever I fall, all I do is maybe get a little bruise or something, on some part that hit. But you have a tendency so that you fall with everything at once, and because of that, you don't concentrate all your fall on an elbow or an arm out here trying to stop you from falling. To the contrary, you don't worry about stopping, you just simply worrying about how you're going to arrange to hit the ground.

KL: What do you remember about the facilities at Manzanar? You mentioned needing mats.

CT: I remember the building had open sides all around, and as a matter of fact, in the diagram here in Manzanar, there's a little diagram of all the huts and everything, there is one in the middle outside, and I'm sure that was the building that we did judo in. And we found up in, when we drove here and we found the area marked off, and I even found my picture there, which was a big surprise to me.

KL: Yeah, the picture was taken at that exhibition, right?

CT: Yeah.

KL: You told me a name for the Manzanar dojo yesterday. Was it Shindo Kan?

CT: Shindo Kan. They called it that themselves, and they used the symbols for it. And it was a joke because the building was so rickety, it quaked and shaked, and the shindo means "shaking and quaking." So they called it the "school of shaking and quaking," what Shindo Kan meant. And it was a tongue-in-cheek joke among judo people here, about their dojo. So that's where the name came from.

KL: Was the exhibition several days?

CT: Exhibition? It was a contest. It wasn't an exhibition. And the people who watched it were just the people who lived here, plus what Caucasians were with us, and most of them were people who were practicing judo, or they didn't bother coming.

KL: How big was the crowd?

CT: Well, there were, I would say, probably twenty to fifty people milling around outside in the open. So it depends on what was going on inside. If we were just warming up and practicing or things like that, there wasn't much attention to it. And, of course, they all knew that we were visiting as a Caucasian group, and this was kind of interesting to them, I'm sure, and they wanted to take a look at us to see if we looked like normal Caucasians, I guess. So everything was very normal.

KL: Did people ask you what was happening in Los Angeles?

CT: No.

KL: When you had conversations with people, were they all about judo, or what did you talk about?

CT: Yeah, the people we talked to that were Japanese, Nisei here, we would be talking about judo. You have to remember, I was only one person out of the group, and I don't know what all the rest of them did or didn't do, because I wasn't always right with them in a group. We were closely so, but not that close.

KL: So there were a few people milling around while you were warming up, but then for the competition, were there more people who would come?

CT: Yeah, more people would come and watch the competition, yes, of course. You always have to warm up with judo, practice falling and stuff like that to get yourself in condition to be able to do it, to take the falls. And unlike most fighting techniques, judo is a technique of body throws, and so people are, it looks very violent because people are literally up in the air because of a fall, and it looks terrible, ways and everything. But because they know how to fall, and they're also, the person that's throwing them knows how to fall so they don't hurt 'em, so that their falling will be effective and nobody is hurt. I taught martial arts in the service part of the time for several months. When they discovered I knew it as well as I knew it, I taught in the service. And the biggest thing I taught was, the first thing I did was I taught 'em how to fall. Because if I teach you how to fall, you could practice these tricks on grass or sand or all kinds of places. But if you don't know how to fall you can't really practice them fully, like fully like you should. So the classes I had, I taught first how to fall and then I would show the various, some of the various body throws in judo. And they all liked the class, and the feedback I got was they liked it because I didn't look like I could do that. And they figured, "If he could do it, we could do it." I wasn't a real big athletic type, and yet I was, to them I was like a black belt, which I wasn't at that time, I was a brown belt, but to them I was the local expert. And the staff where I taught the military staff, they wanted to keep me in teaching, but I was on an overseas draft, and that comes from the Bureau of the Navy, and locally they can't touch the people in a draft, they all go together, so they couldn't keep me. But they wanted me to stay teaching.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.