<Begin Segment 19>

AC: What kinds of things do you really say? What kind of things do you tell people when you give talks about this?

JS: Well, I just, I will point out that our, what our boys did, but I'll not make a big issue like they were the only guys in the service. I don't approach it that way. I approach it and I, a lot of my talks have been before small groups. I don't go out looking for big groups to talk to, but I talk about military accomplishment in a kind of a total picture of what our people are and their problems and what they, what we hope to accomplish as a people, as citizens living in a community. And it, I've spoken from adult groups down to middle school groups, and I even, my daughter in, she was an assistant, she worked for the school in a small town called Dufur outside of the Dalles, and she had these kids taking on a study of the 442nd as a project. And it's a small high school. They play eight man football. But so when they scheduled me to come down and speak, well, it was a whole school affair, so I spoke to the whole student body. It was a grade school and high school together, I think, and then they went to their classes and I spoke to individual classes. So I took the whole half a day. And I've had excellent reactions from students. I've had tough reactions from Latino students, and I don't know whether this should be on, for anybody's information or not, but they've, a lot of people who are second language students, they'd, they don't seem to care. They couldn't care less about what's going on. They didn't try to learn anything from it. And the teachers have had to stop and remind those kids that, "We got a guest speaker here and you better listen to him." These kinds of things. The general student population, I've spoken to schools in Ontario and been well-received.

AC: What kinds of things do you, what kind of qualities do you say that you're trying to accomplish or you want to bring out in these talks? What kind of messages do you want these students to walk away from your talks with?

JS: Well, I think, this is kind of, this is kind of a gray area, because I'm not very pointed in my remarks, but I think, in the first place, we have enough of our people in the community that they, our kids and grandkids, they have a quite good... they have proved their qualities, that they're not second or third rate students, and they, maybe they, probably doesn't have to be reminded of why they're that way, about parental, their parental upbringing and their teachings to respect the law and to pay attention to, respect their teachers and all this. So some of these things in area schools around here, we don't have to mention. And we don't, I don't necessarily, like I said, I don't necessarily make up the big point of what the 442nd itself is, but I work it into the conversation, and it's kind of in your everyday living and your organizational work. You just kind of let the word go out from you, with your attitudes about what you think you can do in the community, and you just let it flow off and see what happens. And through the Japanese American Citizens League, in which I was active, very active postwar, and Inter-Mountain District Council, I've been recognized for my work, but it's, try to bring elements of the community together in their activities, in which we've been fairly, pretty successful in this area. I don't, I guess when you ask me that, sometimes I think, "Just what did I say to the public?"

But when I, then I go back and think about it, I rationalize this way. It seems like most of my life, one of my ambitions, kind of inner ambition, that I would be treated just as good as a white person. And this really has been kind of a pushing factor for me, for most of my life, 'cause I, like I said, I grew up in an all-white community from my childhood, and as I got into adulthood I could see the problems that we weren't accepted. And I'll just briefly review when I say we weren't accepted, until the '50s we were not accepted in any club, like Elks or the Masons or the Eagles, and maybe some others. Even, I was, I become a Legionnaire right after I came home from the service 'cause, I had my reasons for doing this. But there was a fun organization of the American Legion called the 40&8, which they tried to form here. And some of my friends, when they found out, I wouldn't, they wouldn't accept me in there. We just never had a 40&8 here, although some of the Legionnaires would've like it, to have a fun group along with the purpose of the American Legion. I joined the American Legion, and these are all the steps I took after I came out of service. During the war I'd heard about this, the Hood River Post of the American Legion had removed the names of Nisei on honor roll, and the national organization threatened to pull the franchise of the Hood River Post, which eventually happened. I didn't know what was going to happen, but I, while I was in Mississippi I was taking, reading the Pacific Citizen pretty regularly, so those stories came out. And things like that made me determined, I was gonna try to join the American Legion when I came home. 'Cause I, you can't, there's no use trying to fight from the outside if you can get in on the inside, so when I came home that's the first body I asked if I could join. And I, most of the Legion posts at that time were run by World War I veterans, so I was one of the early World War II veterans in our post, and I was welcomed into the post here. Wherever I had an opportunity to keep things like that from happening, it never happened again. The Hood River Post has entirely changed. In fact, the Hood River American Legion Club was run by a Nisei for many years. I don't know whether it is now or not. But it's your, American Legion Club is your fun part of your... guys gather. So I've been in that, and I've been to that club. I visited with a guy who ran it.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.