<Begin Segment 22>

RP: Since we don't have very much time left, I'd like to kind of focus on your life after leaving Topaz. Can you give us an idea of when you roughly left the camp? Was it late, 1945?

KO: I think it was August or September, something like that. Well, maybe it was earlier than that, maybe around July. But anyway, it was about the latter half of the, beginning of the latter half of the year, '45. We wound up in San Francisco for about a month. Which was, being a small town kid, I didn't particularly like San Francisco. But then at that time, there wasn't much of anything. We, my father and I, we stopped over there by Hunter's Point area, they had a bunch of leftover barracks and apartments from the shipyard days. And my father found a place in Menlo Park again and we moved down there. And like I said, he nearly brained me for wanting to go to work instead of going to school. Threatened me with disbarment or whatever you want to call it. [Laughs] So I wound up going to school. Fortunately, at that time, school wasn't much more than the cost of transportation.

RP: And you went to Stanford?

KO: Huh?

RP: You went Stanford?

KO: Toward the end, yeah. In the upper division type. I managed to luck out and get into, get accepted for Stanford. It was sort of interesting 'cause in my case, a guy, kid, a guy I went to school with in the same sort of area, he had better grades than I did, but he got passed over the first time, to get admitted to Stanford. Reason for that was he had a couple of bad grades during the earlier part, during the earlier part of his schooling, and I had neutral grades for that part. So I wound up getting, on paper, looking better.

RP: You were, during the time you were in camp, you were draft age even before you went to camp. You never had a military experience, did you?

KO: No, not directly. Indirectly, yeah, like as I mentioned before, I think if they gave me credit for the time I spent twiddling my toes and twiddling my thumbs in Fort Douglas, Salt Lake City, I could have qualified for the minimal GI Bill. But all it was was the preinduction type stuff. So we spent several days apiece, often enough, and I think at one period I did spend a whole, most of a whole week. And got to the point where they were running us through the preinduction type, or whatever it is they call the movies and stuff they put everybody through. And we had to just sit around and wait for some orders and stuff, and finally they sent us home to wait for orders, and orders never came. Each time, for me, it was each time the same way. They sent us home and wait for orders, and the orders never came.

RP: So you never were officially classified --

KO: We were never officially inducted. We went through a lot of the preliminaries, but never were officially inducted.

RP: This was, you would leave Topaz and go to Fort Douglas.

KO: Yeah. Couple of my people in my groups, different groups got called up pretty, almost immediately. But most of us wound up twiddling our thumbs for most of the time. In my case, I twiddled my thumbs between call-ups.

RP: But how many times were you called up?

KO: Three? About three times, I think. Three, four... at most three, twice for sure. But I think it was three. And the last one was during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe, the army panicked, they were calling everybody up to come in for induction, for induction stuff. By that time... by the time that we got in and went through the mill, the whole affair was winding down, so they sent us home again. But I remember that time they, about the second week of the Battle of the Bulge period, it was pretty obvious the army was really panicked. Because some of the people that had been inducted earlier, the month before or something, we had heard from, their families heard from, they were in Europe. They hadn't even gotten through basic training, they were in Europe. So that's the whole story of the whole period, that time. Lot of people got sent to Europe before they're through, got through basic training. It wasn't just us, it was everybody else, too. The army had just plain panicked, apparently.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.