Densho Digital Archive - George Katagiri Interview (denshovh-kgeorge

<Begin Segment 7>

GK: But there's this whole other chapter that came along at that time. Like right after Pearl Harbor... well, yeah. Right after Pearl Harbor, there were a lot of young kids, Nisei kids, seventeen years old that had to register for the draft. And those that registered for the draft, if they were physically fit, they were classified as 1-A, and if their lottery number came up, they went into the army. They wouldn't let them into the navy or the marine corps or the air force. But a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, they got their notices saying, "You're no longer 1-A, you're 4-C," and this meant that they were "enemy aliens." 4-C is the classification for "enemy aliens." So here all these young kids that are regarded as "enemy aliens," they're the enemy, and they're wondering, "What's going on here? I'm the enemy. They won't let me serve in the armed forces." Okay. That's after Pearl Harbor, December, January, 1942. Then by the following fall, they're all in the internment camps. And in the early part of 1943, they get a notice saying, well, Uncle Sam would like you to volunteer for the U.S. Army, and we're going to change your designation from "enemy aliens" to 1-A again, and you can imagine how most of the young guys felt. "My gosh, they got our families in this dump with the barbed wires around us. They want us to volunteer." Well, it's a miracle, but thousands of them volunteered from the camps. And, but they had to find out, by that time, the authorities had decided, "There's really no point in holding all these people in the camps. We should let them go or push them out and let the young kids go to college and let the young men join the service and let the adults find jobs back east." But they decided, well, before we can let them go and do these things, we have to be assured of their loyalty. And so some bright lawyer in the government decided to come up with a questionnaire, the "loyalty questionnaire," and it contained forty-something questions, and two questions determined loyalty, question 27 and 28. Question 27 asked, "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces?" Well, my dad I'm sure said he doesn't care. He's fifty years old. If they want to have him in the armed services of the United States, they can have him. But it's yes or no. And then the question 28 was, "Are you willing to disavow any allegiance to the emperor?" And then my dad was saying, "My gosh, I can't be a citizen of the United States. If I disavow allegiance to the emperor, I'd have no country," and so it was a crazy questionnaire. The young Niseis were saying, "Are you willing to disavow allegiance to the emperor? I never had allegiance to the emperor." They said it's a trick question, you know. Don't answer it. And so there was this confusion over this dumb questionnaire that tried to determine loyalty. But those... so everyone answered it "yes-yes," or "no-no," or "yes-no," or "no-yes." And this is where the term the "no-no" comes. And so the young boys that respond "no-no," were called the "no-no boys" and they were the "disloyals." It didn't matter for what reason, you know. Some of the "no-nos" were disloyal because they wanted to go back to Japan, and others were disloyal, weren't disloyal. They said, "We will serve. You just let our families out of here, and we'll be glad to serve in the army. But so long as they're in this place, we're going to say no." And so there were different reasons for the "no-no boys." But anyhow, about ten percent of the people that were in the ten camps completed the questionnaire as "no-nos." So they decided to take everyone who wanted to go back to Japan or who disavowed, who, didn't want to serve in the army and put them in Tule Lake, and then ninety percent of them could remain in the camps that they were in.

So here I am in Tule Lake, and here all these people are coming that were "no-no" people. And in my mind, a lot of them were troublemakers, you know. They were physically trying to get everybody to sign it "no-no" to the point where they beat up people and called them names and things of this type. And I was only sixteen at the time, but I thought, gosh, I don't want to stay here. It's time for me to get out, and I was just a junior in high school. And at that time, I thought, well now, let's see, next year, I'm going to be a senior, then I'm going to a college. And if I try to enroll in a college with a high school diploma from Tri-State High School, no college is going to recognize it. It's not, wouldn't be an accredited high school. So I thought, well, I'm going to get out and go to a regular high school and get an accredited diploma and then enroll in college. That was a given. So that's when, in the fall of 1943, I, my mother sewed eighty dollars in my watch pocket, so I wouldn't lose it. I don't know where she got eighty dollars. But she got eighty dollars, put it in my watch pocket, sewed it up. And two of us, I can't even remember who I went with, another high school kid. But two of us got on a train someplace and sat there for three days and finally ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I got a job as a houseboy. I figured it's the cheapest way to get through high school would be to become a houseboy, get my room and board. And so I got this job with this family as a houseboy, and I enrolled at West High in Minneapolis. And the principal there said, looked at my transcripts and said, "You have to attend school for a full year." At first she said, "You have enough credits to graduate now. You don't have to go on and finish your senior year." And I just told her, "I just need a diploma to get into college." And she said, "Oh, you have enough credits in your transcripts. You don't need to go for another full year." And I says, "Well, that's where I stand." And so lo and behold, she went to the school board of Minneapolis Public Schools and pled my case, and they says, "Give him a diploma after one semester." So they made an exception, and I was able to graduate after one semester, and I took all these rinky dink courses of aeronautics and health and art, and I was able to graduate and eventually enroll at the University of Minnesota.

SG: When you were back at the camps, what did you miss about home?

GK: Well, I never thought about it. That was my home. That was my home. I didn't think of any other home or, I just knew we had no home to go back to, no business to go back to, and I just had to make the best of whatever situation we were in and no turning back. So I missed my friends, you know. We had a good drum and bugle corps, the Boy Scouts did, and they brought all their instruments to Minidoka. But there I was in Tule Lake, all by myself. I kind of missed that, mostly all my friends.

SG: Do you, was the relocation a complete surprise to Japanese Americans, or do you think there were people who were seeing something like that coming?

GK: I don't think anybody saw it coming, but we were in for a lot of surprises. For example, even before we went to the main camps, there were agencies and organizations who were encouraging Nisei students to relocate and enroll in eastern colleges. And these people found the colleges, they made the contacts, and they made the arrangements. So a lot of students got into this relocation program, hundreds of them. And historically, as I look back, it was a very successful program. And these Niseis who benefitted from that program, so many of them became so successful in their adult life that they're continuing the program today. Only the recipients are not Nikkei people, people of Japanese ancestry, they're students of Southeast Asians. And so this year, Portland was asked to administer the program, and they identified a number of Southeast Asians, and they're backing the program, the Niseis are.