<Begin Segment 5>

HH: So you went into the army?

NH: Yes, I went into the army before my graduation, and ended up in Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia. And I had my basic training, and I was ready to go out on my last two weeks of bivouac before being shipped out. In that period of time, they found out that I had Japanese language training, which I had in San Francisco going to school after public school. They gave me a test, and I passed those tests so they send me to the Army Intelligence School in Fort Snelling in Minnesota. And I continued studying there, the war was still on with Japan at that time. So they were training us to be what they call a voice interceptor, which means that you were interrogate any prisoner that was captured. But the war had come to an end in, I guess it was in August, so they flipped the whole curriculum to document training, so we studying Japanese language from a point of the, reading documents. And I was shipped to Japan, and it was, period was December, I remember it was Christmastime. And I stayed there for a period of one year. We were tested continuously while we were being shipped over because if you did not have the qualification to read and write, then you were switched over to become an interpreter. And being shipped to Korea when there was a surge of refugees coming through the peril up there in Korea. But I managed to stay in Tokyo and work in the document section, and the document section was called Allied Translator Interpreter Service, which was part of General MacArthur's group.

HH: Did you ever regret coming to Philadelphia?

NH: No, I never felt... I don't know what you mean by "regret."

HH: Well, I'll put it this way. Speculate, you were likely to remain in California, assuming that there were no war?

NH: Well, this is hindsight, but if I didn't have this opportunity, I guess I would get back in the same rut as I was in before. Being in a Japanese community, your experience in the outer world will be quite limited. Maybe it wasn't as fulfilling as I see it now.

HH: So from that standpoint, you would have room for less regret for having come out here.

NH: Oh, yes, yes. It was really, gave me an opportunity to see more of what's around me than if I had gone back to San Francisco.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.