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AC: What made you decide to choose the military versus the CCC?

JS: I'm sorry?

AC: What made you decide to choose the military instead of joining the Conservation Corps?

JS: I don't think they'd have taken me. And I'm not sure of this, but I don't know. The Conservation Corps was, there wasn't really a future in it, except it gave you a chance, well, first, it gave you a chance to get away from home and earn something so you wouldn't be a load on your family, or maybe you even, I don't know what they got, thirty dollars a month or something like that, but it was, a few dollars meant a lot in people's lives in those days. And if you're young and you're looking for something to do, they would get to go to town on Saturday nights and things like that, with a little, they have a little spending money. And it was mostly outdoor work, so it was a healthy way. And a lot of them were sent a long ways from home. They'd never been away from home. Most young people in those days hadn't been very far away from home. That's the way life was. So I had no interest. Well, in fact, this is an area where people like myself were trying to get somewheres, wanted to be something or get somewheres in American society but didn't know how to get there because our folks were restricted in their activities and because they couldn't even apply for citizenship. Why, naturally they were tied together, so Japanese were always looking for their own people. And so our home life was, we spoke Japanese at home; soon as we got out of the house, why, we're speaking English. And I, my brothers and I, fortunately we had neighbor girls who taught us how to speak English at an early age, so we were confident when we started school. Even in those days, why, even a lot of Caucasian people, depending on where their folks came from, couldn't speak English when they started school. Like we had a friend from down in Salem, he was a Caucasian, came over here and he was in the produce business, but his folks were German, lived in the Ukraine, I think, and he was, when he started first grade he couldn't speak English. So there are all kinds of things like that, that we were brought together through school systems, all groups, and we didn't have to worry about what was gonna be our language. I mean, I knew we were gonna, everyone's gonna speak English. If you want to learn French or Japanese or Spanish or anything else like that, that's another class, but English was our language. And of course, that's why a lot of us feel like that's the way it should be today.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.