<Begin Segment 5>

LT: There were certainly a lot of things coming down for you and your family as your father was taken away, you were having difficulties with relationships with others, there was skepticism as you say in the media about Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans. And then in May of 1942, Japanese Americans along the West Coast were moved to temporary assembly centers. And your father was still detained in prison, but you and your mother and your brother and sister were sent to the Portland Assembly Center, which used to be the livestock yards. And so you had to make arrangements to, for your furnishings, for your home, for your father's office, and then you moved to the assembly center. And there was an incident when you were thinking about your future, and you were talking to a friend of yours, and you were walking together along the fence. Can you recall what it looked like, what you were discussing, and what happened?

GT: I remember that episode. The fellow I was chatting with was Hide Tomita. And I didn't know him before the evacuation. He and I applied for a job working as aides in the camp hospital. It wasn't much of a hospital, but they had, were able to... among the internees, there was one, two practicing MDs, and two or three medical students at the medical school in Portland. And Hide and I just applied just to be lowly patient aides to clean, pick up bedpans and those kind of things, menial things. But we got to be pretty good friends there, and we used to spend a lot of time. And we were talking about being released. He had a tentative release from a college, I can't remember the name of the college, but someplace in the Midwest that he had clearance from the college to continue his pre-medical education.

I had already recently been given permission from the University of Minnesota, the president was responding to a letter that Reed College had sent seeking permission for me to transfer there. And I got a nice letter from that president, and about five days later, he sent me a very sad report that the commanding general of the Area Defense Command would not approve my presence on the University of Minnesota campus. And the reason was that the army had just granted the Aeronautic Research Institute at Minnesota to work on the development of jet-powered pursuit planes. Now, Germany already had planes, and they were shooting, by that time, they had virtually overtaken France, and Spain was yet to recover from their rebellion, remember, they, that was a time when they had a royal family, which was not in favor there. So Spain was being reorganized by the rebels, and it didn't look like if France was completely beaten, that England would be the only major country left to stand up against Germany.

LT: So because of the project to test the planes, you were unable to attend the University of Minnesota.

GT: That's right. But they said, "If the war is over, please consider yourself as having an acceptance." But the irony was that when I... when the draft status of the Niseis changed, they made me 1-A, young male eligible for service in the army. And so I... I think it was in '43 that this happened, and I was sent down to Florida, and my basic training was with an all-Nisei outfit. You might have... you're too young, but you might have heard about this. So when our training ended, we were all standing in an assembly area and ready to ship out. We were told if your name was called out, they'll tell you which bus to board. And so we were standing there, and everybody's name was called out except mine. And I was at parade rest, which is a formal... and I was just temped to yell out, "Hey, how about me?" Because even the people who were running this program started getting into the jeeps and driving away. And I thought, by military standards, if they indeed forgot and all drove away, I'd still have to stand there at parade rest. And about that time, a young lieutenant came and said, "You may wonder why you're not being sent overseas with your fellow trainees. We're sending you to the University of Minnesota." And I said, "My gosh, do I get to go to medical school?" He said, "Sorry, you're going to go there to study something about Japan."

LT: So that happened later on. Let me bring you back to Portland Assembly Center, because you and Hideto Tomita were contemplating your futures, and at that time, you had just heard from the University of Minnesota that you would not be able to attend because of the pilot testing by the air force. So you and Hideto Tomita were discussing this and you were walking at the Portland Assembly Center deep in thought. What happened?

GT: At the camp?

LT: At the Portland Assembly Center.

GT: Yeah. Well, they had watchtowers, and just a lot... about fifty feet away was this tower on the outside of the barbed wire fence. And they had a machine gun, thirty-caliber water cooled machine gun. And I looked up, that thing was pointed right at me, and the assistant gunner was threading the belt of ammunition into the thing. And he cocked it, and all they had to do was pull the trigger, I'd have been a dead duck by this time. But fortunately I looked up enough to, at the time, they were at that stage when a guy was talking through a loudspeaker to get away from the fence. They had a rule that we could not get closer than five feet from the heavily wired fence, and we were actually walking right next to the fence. And then, so they yelled at us to get away from the fence or you'll be dead. And so we saw that, and we yelled, "Don't shoot." So we ran into that huge building where we were placed. Anyway...

LT: What were your thoughts at that point?

GT: Well, I thought I was lucky that things worked out the way they did, because if we hadn't heard the guy yelling to us through the loudspeaker, we'd both be shot dead right on the spot. But that's wartime.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.