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AO: And then when I left the Forest Grove area and went to Ontario, the draft quota in Ontario was very short. And so their draft board said, "Well, you're in Ontario, you're being drafted now." So they drafted me and told me to go to Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City. I figured, well, another 1-A limited, so I'll just go there, take another physical, and come back to the farm. So I went there, and they gave me another physical, and they said, "You pass. You're 1-A." I said, "Well, I was 1-A limited before. How could I be 1-A now?" And they said, "Well, your feet aren't as flat as we thought they were, and your eyes are correctable to 20/20, so you're 1-A." So they took me in the army. And that was in June or July of '46, so they sent me to Aniston, Alabama, Fort McClellan, for my basic training. So I spent the summer there, June, July, August, September, doing basic training work, doing regular marching and rifle toting and stuff to become an infantryman. At the end of the basic training, everybody was going to get their assignments to go someplace, and the caption of our group says, "Are you interested in going to Officers Candidate School?" They said, "You have a year of college, and you sound intelligent, so you're eligible." I said, "Oh, okay," I thought, sure. I figured that was better than being a rifleman or a foot soldier. So I went to take an exam, and I passed the mental exam, but I flunked the physical exam. And I said, "What's the matter with my physical exam?" And they said, "You've got flat feet and you've got poor eyes." So those same two things that kept me out of the army before, but let me go back in, now kept me from becoming an officer. And so they assigned me to go to Korea.

And so that was September, October of '46. And so I got to Camp Stoneman in California, and got on a ship to go to Korea. Interestingly enough, the ship that we were going to sail over on was a victory ship, and the victory ship had been made in Vancouver, Washington, because that was the kind of ship that the Vancouver shipyards were making for the navy. And so I got on this victory ship, and we set sail for Korea, which was where our entire group was going to go. It took us twenty-six days to get to Korea, which sounds like an awful, awful long time, and it was. And the reason it was was because the ship had to go southward, because there was a typhoon in the Japan and Korea area, and so the victory ship could not sail into the typhoon area. So we had to spend a few days extra going farther south and waiting until the typhoon had passed by the Korea/Japan area. Then we landed in Inchon, which was the famous port where MacArthur landed for his invasion of Korea later on. But anyway, we landed in Inchon and we were all sent to the replacement depot for infantrymen. In other words, we'd be assigned to the infantry battalion somewhere on the island of, in the country of Korea. When I was at that replacement depot, before I got my assignment, one of the sergeants came up to our group and says, "Anybody here know how to type?" I said, "I know how to type." So they said, "Okay, you're assigned to be a clerk typist. Your MOS is now clerk typist instead of an infantryman." I said, "Oh, that's great."

So they sent me to headquarters company at a place called ASCOM city, which was very close to Seoul, Korea. And so I spent my months in the army doing clerk typist work for the ASCOM city, the city where the Korean, the U.S. troops were centered in Korea. While I was there, I was at the barber shop once, and some of the Koreans saw that I was an Asian and said, "Do you speak Japanese?" And I said, "Yes." And all the Koreans knew Japanese because they had been under Japanese rule for thirty-something years. And so they said, "Well, we want you to speak to our PX manager because we want a raise. We've been cutting hair for a long time and we haven't had a raise." An so they asked me if I would be interpreter for them and get them a raise. I said, "Sure, I'll be happy to." So I met with the captain of the PX and I gave him the story, and the captain said, "Sure, we'll give them a raise. They haven't had a raise for a long time." So I went back to the barber shop and told them, and they were all just very, very happy. And they gave me free haircuts for all the rest of the time that I was in Korea because of that. [Laughs]

[Interruption]

AO: I was almost up in the army, the draft -- because the war had ended -- the draft was ending, and all draftees were going to be discharged after one year of service. And so my time for discharge came up, and so I asked them if I could have a week's leave in Japan because I had relatives in Japan that I would like to visit as long as I'm here in Asia. And they gave me a week's leave in Japan, so I flew from Korea, South Korea, to Tokyo. I was stationed at the hotel headquarters, army hotel headquarters in Tokyo, and there the manager of the hotel was Richard Iwata, who was a Portlander, because I knew him from way before the war, and he and I played basketball together on the same team before the war broke out. But he showed me the ropes of how to get around in the Tokyo area, and then he took me to the railroad station because I wanted to go visit my dad's brother who lived in Yamanashi-ken, which is the state due west of Tokyo. So I got on the train, the train depot was all bombed out yet, it had not been repaired since the war had just been over. So I got on one of the coaches, and the coach was all crowded, so I had to stay in the aisle. And it was immediately obvious that I was an exception because when I stood in the aisle there, I could look right all the way down the aisle, my head was the only one that was higher than everybody else on that, standing on that aisle. And so it was quite a shock to realize that the Japanese people were all very, very short. There were no tall, very few, if any, tall Japanese living in Japan. I'm sure the nutrition, war, etcetera, played a very important factor in stunting the growth of all the Japanese people.

But any rate, I trained over to Yamanashi-ken, the capital of Yamanashi-ken is Kofu, so I went to Kofu and met with the police there, and they took me to Minabu, which is a small town outside of Kofu. And my father's brother came to that town to meet with me and take me back to his farm, which was in, a short distance away in Minabu. So I stayed at that farmhouse for a couple of days before I came back from Tokyo. On the way back to Tokyo, the mother, my brother's... my father's brother's wife took me to Shizuoka at the foot of Mt. Fuji to meet my dad's older sister. So I did get to meet two, one brother and one sister of my father's before I left Japan. And from Shizuoka, I went back to Tokyo and then came back to the States. I came back to the States in a general ship, which was much faster than the victory ship. [Laughs] And there was no tropical storm or anything, so we came back in I think it was eleven days, in contrast to the twenty-six days to go over to Korea. And then I was discharged at Camp Stoneman and came back to Portland from there.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.