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SG: When you found out that you had to leave Hawaii when you were young, what were the feelings or thoughts going through your mind?

AU: Well, I hated, you know, I didn't want to leave my friends, and I didn't want to leave school. But then, when you're that young, when you get into a new place, and then eventually, you make new friends again. But I, after I went back, you know, after I graduated from college and I had been working with the, I got a job at the, for the U.S. military for the, at that time, it was the civil censorship detachment, and it was right after the war that they had, when the occupation forces were there that the United States government used to censor all their, the Japanese mail and the telegrams and everything, and so I worked for them. We had to translate letters and telegrams. I was mostly translating telegrams, again mostly looking for if there's Communist involvement in all that, and then you look for those things. And that's where all the, a lot of us Niseis were working, the Kibeis, you know, and all that were working. And one good deal was because it was after the war, and food was very scarce then in Japan. Everybody was rationing. And because we were Niseis, because we were U.S. citizens, they handled us differently. But they couldn't tell us not as civilians, as civil service because we were not hired as civil service. But because we were Americans or they called us foreign nationals because there were people from Canada, Canadians and elsewhere that's from Brazil and all that, but we were all considered foreign nationals. So we were on a different pay scale which was much higher than the Japanese nationals. And then we got quarters to live, and they took a hotel, and they, you know. If you wanted to, you could stay in the hotel. Then of course, they had the dining facilities. Well, I was living with my folks, so I could commute from home. And then I had a girlfriend that also, she was from San Jose, and she was married to a Japanese fellow and their family, so she was commuting from home too. But we would go to the dining room. We would go for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So at breakfast, what she and I would do is we would order hard boiled eggs because then we could take it home, see, to our families, and so we would order seconds of the hard boiled eggs. We would just wrap it up and take it with us. And of course, the other things like the fruits and stuff that we could, you know, we used to eat it there. But then in the evening like they would have all these cakes and stuff for dessert, and then we would order all this extras, and we, and when we visit Japan now, when I ask Jill to call and talk to her, we laugh about it. Remember how we used to take these things home because we knew that it was so hard to get these things at that time in Japan, so it was real nice.

SG: Everybody thought these Japanese girls eat, how can they eat so much?

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.