<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Now after being back at Portland for a while, then you decided to join the army. And your service was primarily in Japan, that's where you were stationed. So I wanted to ask you about returning to Japan, because as a boy around nine or ten you were in Japan for a summer, and now you returned later. How had Japan changed?

YK: Well, from a kid's standpoint, I wasn't too much aware of anything back in '38. And when I went this time, it was pretty devastated. And so... I got first sent to Sasebo, Japan, and we were there, and somebody got a communicable disease, and so we were locked up for two months. Because I think the quarantine was on for two or three weeks, and when that was over, some else happened, and we'd be quarantined again. And so I had quarantine for a good two months, I remember. We didn't go anywhere, just stay in the building and go out, exercise, back into the building, that's about it. So all we can do is see things out the window, and there wasn't much to see. The only thing we could see from our barracks was the fact that Sasebo was where they put all the ships back, the Japanese army and navy, and they were dismantling them. And we could see one by one how they disappeared. But none of 'em were large, they were all... I think the largest thing was a destroyer. A lot of fishing boat sized ships. They were dismantling pretty fast.

TI: And what were they, why were they dismantling them? For the metal?

YK: Scrap.

TI: Scrap metal.

YK: Well, plus the fact that it was an enemy, it was a navy ship, so they didn't want the enemy ships around. They just destroyed 'em.

TI: So I'm wondering, after the quarantine, were you ever able to use your Japanese language skills in the army?

YK: Uh-huh.

TI: So describe that. What kind of work did you do?

YK: Let's see, when we first got out, I mean, when they first got us out of quarantine, they put me in... what was that? Oh, training aides. I can't remember, I think part of the headquarters group. But they gave me, I was only, I think I was only a corporal, but they gave me this building in charge of making training aides, and they would make replica guns and things like that out of wood to show how different parts worked and things like that. I was in charge of that.

TI: And would your workers be Japanese?

YK: All Japanese. But seemed to me there were about twenty or two dozen, and they were all craftsmen of some sort, because they were pretty good. They would see a manual of a gun, unexploded, exploded view of the gun itself, the bolt action and everything, and they would make a replica.

TI: They could figure it out?

YK: Yeah, pretty good. It's all made out of wood.

TI: Some of the Japanese literature, they talk about that sometimes, the Japanese felt that the Nisei soldiers were sometimes harsh with Japanese workers. Did you ever see that in terms of sometimes the Niseis... and part of what they would say is sometimes they thought the Nisei soldiers felt they needed to do this to show the other whites that they weren't Japanese, they were really more American. Was that kind of something that you saw when you were in Japan?

YK: No. Of course, when I was with the headquarters group, I was with a bunch of Hawaiians. They were a mixed group of Japanese, Korean, Hawaiian, Filipino. They were a pretty homogenous group. And as far as discrimination, we didn't have anything like that. And I was in charge of these Japanese people, but they were doing something I couldn't do anyhow, so I had respect for that and we got along pretty good. We didn't have any discrimination of that sort.

TI: But maybe do you think it may have happened in other places?

YK: Yeah, probably. You mean the Nisei?

TI: The Nisei, yeah, maybe not treating Japanese workers that well?

YK: Yeah, it's possible. But like us, we didn't have very many, and basically we were just infantry, so we just kind of, well, we were peons of the army, and we didn't have any animosity for others of lower rank, you might say.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.