<Begin Segment 21>

AC: I want to get back to something you mentioned before. You talked a little bit about your experiences after the war and the prejudices going on there. What was it like in the South, in Mississippi during the war, during this time of segregation, and yet you were neither black nor white?

JS: Okay. Well, I think that for the mainlanders, it wasn't the shock that it was for the boys from Hawaii. 'Cause of course, even the mainlanders, we had grown up with this kind of problems in our lives. I can remember when Mrs. Endo's brother, his name was Taro Nakamura, and when we were growing up we were close friends, our families were close. But Taro, he used to take us kids to movies sometimes, in Portland, and it seemed like one time we went upstairs, maybe more than once. And the only reason you went upstairs, most of the time, in movies in those days, because you were among the second-class citizens, Indians and blacks and Orientals. They didn't want you sitting on the first floor if they could help it, I guess. But we, the other part was that we had, we were not strangers to this. Even though we had not been in the South, we were not strangers to this because we, it was part of our history. And if you were in Hawaii, might be part of your history there too, but Hawaii was a different situation in those days. You weren't a state yet. What do you call it, a protectorate, or territory?

AC: Territory.

JS: You're kind of, a lot of things applied different there. And of course, I reached off and I think, "Well Jesus Christ, those guys in Hawaii, those commanders, they, the Defense Department in Washington or the President held up the message and wouldn't let 'em know that, so they could get their ships out of Pearl Harbor." We, our own government set the trap there so they'd have an excuse so they, they could start the war instead of being blamed for your part in Europe, they got, they could... well, anyway, these kind of situations that, as we look back on them, you kind of rationalize, well, this is why you felt this way and I felt another way. But we were the real victims, here on the mainland, because we're only a small part of the population and our leadership was in their, most of the leadership of our JACL chapters were in their early twenties. Well, in those days we didn't have enough brains to be able to figure anything out, 'cause we weren't exposed to the political system enough because our folks weren't in it. So it wasn't a thing to talk about at home. You never heard anything about how you were supposed to do things or what, how you could do things. So we just, we had to go along with the tide, and we got pushed into, some of the Kibei really got ticked off at the JACL's leadership. Well, the JACL leadership was caught in a terrible bind. When DeWitt and, he convinced members of, the leaders in government that this is the way it is, by gosh, and "we don't want the Japs overtaking," and they were being put, like General DeWitt, and the pressure was coming on from California political leaders, from the growers in California, people, vegetable, fruit, produce business who could see the Japanese taking over the prime land. Well, the Japanese developed these lands, the delta lands in Sacramento Valley or down there in L.A. or anyplace. Why, the airports came in last, you know. Even right here in Ontario, the airport was developed last; all the farms were around it already. And the Japanese want the good land. They don't want to be, they want to be close to town where they don't have to go so far to haul their produce, and they want a nice piece of land, land that they could develop and make it into good land. So we're being blamed for the progress made and then punished for it, in the way of everybody's gonna get off the Coast. They, according to FBI, why, they haven't proved any, haven't had a case against anybody. The ones that they knew were possibilities were, they rounded up all the Issei leaders, took them off first, and then other, especially those who were along the Coast there, had fishing boats and everything. I'm in the middle of that, and I can't figure out where to finish off.

AC: Well, I guess getting back to, so you said that the people from Hawaii, the boys from Hawaii reacted differently from the Japanese on the mainland. Can you describe how, what the differences might've been in the reaction?

JS: Well, you'd never, a thing like what happened in the South had never happened to people from Hawaii. So as, when they, just like what toilets do we use or what drinking fountains do we use, or... well, it's, when you're on the bottom end of a racial thing, and it's a tough, that's one situation. But if you're on the top end, like in Hawaii most were minorities from the Pacific Island groups, or Asian, but the only thing the Asian groups had was a dislike for the Big Five, because they could, they couldn't advance in their jobs. So just on a, for the everyday life of people, why, the way you beat that up, if you'll only get so far in life anyway, you're gonna gang up, protect your positions. Well, there were places in California that did the same thing, but that's the only part in the United States where this gang situation existed, is in California. We, when people came to, came out of camps, well, like in Caldwell, Idaho, down the road here, people came out of, there was a camp there. Well, the only people that had a reputation that I know was, they called 'em Sacto, Sacramento guys that, what do you call those guys that had long haircuts and fancy clothes and everything? They called 'em yogores. [Laughs] But anyway, those guys come in camps and they wanted to take over, just like any, like gang types. So up here in the Northwest, we're not used to that, so we became the victims of our own people sometimes too, that way. But I think the people in the Northwest kind of kept this, the only place that we didn't have any control was over there in Tule Lake. In Tule Lake they eventually rounded up all the anti's, but the people in the Northwest are a different breed of cats than a lot of those in California.

AC: How did you feel when you, when you were down there? You grew up in the Pacific Northwest, you had your own experience and all of a sudden now you're in Mississippi. Was it treated the same, was it different for you?

JS: At the time of the war?

AC: Yeah.

JS: Well, I wasn't here. I was in service all the time, so the people that, what happened here was all I, was what I heard from my, members of my family. And I remember when I came home from furlough one time my dad says, "Don't forget that you're, we're no different than the people who are evacuees, and if our people here can help those people in camp, got to do it." So my dad had a good reputation here too, so he helped quite a few families, and especially he was able to help Endos, 'cause they were old family friends. And so Mrs. Endo's brother worked for us until, I think we wore him out and he decided to go back to Japan. It must be an easier way of life. Well, he earned, got his social security status by that, up in the '50s, and he was fifty-something years old and had high blood pressure, and he had a daughter in Japan. I think that's how it was. And he, Taro, I think he lost his wife in a, like a lightning shock or something. Anyway, so he went back there, and he had, he was well off enough that he, he's kind of an important figure in his community there. When my wife and I went to Japan, he got us located around with my dad's side and my mother's side.

So I, as a soldier, didn't feel like I, people were sometimes indifferent to me, but nobody was ever, that I recall, outright bad to me. But the blacks, I felt for. I can remember getting ready to go back to post one Sunday evening and -- it was Saturday night or, might've been Saturday night -- and there was, Camp Shelby was a big post with lots, a lot of soldiers coming to town on weekends and evenings. And the blacks couldn't, the blacks had no privileges. So one evening I came in, I came back to catch a bus to the post, and here's all these blacks sitting around in the station there, and what happened, they took all the whites first and the blacks had to wait 'til they had room. If they didn't have room on that bus they just waited for the next bus. And this was, this is the way it was. And if you, and this was, during the war you had, everything was the old-fashioned way, and blacks, they were discriminated against pretty badly. A lot of blacks must've had the attitude, "Well, what are we fightin' for?" And the other aspect of it, "Well, when we get back we're gonna demand our rights as full-fledged citizens, because we've fought just like any other citizens," those in service. One of my friends here, well, one of my friends in regimental headquarters, he's not a medic, but he was a soldier -- he is originally a Seattle fellow -- he was in regimental headquarters and he wanted to get married, he was going to get married. So he married a girl right here from Nyssa, Oregon. Her brother was in OSS, I think, which is the CIA now, and working in Washington at that time. He came down by bus, and at some point in Mississippi on the way down to Camp Shelby there was a, they saw a black guy laying in the road, probably hit. He was dead, I guess. Bus driver never even slowed down, just drove around him and just kept on going. So that's the way it was. Mississippi is a pretty bad state when you drive through it now. It looks pretty bad. But when my son got married -- when did he get married, in the '70s? -- he married a white girl from Mississippi, and they were going to William Carey College. This is before my son went... that's another story, how he ended up Williams College, William Carey in the first place, but that's in Hattiesburg, which is Southern Mississippi State now. But one of their fellow students was a black fellow, and he couldn't come to my son's wedding 'cause his wife's, his wife's grandmother would never allow it to happen. She would never come to a wedding if he came.

AC: So you were able to get on the bus with the whites, the Caucasians?

JS: Yeah, oh yeah. In fact, one time one of the guys, I forget whether he was a mainlander, a Seattle guy, one of the Niseiguys and I, we were, we'd been down to New Orleans, I guess, on a weekend. We were coming back and, I don't know how, this Caucasian girl got sitting with us. She was going up to Indiana somewhere, and so we were sitting together and having a nice visit. Well, the three of us sitting together, there's only two seats, so we sat in the back, and I think we got dirty looks from that bus driver all the way up 'til we got off at Hattiesburg, because, well, we weren't supposed to be sitting there. That's the black section in the back. So it was only, if you sit back there, why, if you're in the black section, depending on, if you run out of room, the black guys got to get off. So these things, these things were just an accepted part of life in the South, and you, it never happened in Hawaii. I don't think it did. Wasn't supposed to happen, Hawaii was... but, except in the services, now, the blacks could only, they could go in any branch of service, I think, but menial labor jobs. So you can see how much it's changed. Everything has changed. But it, we, we are now the smallest minority group in this nation. I mean, if you take a bunch, all the Asians, mix 'em up together, you got a lot of people, but one of the problems now, as I see it, is we're all, we're Pacific Americans or, we got so many groups. And everybody isn't the same. You got a lot of Pacific Americans that you wouldn't care to be around too much. Well, I mean, that's just... isn't that right? I know you can't answer, but that's the way it is. And so when we, when they take all the Pacific Americans now and place 'em in one category, you're not doing our people a service at all, because we, they're having so many problems with different groups that their standard, what they consider their worth in life is, it's so much different than ours. So we have to, this is a thing that people like myself, who have worked in the community, try to bring us up to a level, now we have to accommodate a different of group of people, help them and hope that they would hold up their end and conform to the laws without making the big, such a big thing about the right of free speech. This is the trouble with our communities today, so I've, I'm hoping that our young people will continue to take part in our civic activities and our social activities of the community as part of a total group instead, rather than just isolate themselves.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.