Densho Digital Archive - Roy Murakami Interview (denshovh-mroy

<Begin Segment 41>

RP: I thought you'd be a judo instructor in the military.

RM: No, they don't, they won't take me. I applied for March Air Force base but they didn't need me.

RP: Was judo part of military training for, for...

RM: Some of it.

RP: For the Korean war, or...

RM: Yeah. Some of it. Air Force had it quite a bit I think. Navy had some.

RP: Not the army?

RM: Army didn't have it.

RP: That scrapbook that you donated to us had some stories about some, some gentleman I think in the Navy who was Bruno? I think his name was...

RM: Yeah, yeah. He's, he became head of San Jose, I think. Coach of San Jose. And then he went up to national president of Judokan.

RP: So did you get, eventually did you get involved as judo became an Olympic sport, were you involved at all in...

RM: No, only for working, building the mats or something like that.

RP: Uh-huh. You never refereed or anything like that?

RM: No. They didn't need me.

RP: But it is an Olympic, it's still an Olympic sport, isn't it?

RM: Yeah. It's goin' big. It's, I don't know. My personal opinion is that you will never learn to be, or know enough to become a judokan, a real true judokan. There's always something you gotta learn. And there's a lot of what you will say, tension in it sometimes. You know, there's political sometimes. I don't know if there's a lot of political stuff, but I guess there is, because we have the nationals, all the way up to nationals.

RP: Speaking of political stuff, did you have a reaction to 1988, the bill was passed to, to give every survivor of the camps, you know, an apology and a check for $20,000?

RM: Came too late. It came too late. All the work that somebody did, it came too late, to my opinion. It could have been given to more people that really needed it.