This is Ed Metzler, and today is the 18th of
September, 2005.
I'm interviewing Mr. Warren Sunishi.
This interview is taking place in
Fredericksburg, Texas.
This interview is in support of the Center for
Pacific War
Studies Archives for the National Museum of the Pacific
War, Texas Parks and Wildlife, for the preservation
of historical information related to this site.
Let me start out, Warren, by thanking you
for taking the time to share your experiences
during that period of time with us today.
I think it will be a great addition to our
archives. Let me ask you to start by stating
your full name and when and where you were born
and who your parents were.
I'm Warren Michio Tsuneshi. That middle name is
spelt M-I-C-H-I-O. Excuse me a moment.
I'm thinking about the problems your
Transcriber's going to face.
Okay, we're going to continue the interview. Go
ahead, Warren.
Where I was born, oh, my parents. Yes.
My parents are Satoru, S-A-T-R-O...
Begin again.
Satoru, S-A-T-O-R-U, Tsunayishi.
My mother's name is Cho Tsunaeishi, S-H-O.
They're both immigrants from Japan.
My father was born in 1891 and my mother in 1893.
My father came to this country in 1907 as an immigrant
off of a rice farm in the prefecture of Kochi, Japan,
in the island of Shikoku, which is the second island.
If you proceed from Okinawa northward,
the first big island is Kyushu.
The next is Shikoku to the west.
The next is Honshu, the main island, and the
last is Hokkaido.
It's that part of southern Japan that my
parents come from.
My mother was a schoolteacher.
She had been selected by the prefectural government
to receive training as a normal school training
that would mean 12 years in
those days. And she was then, she had, because
the government paid for her
education, she had a obligatory service of
three years as a teacher. My father
came to this country in 1907, headed to
Webster, Texas, which is right then a
newly organized rice-growing colony by a
Japanese entrepreneur from the same
prefecture, Kochi, K-O-C-H-I, that my father
came from. Now where was this located?
Kochi, no, the Webster. Yeah. Webster, which is
the town, as I, or area between
Houston and Galveston, as I understand it. My
son was quite an entrepreneur, and so my
father set out to take a look at it to see. He
established a company in 1901 and it was
almost an immediate success. The land was cheap
in Texas, and there was quite a bit
of Acreage, and he was a man of some standing
in Japan. He'd become a
Christian, and he was also a politician. That
part of Japan is that he was for the
Kochi Prefecture and three of the outer
prefectures, by outer I mean one, Kyoto and
Tokyo Prefectures,
where the movement began after the arrival of
Admiral Perry in 1853 to open Japan,
the movement began to oust the reigning shogun,
Tokugawa shogun, and restore the
emperor to the position as head of state. And
so that prepared to have,
Well, they were the ones who were talking about
parliament, government for Japan, formation of
political parties.
And the first political party, Jiminto, J-I-M-I-N-T-O,
when translated as the Nobel Party, was
organized there.
In any case, so my father, and that was a man who,
There was this man named Saijo who also came to
this country to convert to Christianity, too.
His goal was to go to the Yale Divinity School
so that he could become a minister.
But he got as far as New York City, and a
friend in the Consulate General there persuaded
him to take a look at this area
near Galveston, I guess it is, and see what
opportunities there were, and so he took it
and he began this enterprise. My father
subsequently converted also. So were you
born there in Webster? No, that's why I said
I'm an almost Texan, because my
father was headed to Webster, but he got as far
as Los Angeles, and they were so
attractive there, the state remained and never
got beyond. He never made it to Webster.
Never made it to Webster. That's why I refer to
myself as an almost Texan.
Well, so he began a life of farming, truck
farming, watermelons, potatoes, that kind of thing.
And then in the 20s, he switched to real estate development.
Or was it the wrong 20s, you know? Yes.
And then, with a crash, he returned to truck
farming, strawberries and berries and raspberries
and blackberries and blueberries, not
blueberries, Boursin berries, those kinds of berries.
That's how he found a living during the 1930s.
But he was very much inspired by the freedoms
he found in this country.
Even though there was considerable
discrimination against Japanese or Asian
immigrants to this
country, he looked at the brighter side of
life, and I guess I sort of inherited that
attitude toward, despite the rank
discrimination in all fields, it was like the
South in many
ways, except that it was not a white-black, but
it was a white-Asian split in the communities,
Not as bad, I don't think, because I had never
experienced it.
How many brothers and sisters did you have?
My mother and father produced ten children. Wow.
Nine survived in tenth and last died in infancy.
And were you the elder?
No, I was right in the middle.
Right in the middle.
My father gave us all English and Japanese names.
The firstborn was Hughes.
He was born in June 1916, at the time of the
national elections, when everyone
thought that Charles Evans Hughes would win the
Republican candidate,
race, as a Republican candidate. It was an
over-cooking at the last minute when
California swung to the Democrats. I came along
a few years later, in 1921, I was named after
Warren G. Harding, of course.
21 was two years before Teapot Dome.
Well, that's what bumped him out, I think, when
he died, as I remember, but it was ugly.
My father was a poet, a poet. He had a lifelong
love of writing, haiku. He put himself through
high school here, and his English was good, you
know, so that he was able to write sonnets.
I am a pentameter from what, but he could write
very passable sonnets.
He wrote an ode to Warren G. Harden, possibly
the only prince then so honored, you know.
And probably the only sonnet written for Warren G.
That's exactly the case.
And then, so I had an older sister, Florence,
who was named after the Archoness.
Frances was named after St. Frances of Assisi.
And then me, I'm the fifth in the line, my
younger brother is named Paul,
like the son of Paul. And then my brother,
Noel, he was born on Christmas.
And then my another brother, James, named after
James in the Bible.
And then Rose, named after a neighbor, Rose
Maxwell, who is in fact our landlord.
So let's fast forward to 1941.
You were still in California, and you were in 41.
You were how old then?
41, I was 20.
Okay, so...
Well, what happened is I graduated high school,
Monrovia Arcadia Daughter High School, in 1939,
and matriculated at UCLA,
in part because Jackie Robinson was going...
Jackie Williamson was a football star at P.J.-
Pasadena Junior College, nearby, about ten
miles from
the river, and they used to play in the Rose Bowl.
My brother was a student at P.J.C., and once
took me to a football game, and I had never
seen a more amazing football game than that,
and I can still see Jackie Williamson dancing
down the sidelines, evading tackles. And then
in his third year, he transferred to UCLA or
maybe was
recruited. That was in 1939. That's the year
that I went to UCLA. Jackie Robinson was
lettered in
four sports, football, baseball, basketball,
and track. In those days, they had that underhand
baseball, basketball style. Yes. And I can
still see him doing that kind of thing. That's
one of the reasons I went to UCLA,
but the real reason is that it was essentially
free, because my parents
could not, couldn't afford to send me to
college, right? If you can believe it,
There was no tuition at the University of
California system.
You had to pay student fees at $27 a semester.
$54 a year.
Then, of course, you had to pay for books.
Then you had to find money for room and board.
We didn't have room.
This was the start of the Depression.
We didn't have enough money for room and board,
board, so I worked as what they call a
schoolboy, essentially a servant, in a
household where
I got, in a family where I got my room and
board in exchange for serving as a cook, and
essentially doing work. I was a clean house,
actually. So I finished there, but by that
time I decided that my major was political
science, my minor was English, and by that
time I decided that I wanted to have a career
as a foreign correspondent. And in Asia, you
know, the professions were essentially closed
to Japanese-Americans. If you wanted to be
a newspaper man, you had to go outside the
country to be a newspaper man. So I transferred
to Berkeley because they had a good Japanese
studies program, Japanese
language and Asian history, Chinese history,
Chinese politics, Japanese
politics, and that kind of program. So then, so
I was in my junior year of
college, and I remember, December 7, I was in
my room studying, and my roommate comes in and says,
have you heard the news? And so what news? They
turned the radio on. Japan has attacked Pearl
Harbor, and that's all it means.
There goes my dream of being a colonel. Nothing
but bad is going to come down the line, and
that's exactly what happened.
President Roosevelt and, well, first of all,
the FBI rounded up all of the potential spies
and saboteurs,
about 2,500 in the West Coast states and
perhaps throughout the United States.
Both of the population was, the Japanese
population was centered in the West Coast
states and Hawaii. About 120,000 in the West
Coast states and about 150,000, 160,000
in the state of Hawaii, in the territory of
Hawaii. So the FBI is responsible for
Domestic Security, the Office of Naval
Information Intelligence, ONI,
Office of Naval Intelligence was responsible
for military security.
And both of these organizations had developed
names of potential saboteurs
and smugglers to be picked up in the event of
war. The FBI list was about 2,500,
end up at the O&I District about, there were
3,000 of them,
there must have been a lot of deportation by Negroes.
So they picked them up and put them in these
enemy Alien detention
camps for the duration.
But we had no idea that we would soon follow.
But in February 16th, I believe it was, of 1942,
In June, President Roosevelt issued Executive
Order 9066, which permitted the CG, Commanding
General of the Western Defense Command, a man
named Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt,
capital D-E-W, capital W-I-T-T, one word,
General DeWitt, to issue military proclamations.
The very first one was on at Curfew, between 8
p.m. and 6 a.m., and the second
was Zone of Exclusion Proclamation. All
Japanese Americans are to be excluded
from this zone on the coastal areas of the
three West Coast states. And the
third was the evacuation itself. And we went
into, I don't recall, yeah, I'm a
political scientist and had not taken any
courses in constitutional history or
law, I don't recall that I objected to the
violation of my basic Fifth
Amendment, Habeas corpus rights. You know, the
government may not arbitrarily take
life, liberty, or property without due process
of law. And I don't remember
thinking that I should... I think, basically, I
think I accepted this as part of the
kind of treatment we had received. I had
received all my life as a minority
which, remember, which was not held in high
regard or respect by the
generality of the West Coast population. Even
though I used to think, I used to
think, well, if my friends were old enough to
be in positions of political
power, you know, this evacuation, selection,
profiling, the word that they use nowadays,
of, yeah, these Americans are possible spies
and terrorists and disloyals and so forth,
I don't think it would have happened. And so I
held a point to that conviction
because I didn't want to be, I didn't want to
feel that my country would, eventually, I
argued to myself that this country would live
up to its fundamental values enunciated in the
Declaration of Independence, and later in
Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, but
that was much later.
And here, when you come right down to it, what
Martin Luther King is talking about,
I have a dream that one day my children will be
judged, not by the color of their skin,
but by the content of their character.
And that is exactly what the Declaration of
Independence and Spirituality promise,
that all these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The First Amendment says that life, liberty,
and property will not be taken away from us.
So these are the basic core American values.
And I believed in it at that time, I believe in
it today, and that's what sustains me.
This is an aberration, this evacuation, this
isolation, evacuation, and no holding of us in
detention centers.
Describe that evacuation, if you would, please.
But notices went up all around. First of all,
the notices on the restrictions on curfew, and
then the zones of exclusion, also in the newspapers.
And then we got notices through the press to
begin with.
My family lived in Southern California,
and I should have gone down to join them.
But this was May.
I still had a few more weeks to go
so that I'd get credits for my junior year.
You've got to be practical about these things.
So I stayed in my Berkeley lodgings as long as possible.
By the time the evacuation came, I
was sent with the San Francisco Bay region contingent
to a temporary holding area, converted racetrack
in Tamparan, which is just north of Stanford University.
I remember we were told to, the Berkeley contingent
was told to meet at the Methodist Church in
Brooklyn, which
happened to be just a block away from where my
lodgings were.
And we were told to bring along only what you
can carry.
And you were given a piece of luggage
of whatever you wanted to carry.
And we all dutifully obeyed.
well, Japanese-Americans are very dutiful
people. I mean, you know, obedient people.
Generally. Mm-Hmm. I used to argue that, well,
I'm as American as you are, but then I
think, gee, there must be some Japanese
cultural traits in you, because you take this
kind of thing, and a real American would say,
you can't do this to me, you know.
Well, anyway, the good ladies of that church
had coffee and things, served to us,
We were loaded aboard the bus and it took us
about 30 miles to the Tamperon racetrack.
And what I remember about that is they put a
barbed wire around that enclosure, the racetrack,
converted the horse stalls to family apartments.
And for bachelors like me, there were about a
thousand there, 13,000 altogether.
About a thousand of us were bachelors, and we
put us in the grandstand, really.
The grandstand seats us, and there's an
enormous hall, or room, and they put
cots in there that could hold a hundred, a
thousand people. So that's where I, what I,
what happened is that I remember chiseling away
at the, not the mortar, the putty,
holding one of the window panes, the whole back
was covered with this small window pane, so
that I could remove the window and the fresh air...
To get the fresh air in.
Fresh, or normal fresh air, that symbolized to
me freedom.
Because every evening the fog would come
rolling over the San Bruno hills in our
direction, and I thought,
I could move so freely, so should I, and that
kind of thing, but I missed most my freedom,
taking away my liberty.
So that was...
How long were you there?
Well, that's the funny thing.
Most of the people were there two or three months.
I was there possibly less than a month because
the Department of Agriculture sent in a
recruiting team.
they were short of stooped labor, agricultural
labor in Idaho and Montana,
and so they were recruiting for work. People
who volunteered to go work there.
We still remain, all this was done under the
War Relocation Authority. It was
headed by Dr. Eisenhower, Ike Eisenhower's
brother. The Department of Agriculture sent in
And as for volunteers, as I said, there were
13,000 in there, only 13 of us volunteered
to go, and they took us by train to Buhl,
B-U-H-L, Idaho, and they put us in a former
CCC camp there, and then they farmed us out to
the various farms in the area that needed
agricultural labor to thin the sugar beets in
the springtime.
When that work came to an end, we were assigned
to a cattle farm.
This is just a country, but they had irrigated alfalfa,
and they had to put up this hay for their cattle.
And out there, they don't have barns to store
its dry,
so that they simply build these enormous haystacks.
They're shaped like a loaf of bread,
except magnified 1,000 times, about 20 feet wide,
about 30 feet long, and about 15 feet high.
And there was a team of horses that you hitched up
to cut the hay.
And then after a drive for two or three days,
you'd come along with a rake and rake the hay
into windrows.
Then you counter to that with a rake and make bundles,
big bundles.
And then you had a team of horses working with you.
Another team of horses had a slip, a wooden
slip, a structure of wood, about 20 feet wide,
30 feet long.
We'd go along and pitch these hay bundles onto
the slip, take them over to where they're built
on this haystack with a derrick,
and unload it there and repeat the process.
So I did that during the summer months.
So how long were you doing that in Idaho?
Oh, I'd say July, August, and early September.
By that time, the potatoes are ripe, and
they're called piquin.
And those were the sugar beets.
And it was late September.
So we went back to Bureau and did that work.
And by the time the snows came, the harvest was over.
My parents had been, family had been moved
to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center,
which is Cody, Wyoming, practically next door.
We were still under WRA authority,
so I joined my family there.
And I didn't stay there long either.
For three months, I remember working
as a hospital orderly, taking pulses and all
kinds of stuff, temperature.
But the American Friends Service Committee held
a program to relocate students,
and the government itself, the WRA, the World
Relocation Authority,
had this program of resettling college students.
As I think I may have said earlier, this is not
a Nazi concentration camp or a death camp.
this is a camp to, literally it's a
concentration camp, but I reserve that
for the death camps, because it's wrong.
Anyway, they had a student
relocation program, and the American Foreign
Service Committee would contact
colleges in the interior, asking if they would
be interested, willing to accept a
few students from the camps. There were ten
such permanent camps located in
Wyoming and California itself, in the interior
of California, Arizona, Utah, and so forth.
even in Arkansas. Two camps in Arkansas. Of all
places. Yes, of all places. So that
students were able to get out if they had the
resources themselves. I had made
enough money in the sugar beet fields to, I
think I had about $600 in my pocket, and since
I had
been nominally a Methodist. When Dr. Burns
approached Syracuse University,
which was Methodist, which was founded as a
Methodist institution, I received a... I was
accepted and was received a scholarship from
the Methodist Church. I had to look
for my room in Bowdoin, however. The reason I
was accepted, when the
Chancellor of the University, William P.
Tolley, T-O-L-L-E-Y. He was a son of immigrants
from England, and he says, writes in his
memoirs, that when his father set
foot on Ellis Island, he proclaimed himself an
American, and he was going to
be lived by American values and standards. And
he settled down in the
east side of New York City, which is two
mountain tops, representing all kinds of
ethnic groups and languages and foreigners, and
he had, at one time, was a conservative, but he had
this strong conviction that the Constitution
means what it says. He
didn't believe that the evacuation of American
citizens of Japanese origin
without due process, was constitutional. So
when he was approached, he said,
I'll accept a hundred. Now I made it, some
years ago, I'd been buying copies of the
Alumni Directory, circuit union Alumni
Directory, and I went through the whole
thing for the years 1942, 43, and 44, looking
for Japanese names on it, Howard only about
15. So I don't think he ever got his hundred,
but he did open up the university to those
of us who wanted that. So which university was
this? Syracuse University. Syracuse. Yeah,
Southeast New York, upstate New York. And, you
know, when I was evacuated, did I
tell you that my best friend was Ted Smith,
whom I had met in the Boy Scouts?
I think I said that. You mentioned that in
there, but tell us again. Well, group number one
of Monrovia was at the Presbyterian Church of
Monrovia, and I joined that troop.
I was the only Japanese American in that troop.
I became friends with the...
And how old were you at this time? Twelve. And
my best friend became Ted Smith,
whose father, he had an older brother, Ian
Smith, who was also a Scout. His father was a
World War I veteran, a veterinarian. You know,
in World War I, he had mules and horses and
all that, and he was a large animal
veterinarian, but when he moved to
California after the war, he became a small
animal, veterinarian, dogs, cats, and that kind
of thing,
and his wife, Julia, was, that was Benjamin
Smith, his wife, Julia, was an immigrant
from Scotland. And over a period of years, that
became my sort of second
family. I stayed overnight there all the time.
Oh, yes, and Dr. Smith would accompany the
group, the Scout troop, to winter camp and so
forth. And when I was
evacuated, when the evacuation came out, Dr.
Smith visited my father and offered to pay
for my further college education. My father
contacted me and I said,
no, I'll try to make it on my own. But, you
know, instances of examples of this
type where you have Dr. Smith, William Tolley,
befriending, helping, you know, also
supported by belief that sooner or later this
country would really live up
to its basic fundamental values as a country,
as a civilization, and as a
political organization. And I never, never
thought that my trust was placed in the wrong place.
So what happened at Syracuse University? Here
you are in upstate New York now, and
what were they, what kind of program were you in?
Still, in political science, one thing I did
not like was laws. Law, for some reason, I just
could not get interested.
Political science is supposed to be an interest
in the Constitution and the law.
For some reason, I just couldn't get interested.
So I took courses in comparative politics and
that kind of stuff.
And I did take one course in law.
I was befriended there by Professor Douglas
Herring, H-A-R-R-N-G.
He had been a missionary in Japan.
As a matter of fact, in the northern Ryukyus,
R-Y-U-K-Y-U-S, the Okinawa is an island in
the Ryukyu Archipelago. He had been a
sociologist, anthropologist, and became,
after serving all these missionary years, he
became a sociologist,
anthropologist. He was teaching, of course,
there, but he befriended me, as did the
Reverend Egbert Hayes, H-A-Y-E-S, who was the
university chaplain. He had been a
missionary in China. So they looked after me. I
found lodging in the home of an
Italian-American widow who had a son. Her name
was Anna Carpasso, C-A-P-A-S-S-O.
And all the students were Italian-Americans. We
used to have bowl sessions.
When I was a student at UCLA and at UC
Berkeley, when you say we'd get together,
we'd have both sessions or one thing or
another, you know. Remarkably, the same
kinds of issues came up among my new
Italian-American friends, you know, dating
and discrimination because of, you know, ethnic
background and jobs and the same
kinds of things that college students worry
about. But, again, this is further vindication
that my trust had not been misplaced. But, as I
said earlier, I think that what
happened in 1942, February, was that my older
brother, Hughes, was drafted at that
point. But shortly after that, the draft was
closed, but he remained. Some of the
some of the Nisei who had been drafted were
summarily discharged. Some were
kept on for reasons. The application was not
consistent, you know, dealing with
hundreds of different draft boards in the area,
because they interpret the law in a different way.
But most of the draft boards did not draft
Nisei. Did I explain what Nisei
means n-I-s-e-I. Would you explain it for us?
Yes, it means second generation. You see,
from the point, the way that the first
generation calculated it was that they
were the first generation of Japanese to be,
live, immigrate to this country. And
the second generation was really the first
generation born in this country.
But it was, Japanese immigration to this
country occurs in a period of about 20
years, from 1886 when the Chinese Exclusion Act
was passed, 1896 to about
1906 when Theodore Roosevelt and the government
of Japan began this series of
gentleman's talks to restrict immigration. So
the first group of
immigrants formed a kind of a cohort age-wise,
and their children also formed
kind of cohort, age-wise. Most Nisei, I would
say, are in the age group of 60-90, as a
cohort, let's say.
And our children are also formed in the third
generation. The problem being that the first
generation married at the Japanese, of course.
The second generation, my generation, also, for
the most part, married other Japanese
nisei. In California, there were miscegenation
laws, and that's so that
you could not marry whites. That law was
changed after World War II. As was the
Naturalization Act passed in the 1790s, which
made naturalization open only to
those of European or African descent. That law
continued until after World War
II, so that things changed over a period of
time. What was I talking about when I got
on to this track. I was at Syracuse. You were
talking about the second generation.
Yeah. We were at Syracuse and then... Syracuse.
Oh yes, okay, and the draft was closed to us for
most of, all of 1942, most of 1942. Then Elmer
Davis, who was the director of the
Office of War Information, got the bright idea
of using for propaganda purposes a
unit to be organized to fight in the European
theater, just to show that
Hitler's policy was completely racist, what
we'll call racist now, anti-Semitic, you know,
racist and anti-everything else.
But you can see this idea of forming, or having
the army form a segregated unit
the Japanese-Americans would fight as a unit to
show that Americans, despite the
fact that... Show they could do it. Despite the
fact the country was at war with
Japan, the former regiment was a combat team,
so that means it's
about, normal regiment is about 3,500, this is
about closer to 5,000. And one of the
battalions instead of, you see, a regiment has
three battalions per
The first was called the 100th Infantry
Battalion because they were a group of
people, a group of students, college students
in Hawaii who were members of the
Territorial Guard. Initially they were put to
work after Pearl Harbor during
miscellaneous work for the military, but then
they decided that they didn't
want a Japanese unit in Hawaii, so they sent
this group, a provisional group, to Wisconsin
to receive, it was shipped out, and the guys
who were shipped out didn't know where they
were going.
Who heard they were going?
Whether they were going to a detention center,
or they were going to an army camp, or they
wound up in an army camp to form the 100th
Infantry Battalion, those are the guys who
first fought as a battalion attached to another
division, as part of another
division in the Mandis in Italy, and they made
a real name for themselves, and
that's where they provide the impulse to create
this regimental combat team,
which covered itself with glory in the European
theater. Meanwhile, this program
that Japanese language training that had
started in September 41 was beginning to
produce Japanese language linguists. Did I tell
you about that? You may have mentioned it in a
larger group, but you haven't mentioned it
here, so go ahead. Okay. Well, the War
Department adopted a policy that was carried
out by the G2, the 4th Army
headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco.
That was commanded by
General John L. DeWitt, and he was also
commander of the Western Defense Command,
where you had mentioned DeWitt earlier. And
there's a history being written
about the MIS by a scholar named Dr. James
McNaughton, M-C-N-A-U-G-H-T-O-N,
called Loyal Linguists. Well, the manuscript is
finished. It will be published
probably next year by the Center for Military
History in Washington, D.C.
Rooknotten, I've seen this draft, Rooknotten
tells a story about General DeWitt coming
into this first class of 60 students, 58 of
them Nisei II and VI Nisei
instructors and putting his arm around the
chief instructor to support him and
show him, he said, you're doing a good job.
Reminded me of, you're doing a good job, Brownie.
Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
Oh, that thing with Michael Brown.
I mean, that reminds me of what John Dewitt
said, because later, of course, he carried out
the Executive Order 9066
in evacuating all of us.
So this was before he did that?
Oh yes, of course, this must have been before
Pearl Harbor.
But you see, the military recognized that war
was coming,
possibly, probably coming.
If it came, then they would need linguists.
The Navy recognized it also, so they set up
their own.
So did you get involved in the linguists?
Well, the Navy began its program for officers
in Berkeley and Harvard. I think I did mention
that all of these programs,
the two Navy programs brought together in
Berkeley, but all of
these programs were, the instructors were
Japanese Americans. They couldn't
stay there in California any longer, so the
Navy program was moved to
University of Colorado Boulder, and the Army
program was moved to Camp
Savage near Minneapolis. Now last time I
checked you were in Syracuse. Okay. So how
did you link up with this? Well, as I said
earlier, my older brother, Hughes had been
drafted in
February of 1942 and he wound up at the MISLS,
the Military Intelligence
Service Language School at Camp Savage, later
transferred to Fort Snowman, S-N-E-L-L-I-N-G.
He was there when I was a student of Syracuse,
and he wrote to me and said, in early 1943,
maybe February or March, saying that, in
effect, that he was at Savage, it was a good program,
The Army had opened up the service for gratis
if they volunteered, and sooner or later they
would make this mandatory.
We introduced the mandatory draft.
If you get caught up in that, you'll probably
wind up in the infantry as a cannon fodder.
In Italy.
In Italy, it would be better for you to
volunteer for the MIS because you have some Japanese
language capabilities.
So that's what I did, and the draft board sent
me to Camp Upton in Long Island to be
inducted, and from there I went by train to
Minneapolis, and then into-I had my travel
orders by then, of course, and then into Camp
Savage, arriving there in early
August of 1943 before my class graduated,
actually. I had asked for a deferment
after I could complete my credits for my BA,
and the draft board
permitted that. So I wound up there, as I say,
this had originally been planned in
September 1941 as a one-year program. Well, as
when war broke out, they
need interpreters and translators and
interpreters almost immediately. The first
The first battles, I think, occurred in the
spring, late spring of 1942, not the naval
battle, but the
artillery, I think, peace corps. And as I said,
every battle in the Pacific and in the China-Burma
in the theater included Japanese-American
interpreters and translators.
Even those as in Waterloo Canal, Tarawa, and
Iwo Jima, which were essentially marine operations,
Marine Corps did not have any Japanese-American interpreters.
Did they have any interpreters at all?
They had, they were trained as part of the
Marine Corps, officer cadets were trained
as part of a Navy program, so they had officers
who are, you mentioned today about a Marine Corps
intelligence officer at the Battle of Okinawa.
And they could speak Japanese? Presumably, but
six-month training, that's pretty hard. You
don't learn, okay, go ahead. So they started
with a
one-year program based on Japanese Americans on
the assumption that we knew
Japanese. Well, when it turns out that we only
began to take tests for the
language competence, not many of us had enough
Japanese spoken or written. The
percentage was remarkably low. I tell you why.
Every immigrant group to this
country tries to establish language schools,
whether they're Portuguese or
Polish or whatever, Korean or Japanese, and I
went to Japanese language
school as a youngster. Mondays and Wednesdays
after regular school and all
the Saturdays, I was a very indifferent student.
I was a straight-A student in
regular school, but in the Japanese language
school, I got C's and D's, because I
wasn't interested. I was interested in being
American. As a matter of fact, I
thought I didn't want to study there. I was
unpatriotic and all this kind of stuff, you know.
The funny thing is, the ironic thing is, I
regretted that later, when I was at
camps. They came back to haunt you. They did.
They'd bite me. If I hadn't been more studious,
I would have been a much more efficient student
in the military, intelligence, and social
science school, a much more effective
intelligence person in the field. And more
ironically than
that, I ended up being a professional, what I
call a professional Japanologist. After
the war and I went to the graduate school on
the GI Bill. I ended up, got a
Ph.D. in political science. My dissertation was
on constitutional
political changes in Japan under the occupation.
Then my job was as
librarian of the Japanese collection. Then the
Library of Congress recruited me as
headed by Far Eastern Languages Section,
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and
eventually I became chief of the Orientalia
Division because of my
Japanese language competence. Back to World War
II. Did you pass or did you not pass?
No, no, no. I passed. I had pretty good
competence. You were good enough. I was good
enough, yes. So then what happened?
But those who were not good enough were sent to
the 442nd.
We became cannon fodder. Yeah.
Then what happened?
Well, after the six months of total immersion training
in the Japanese language, we were
sent for two months of infantry basic training.
I was talking to somebody about that here.
And where was your infantry basic training done?
At Camp Blanding in Florida.
In Florida.
were sent for two months of infantry basic
training. And then what? 1944, for two
months of infantry basic training. And then
what? And then they shipped us back
to Minneapolis. By then, Saint-Pont, by then
the school had been moved to
Fort Snelling, because they were training
hundreds of Nisei students by that
time. Eventually, as I said in my talk, I think
by the end of, before the end of
the war, they had trained and sent to the field.
I think the figure is 2,700,
somewhere in that neighborhood. Eventually,
before they moved that
operation back to California after the war,
they had trained about 7,000
Japanese language specialists, and they had
added Chinese to their list of
languages taught. So you were back in Camp
Snelling now? Fort Snelling. Fort
Snelling, sorry. This is in early spring of 44,
and then we were formed into teams of
10, he say, with the NCO in charge, Tech Sarge,
in charge
of this, we were given a leave to visit our families.
And I went back to the Heartland Rehabilitation
Center to visit my family.
And the strangest feeling, walking through the barbed
wire gates in U.S.
Army uniform and going to a checkpoint with
guys dressed
the same way I was, you know, and the guard
towers were managed by G.I.s.
So there you are in your G.I. uniform going
back to the relocation camp.
You know Franz Kafka? Yes.
You know, he reminded me of a part of one of
his novels, you know,
Very peculiar feeling, uneasy feeling, you know.
I hardly decided to have it, but again, you know,
that's reality.
You face it, and you don't cry about it.
Just accept it.
There isn't much you can do.
You can't park City Hall, right?
Yeah, well, not immediately.
Now, by that time, this is Mid-19,
or no, late spring 1944, my older sister Florence,
had gotten a teacher's degree at UCLA had been
unable to get a job because
the professions are essentially not open to
Japanese-Americans. Ronna Clay, when she
got into camp, into Outbound Relocation Center,
she had to give her job as a
teacher. But then the Army was looking for
Japanese language instructors at the
University of Michigan and at the University of
Minnesota, where the Officer
Candidate Schools, where the White Officer
Candidate Schools were located, and she
was recruited to go teach at the University of
Minnesota. My two younger
brothers, Noel, my younger brother, had already
been transferred to the
University of Wyoming, and my younger brother,
Paul, was stayed in camp so that
or maybe he had gone out to work in the
neighborhood. In any case, the ones who
were remaining when I visited that camp were my
father and mother, and my younger
sister, Rose, and my younger brother, James.
There was another
the youngest brother had died in infancy, as I
said, I think I said earlier, and I had an
older brother, Arthur,
who was in Chicago. He was physically handicapped
by a fungus infection of the legs,
unable to serve.
But the rest, the four of us, were healthy and
of age.
Hughes, Bea, Paul, and James. Now what happened
to you? Well, take me to your next step
here. Well, I went back to a relocation camp to
see family and then after that I
went back to Sonoma. I was on leave from Sonoma
and then we had been
formed in September 10 and they shipped us out
through Fort Lewis in Washington
to Hawaii, and we wound up at Schofield
Barracks, S-C-H-O-F-I-E-L-D, in Wahiawa, W-A-H-I-W-A-W-A,
just outside of the airfield there.
But then we got jungle training there in
Hawaii, and by then we spent a
little bit of time, not too much time, working
for the JICPOA, Joint
Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean Area. That
was headquartered at Pearl Harbor,
But if you were a Japanese American, all
Japanese were denied entrance to Pearl
Harbor, so they put up an annex in the city of
Honolulu, and that's where we did
the work. And so, let's see, it would take us
to around July or August.
44, we were put aboard a troop ship and we were
sent to cruise around the South Pacific.
I think we, as part of the 24th Corps, I think
we were sent to become part of battles in
the South Pacific under MacArthur's, you know, MacArthur
commanded the Southwest Pacific in the midst of
the Central Pacific.
And the 24th Corps was sent to join other Army divisions
in the battles of, I think, Ulysses, I'm not sure,
Marianas maybe.
No. My older brother, Hughes, was in Brisbane,
Australia. What happened was that most of
the graduates of the MRSLS were sent to
MacArthur's headquarters, which was then
in Brisbane, Australia, as part of the Allied
Translator and Interpreter
Section of GHQ. Was that where you went? No,
no, because I was a part of
Nimitz's command, I think. We are part of 24th
Corps, which is under
Nimitz's command. Now, as needed, these units
from Addis would be sent to
the field. My brother went to, what's that, a
giant island north of Australia, New
Guinea. He went to New Guinea and after that he
was sent to various American divisions
and then he was sent to the Philippines later.
Most of the Nisei in
Addis were sent on as-need basis. Teams of
three, four, ten is required to the
field. And they wound up in the Philippines.
24th Corps is a little bit
different, as I say, because it came under
MacArthur's command, but was still under
Nimitz's organizational authority. And then, so
we went through the Battle of Leyte. Leyte was
declared secure by late December. We landed on
October 20, 1944, and November,
December, two and a half, two, ten weeks it was
declared secure by end of
December. So you were there serving under
Nimitz? Well, no. In the 24th
The 24th Corps was loaned to MacArthur for the
Leyte operation, as I understand it.
Leyte was declared secure by December, and then
MacArthur's headquarters got a hurry
of refuel from the natives of the three little
islands off of Leyte, the Camotes Islands,
the Sweet Potato Islands.
Which islands?
Kamotes, C-A-M-O-T-E-S, Kamotes, C-A-M-O-T-E-S,
called Sweet Potato Islands in English, and
there was a staging point for Japanese forces
on Leyte, and a few, the call was
that they were, civilians were being
slaughtered, and for rescue to be sent,
The American force was sent to rescue them.
Another guy named Lloyd Shinsato, S-H-I-N-S-A-T-O,
and I volunteered for that mission.
Did I say that we were in 24th Corps headquarters?
We were members of the 306th Headquarters Intelligence
team of ten with a head officer, eleven, so
that there were twenty of us at their headquarters.
So that when that appeal came to McCloskey's
headquarters, he ordered the Corps to take
care of this, and General Hodge, who was
Lieutenant General Hodge, John Hodge, organized
a, issued
the order to the 7th Infantry Division fighting
on Lake Tate to take care of this, and one
of the regiments of the 7th Division organized
a reinforced battalion of about 900 men to
liberate the Comoros Islands, and I, Lloyd
Shinsato and I, volunteered for that
operation. And as soon as we landed, we were
taken by ducks, you know, the ducks.
Our Air Force battalion was. Now, these islands
had been liberated from
Japan at that point? No, no, no. They were
occupied by, Japan occupied all the
Philippines, you know. So this was a combat
zone? Oh yes, oh yes, indeed. So was
there any resistance on when you landed? No,
not when we landed, but as soon as we
landed, the corps of elements picked up some
documents, I remember translating them,
and almost immediately we determined from those
documents what the order of
battle was. It was essentially a group of
units, miscellaneous units, the main
force being what was called the Shipping
Engineers Organization. I think it was going to be
KCOG. Shipping Engineers, like Seabees, are not
really trained for land
combat, right? Well, then there were all kinds
of other miscellaneous units making up a
force there of about 400, and we were able to
determine that from capture
documents almost immediately. We didn't know
what the positions were, but a
Japanese map was captured also. And the initial
report was that they couldn't do
anything about it because it's in Japanese, but
Lloyd and I worked on it,
translated it, converted it to American
coordinates, and they showed very
clearly what their strategy was, to put their
defenses on the top of Three
just like in Okinawa, and run tunnels and all
this kind of thing, and make the Americans
fight them against stronger, fortified positions.
And it turned out that these guys were not
patsies either.
Their infantry basic training must have been
better than ours.
So they were tough soldiers, then.
Oh, they were.
And we found them right over in just a few days.
it took a couple of weeks. And one of the
things that Lloyd, Lloyd, I stayed at the
battalion headquarters. Lloyd was sent to Fort
Nisen company level, I think. What he
reported to me later was that when he and his
group went through town, the
first village, it came across homes, houses
that had corpses, corpses, murdered corpses,
stacked with cordwood, so much cordwood in each
house. And in the regimental report of
the battalion's work that I read found just a
couple years ago in the National
archives, there's one GI's quote that's saying
when he saw that, we'll get all of
these bastards and kill them all. And as a
matter of fact, no prisoners
were taken. But we turned the battle on Troy,
in other words, that we
translated the map showing these positions, and
now the battalion commander could
determine how best to attack that, and they
reduced their effectiveness, and they were all
killed in a
bonsai attack that opened one evening, one
evening. Well, you know, you see, they were all
killed. There must have been some who fled,
escaped, and some
who were wounded and who were killed on the ground.
War is not a pretty thing.
No, it's not.
Those things happen in the heat of battle and
so forth.
Well, incidentally, it was the only time I was
ever under enemy fire,
not from the troops, but from an attacking airplane.
I was at the town headquarters, and our pump
tent was on the top of the hill, and I was
standing by, and I looked up, and there was
this plane flying the tracers.
And it looked so pretty, and I was watching it,
and all of a sudden, zing, zing, zing, all
these bullets started hitting around me, I
dropped to the ground.
And as the plane went by, there was this
meatball on the fuselage, and I thought, Jesus Christ.
Big Japanese meatball?
I was too surprised to be scared, but when I
hear these stories told by these infantrymen
in Okinawa, when I hear these stories told by
these infantrymen who are at their front
lines, it's nothing like that, you know.
What they went through, there's true heroes in
those guys, courage, I don't know how they
went through it, committed themselves, I guess
it was their duty or whatever.
I really salute those guys. I was under
friendly fire in Leite in the
headquarters area of 24th Corps because, you
know, one of the tactics there that
Japanese forces used was they would tie
themselves up on top of the
trees. We landed and our headquarters was in a
grove of coconut palms. They tied
themselves up and hide in the leaves up there,
even though most of the leaves had
been shot off in the pre-1911 bombardment. But
they were enough there so that you could hide,
you know, if you
try yourself out there. And somebody thought
that he spotted a sniper and started firing,
and pretty soon
everybody was firing. You know, at
headquarters, you have a bunch of
undisciplined guys, you know. And if you don't
control the firing, somebody's going to get
had fortunately no other one.
Well, I mean, but they were firing at you.
No, they were trying to shoot anything they
thought they saw
in one of the palm trees.
One of the team of 10 that we had on May 10 was
a guy
named Ito, I-T-O-W. He was born in this
country, but was
taken by his parents to Japan and was brought
up there. And he didn't realize,
no, until he reached the age of majority, 20 in
Japan, that he had been born in
the United States and was a U.S. citizen. And
the very first thing he did, he did was
to hop on a boat and go to San Francisco where
he'd been born. Almost the first
thing that happened to him after that, he was
drafted. This is pre-Pearl Harbor. He
was drafted and he was working on KP duty in
the Army. He was the only
member of our team who was truly proficient in
all phases of the Japanese
language. The system of writing Japanese, which
is known as grassrooting, it's a
cursive script, or Chinese characters, you
know, Japanese is written with a
combination of Chinese characters and letters
of the Japanese syllabary, but
this cursive script is an abstraction of
Chinese characters, and it
takes years of study to learn how to write and
read in that cursive style.
But he was the only one who was really
proficient in that, and that was because
you had been born in Japan, I mean, educated in
Japan through the two years of college, I
believe. And I remember this question. Well,
when we got to, well, let me get to
later, when we get to Okinawa. Okay. I'll tell
you what happened there. So that, then we
trained, we knew that our 24th Corps would be
involved in the invasion of
Okinawa on April the 1st. We knew the date. Let
me come back to your first
experience where you were translating the maps
and were involved in that
invasion. When you successfully translated
those maps and were able to
contribute to the effort, that must have given
you a good feeling of
accomplishment. There's another document that
was captured by the
troops and that I spent all night translating.
The Japanese had mounted
an airborne raid on our positions on Leyte.
Leyte was captured, invaded and
captured for the purpose of creating landing
strips, you know, in the island
hopping campaign. The invading party's mission
was to attack two
landing strips that were under construction by
the Seabees, and the
mission of this invading airborne attack was to
destroy the facilities as much as
as possible, and then to link up with the
Japanese forces on Leyte.
All of this was spelled out in a field order
given to this raiding party, which came down
in three bombers, Betty Bombers, and one of
them crashed right near the core headquarters
along the beach there, not too far from there,
on Landing Beach.
The soldiers, GIs, retrieved the documents from it.
And one of them would say, he wrote her.
The whole thing?
The whole thing.
Why they were carrying that with them, I have
no idea.
I meant to ask General Minamoto that.
Why were the Japanese so careless about it?
Because that happened to mark the Pacific.
It wasn't just this one.
It wasn't just Okinawa.
But I remember, straight up on, I translated
that document.
My CO was with me.
And Herb Nishihara, N-I-S-H-I-H-A-R-A, Herb was my
buddy, he was a clerk typist.
And he was the one who, as we translated the
document, he
would cut the stencils for the mimeograph.
And so that by next morning, we had the whole
story sent to G-2.
So that just a few hours after the landing,
headquarters knew what force they were, what
equipment they carried, what their mission was,
and all the rest, you know.
In effect, it was a futile effort on their part
because they were cut off when they attacked
the airfields and so forth.
I don't think any of them reached whatever
forces were left in, Japanese forces were
left in Meiji.
But it's that kind of thing that we did that we
think contributed in some measure to the
success of that long-lasting operation because
that is what other things that
we did was together read diaries for order of
battle information especially
about morale. You know we were trained to in
the army we were trained and told
not to carry any personal diaries or journals
or letters into the battlefield
because the enemy could exploit them for
intelligence. So I left my diary that I
kept since my college days with my friend
Gerard Nishihara, so I don't know where they
are now. They
disappeared. But the Japanese had no such
compunction about that. They carried these
diaries, and you could read the diary, and the
guy was in Manchuria with a
Guandong army, and they transferred on such and
such a day to this place, and
and they were sent out.
All the information?
All of them.
You know, that's historical information, but
then to talk about the current situation,
the latest notations, the current situation
where the officers were and how many people
they had left and what kind of ammunition
supply and all that, they would put it all down.
is very, we work right next door to the, to the
Corps battle team. We supply them
with this information. They compile this and
send it to Corps headquarters. So,
identification of the enemy unit in front of
you, what their forces, force
strength was, what the equipment was, how they
were officers, all of this is of
importance, tactical importance. Seems like
it's extremely important. Do you
feel like you and your group got recognition
for your contributions at
that time or did that come later or what? Well
I'll tell you something about
recognition. The 442nd in Europe got all kinds
of publicity because that's the way
the War Department wanted it. This is
intelligence is by nature a classified
secretive operation, and information leaked out.
There were some notices, bits
and pieces of news about the MIS in the
mainland newspapers, but the whole story
was never known until much later. As a matter
of fact, the information was classified as
confidential, at least until... But what about
feedback from your immediate,
you know off commanding officer or anything
like that I mean what we call
attaboys or oh yes I think we've got this
matter they were happy oh yes I
eventually was awarded a bronze star for
military service that's just a step
above a good conduct medal you know one of the
guys today said that he got a
Bronze Star for Valor, and the Bronze Star
comes in two colors, yeah. Bronze Star for Valor,
Bronze Star for Meritorious Service. No, no,
no, they recognize the importance of it.
These are professionals. They know what they're
in, and this is not
unimportant information. And the POW
interrogations also produced an
awful lot of information. Were you involved in
any of that? Well, my MOS was that of
translatable once in a while, and the
interpreters would be
overbooked, so that I would have to take over.
But you see, again, we had been trained to do this,
whether that was our MOS or not.
You were trained to interrogate as well as interpret.
Yeah, and that was part of our duties.
But the really completely bilingual fluent in both
Japanese and English were the interpreters.
Then those who are good in Japanese were the interrogators,
and those who are good in translating,
converted into
readable in English, were the translators.
But we all interacted and stepped in as needed.
What we were trained to do is not to use force.
Our Geneva Conventions prohibited that to begin with.
but to show kindness and show respect. And you
know the funny thing is,
the Japanese soldiers were indoctrinated to
believe that surrender was impossible to do.
It was the utmost disgrace. It would disgrace
yourself, your unit, and your family, and your
country, and your emperor, if you surrendered.
And that's sort of a
consequence for a lot of the suicide, of course.
But, as a consequence, they were not
trained in what to do if captured. You're not
just... Because it wasn't
supposed to happen. That's exactly the case, so
that if you treated them kindly, with
some kindness, and some respect, and you asked
them a question beyond name, rank,
I can say or not, but that's all we were
supposed to give under the Geneva Conventions,
if you
ask them, oh, what were you doing at this
point, or who were your officers, and how
many guys were left in your outfit, they would
respond without any compunction.
Again, maybe they thought that they were dead,
you know, because that was a part of the indoctrination
that you might as well consider yourself dead
if you're captured, you know, but for whatever
reason they smelled their guts without any, you
know. They would actually open up? Oh yes, yes.
How many hit Christians? Well, there weren't
that many captured. There were prisoners,
people that was
captured, but there weren't that many. Most of
them, I would say, were captured because they
were gravely wounded. I remember the very first
one I interrogated, this was at headquarters on
Leite, and the G.I.s brought him into
headquarters on stretcher. You could see
the look on his face, and he had been hit
someplace. He was in very bad shape, and he was
barely conscious, but showing great, great pain.
And I asked him, would you like a shot of
morphine to, you know, kill his pain, and he
nodded, and I had a medic come and give him a shot.
But then after March, I wasn't able to
interrogate him until later, and then he
was able, you know, what information, it's
small bits of information, but you get
these small bits of information and tie them
together to be something meaningful.
But in that particular case, I wasn't able to
get that much information from
him. But other cases, some of our colleagues
who were interrogators...
Now, this experience you're speaking of,
was this primarily in Okinawa?
This is Leyte.
Oh, this is still Leyte.
Still Leyte, yeah.
So after Leyte, then trace your steps to
Okinawa for us, please.
Well, let me see now.
Leyte is declared secure by end of this 1944.
I'm involved in this sweet potato operations
until February, through March of February.
Up 45? 45.
And the landings are supposed to take place on April,
1st of April.
We were undergoing treatment, training,
on Okinawan geography, topography, probable forces.
And we're still in the late stage.
You're still in the late stage when all of this
is going on?
Oh, yes.
and the training of what to expect. Snakes were
a problem there, poisonous snakes, and
what the nature of the population was, who they
were, and what probable force. I think
I think by that time, there were questions
raised about the order of battle, how many
troops the Japanese had there.
By the time, before we got there, we knew, and
I'm not sure where we got the information,
that there were approximately 90,000 troops,
Japanese troops, in Japan, in Okinawa.
They may have gotten this from radio intercept,
you know, the breaking the code and yeah.
the interesting thing about breaking the code
and all that is that we still were
not trusted enough to be trained in
cryptography, cryptanalysis, encrypted,
but once the code breakers got
translated, the coded message into Roman
script, Japanese can be written in Roman
script. Then they turned that over to us for
translation, so that that's a way, so
that I would assume, I don't know for certain,
I would assume that there,
because there were troop movement, Japanese
troop movement was going on to the very,
almost to the very end, they sent one of their
crack divisions, I think was the
7th Division, to Taiwan because they, or mostly
because they thought that the
attack would come there, and they sent it
instead of sending the weakest division,
they sent their best, because the weakest one
had their artillery and the best did not have
field artillery.
You know, they're bureaucratic, isn't it?
They got as many problems as we did.
Ah, yes.
Would you like some water?
Yeah, I think I'd better go.
So you were in training in Leyte, anticipating
the Okinawa campaign? Okay,
and as I said, I think we knew just about what
the troops' strength was,
how the Japanese troops' strength was on
Okinawa. We didn't necessarily know their
disposition, how they were sited, how the U.S.
divisions were sited, and where the
headquarters were in, and all that kind of
thing. But we learned about all kinds of
aspects of the countryside, the geography, the
topography. And several times in the
last two days, these tombs have been mentioned.
There's one ridge called Tomb
Ridge, and one part of the first line, the
defense of the Japanese. Yeah, there were tombs all
over the island. Tombs all over, but they are,
in fact, mausolea. Mausolea are huge, all of
the living rock.
It's a Chinese custom, southern Chinese custom,
that's where it must have come
from. You, for a family burial place, you
create a crypt. It's a round, or a mound of
dome carved out of the rock. Twenty-five feet,
let's say, in diameter. And then, as the
walls go down to the ground, extending from the..
. after this
dome is created, in the very center, at ground
level, you create a little
entrance, rectangular entrance, where they put
the bodies in after death. Then it's a
courtyard, Masonry Courtyard, extended on one
side and one side. And the symbolism
to me is very obvious. You come out of a womb
at birth, and you go into the womb
at death. But anyway, they made, Carl Gardner
Stone, they made wonderful bomb
shelters, and they're all over the island, so
that that's where I think a lot
of the refugees or civilians trying to find
refuge would hide. Are we in Okinawa now?
I think we got there a little bit in advance.
Yeah, well that's okay, but you
were talking to me about the training and the
preparation work, and also you were
finding out about all of this. Yes, all of this
kind of stuff. Well, I wanted to ask you a
question. Sure. In some of the books that I've
read, I understand that the Okinawa
inhabitants were really different from the
Japanese. They had more direct routes
on to the mainland from China when they had
originally gone there, that the
language was somewhat different, wasn't
identical to Japanese, and that the
Japanese looked down, if you will, on them as a
sort of, as kind of an inferior group, isn't it?
Tell me about that.
Yeah, okay. We learned about that aspect of it
from some, of the nature of the Okinawan
culture and history and so forth.
The Ryukyu Archipelago came under both Japanese
and, historically has come under
both Japanese and Chinese influence. I would
say in the 19th century, maybe late
18th century, the influence was predominantly
Japanese by the daimyo of
the prefecture, a prefecture, Southernmost
prefecture in Kyushu Island, okay. But
there were Chinese influences going back,
that's where I said the tombs come from,
mausoleum come from. And there was a system of
paying tribute to both China
and Japan historically. But that became just to
Japan in the last hundred years
or so before. As to the language, the culture,
the clothing is different,
dances are different. The language is related
to Japanese more than to
Chinese, although there are Chinese loan words
in the Okinawan language, but it's a
different dialect and it's, unless you study
it, it's very hard to
understand and speak it. For the Okinawa
operation, therefore, you know, one of the
things is that there was substantial emigration
from Okinawa to Hawaii early
on. One of the reasons is precisely what you
said. There, in Japan, a very strong
way is a class consciousness, okay. Way back
into history, there are four classes in
traditional Japanese history. There's the elite
at the top, the samurai class,
then the farmers, and then the merchants, or
artisans, then the merchants, the
merchants at the very bottom of the class
system. Now, the inhabitants of the main
four main islands Hokkaido, H-O-K-K-A-I-D-O,
Honshu, that's the main island, H-O-N-S-U.
Yeah, you spelled those for us already, go ahead.
I did, okay.
Those that consider themselves the real
Japanese, the pure Japanese, or whatever,
you know, Japanese society can be as racist as
any society.
And they look down on the Okinawans, probably
to this very day.
when they incorporated Korea into the Japanese
Empire as a colony, they made
them to become Japanese citizens, but they were
not slaves, but they were
treated with disrespect. And, you know, 24th
Korea went into the occupation of
Korea. Do you want me to get into that later?
No. I'd like to get to Okinawa. Yeah, okay.
So, but anyway, Japan's divine mission was
supposed to be to free the Asian people from
the white colonizers, Great Britain, France,
and Holland, you know, and Germany, and create
a co-prosperity sphere, but when they were in a
position of power, they took up the same
kind of...
It became the imperialist...
It was like a colonial organization to me.
Was resented, is resented to this very day,
especially by China and Korea, okay.
yes, you're right. But, you know, the younger
generation spoke
standard Japanese, so basically we had no real
problem, although we had 15 members
attached to 10th Army headquarters who spoke
Okinawa. They got there a little late.
So tell me about when you were landed on the
island, and how that was, and when it was.
I remember it as being April 1, and I spoke to,
I talked to Stanley Falk, Dr. Stanley Falk,
who is the co-editor of the book that we cover
titled American Patriots. He's a trained historian.
He wrote the book on the history of the Leyte
campaign, and I said, you know, Stan, we were
on the beach there, on the island, and he said,
no way you guys are called headquarters, you know.
Today there was a comment made that because of
the fact that there was no
opposition, they had 60,000 troops landed,
American troops landed on the
first day or something like that. And we had 83
times that number. But I'm quite sure that
we were there on the very first day. Among
other things, as I came off the Ellis Island,
right around the beach was this body of a dead
woman. And I don't think if we came in
on L plus two or three, she would still be
there, have been there. In any case, I
remember that. I'm quite sure we were there on
L day. But we moved in then very
quickly, as a number of speakers have said. And
we didn't really understand this
because, as I said, according to classic
military doctrine, especially Japanese
military doctrine, your objective is to
annihilate the enemy at the water's edge.
the way the Japanese put it, and there was
simply none of that heavy opposition, harassing
opposition, but no main force opposition.
So how long were you there then before you
started seeing opposition?
Well, we moved very quickly across the island
to a cool headquarters was set up atop a hill
on the ruins of a castle called Nakagusuku, N-A-K-A-G-U-S-U-K-U.
It means Central Castle.
There's a Shuri Castle, and that was the headquarters
of the General Ushijima.
I think you have that name from the other
pieces on here.
So it was atop of Hirakawa.
We were there the first day, in camp there.
And the thing about that is that we
assume that the Japanese funeral artillery
had this on their cross.
OK, tape two.
Go ahead, Walter.
So the headquarters was placed at the top of
this hill,
ruins of the central castle.
And we couldn't-every evening at about 6 p.m.,
the Japanese field artillery would start
shelling us.
But all the projectiles went wrong, and I
couldn't figure that out, because they must
have had the field coordinates there, because
you never really know exactly where they are.
Why are they missing something?
I couldn't-whatever.
Then we set up operations to do our work there,
and almost immediately we got these documents
that we began translating, classified
documents, top-secret orders and operational order.
Did I tell you, I spoke about this, about the
strategy for defense of the island.
I spoke, I know I spoke about that during the
talk, but I hadn't spoken about that yet.
Tell us about that briefly.
Well, the reason that there was no opposition
on the beaches is that that was the strategy.
The basic strategy according to this document,
top secret document, military top secret,
and that's top, top secret, was that it was
captured almost immediately after the landings.
How a document of that type could fall so
easily into our hands, I don't know.
It's been a mystery to me.
Almost like it was a decoy.
Well, except that what was known before we
invaded Okinawa
was a general outline of their strategy,
which was to fight at the water's edge to
annihilate the enemy.
But that was changed later to...
Fighting from fortified positions.
fortified positions in the waist of the island,
stretching about three miles
across the waist of the island, near the
capital city of Shuti, the city of Naha.
And, but no one thought that this was a false
document. Okay. Yeah, but we
translated that, and the idea was this, that
there would be no opposition, no
main force opposition, as far as the 90s are
concerned, they would be harassing
for our cause. But maybe that's what they
reported yesterday on the Marine unit
that came under a fairly heavy fire, but on the
first two or three days. But the
idea was this, that they would let the enemy
land and unload all of their,
all of their troops and all of their supplies,
and just wait.
Their strategy was organized a defensive
resistance to wear down-a war of attrition to wear
down the enemy forces.
And then, after we were all on land and
thinking ourselves safe and all our supplies
were with
us, they would hit us with the kamikazes and
any other separate ships they could muster
and kill the U.S. Navy, sink our shipping, our
transport shipping, cut our line of supply.
And then they could emerge from the heavily
fortified position and wait for the attack
to come, because their positions were very
heavily fortified, and to at least prolong
the war, the defense of the war, for whatever reason.
Yeah, now is this what those documents said?
The documents said that their strategy was to
let us land and then let the kamikazes
hit and destroy us.
I'm speculating as to why they adopted this.
We knew exactly who the commanding officer was
and we could supply biographical information
about him, Ushijima Mitsuru, and his chief of
staff, Isamu Cho, and we knew what the
divisions were there, and in what force. We
knew that they had recruited among, they
recruited, this is in other documents that we
brought, that we transmitted, that in
interrogations that were made of the civilian
population, that they recruited
heavily among the Okinawan population, male
population, to create a kind of
militia to bring the troop strength up to close
to 100,000, something of that
order. All that information we did supply,
through the information
collected through translation of documents and
interrogation of prisoners
of civilians. So was there interrogation of
civilians as well? Oh yes. Did you
participate in any of that? No, I did not
participate in those. Now, here's one of the
things that you may have heard about, cave
flushing in Okinawa. It was a term
where the civilians would retreat into their
mausoleum or to natural caves to
escape the bombardment, you know, there was a
huge amount of bombardment of
Daha and Shudi, the twin cities, which I
visited after the honor was declared
superior. Daha is at sea level, and Shudi is on
the top of the hill. But you can see
across the plain there, it was completely
flattened. Not a single building standing,
except for the skeleton of ferroconcrete
structures, several-story,
multi-story structure. I don't know what that
was used for, but that was the only
building's name. Now you can imagine, that was
under naval bombardment, BB
battleships and cruisers and aerial bombardment.
You can imagine, not all the
civilians escaped from those cities. These are
homes now. I just don't know. I imagine. I was
fortunate that I didn't get to the front lines.
I did not see all this killing. I
didn't see all these dead bodies. The only dead
body I saw was on the beach the first day.
Now, but I knew the civilians were being killed
as part of the 20th Century Total War.
And then the civilians naturally took refuge in
these caves.
And then you were talking about cave flushing.
Some of the guys were, some of our interpreters
who spoke excellent Japanese,
asked to go into these caves and convince them
that, no, we're not going
to kill them, we're not going to rape them,
we're not... if you come out, we'll feed you
properly and provide food and place to live,
and all this kind of thing, and, you know, that
takes an awful lot of guts.
For one reason, one of the documents that I
translated myself was, I
call it a jack-in-the-box position, positions,
field positions. It's in
Japanese, it's called, it would be directly
translated as Beikuri. Beikuri means
surprise. Surprise, raku means Box. Jinchi
means military position, surprise box
positions. You know, the instructions were for
those who remained
behind to harass the enemy, or any other
reason, even at the front, was to
hide, secrete themselves in some of these
mausolea or caves, until they let the
enemy pass, and then spring out from behind
them and shoot them down, in a
surprise manner. Surprise, surprise, you know.
So I translated this Jack-in-the-Box
position from, you touch the cover, pops up,
you know, surprise the
kids, you know. Anyway, the one possible
adverse effect of that, which I didn't
really think about at the time, but when I
learned later about the enormous civilian
casualties, and there was talk today about
plane throwers and napalm and so forth, and
white blossoms, shells, I knew those were being used.
It was that if you, I translated that document,
it was circulated.
And if the troops are warned to watch out for
this kind of thing, every time they come
come across a tomb or a cave, they would treat
it as a suspect position.
Assume that was Japanese. And going there was
paint, flamethrowers in order to kill them.
And for the Nisei who are competent and
Japanese to go, we asked to go in
there and try to coax the people out. They
didn't know whether there were these
Jack-in-the-box position type soldiers or
civilians to do that, it's like no
matter... That is a potential suicide mission.
Absolutely, you know, but you know what
happened, when those guys went in, and I don't
have any numbers as to the
number of caves they entered and the number of
civilians that
lived, most of them turned out to be civilians,
almost all that they went
into. Maybe a couple of straight soldiers mixed
in with the civilians, but they were
reluctant to come out because they had been
indoctrinated. Part of the indoctrination
that the soldiers received to be taken prisoner
is the ultimate disgrace and that kind of
nonsense. But I'm not sure that they all
believed in you and the soldiers, because
there's at least one kamikaze that was involved
in the interrogation of
whom I was involved, who didn't want to die for
the Emperor.
Did not? Did not want to. He wasn't quite on
board. Well, what happened is this. I
think at the time this was scraping the bottom
of the barrel. They were taking most of the
young guys, 16, maybe 16, certainly 17 or 18,
and giving these training courses to fly
in a suicide plane, and they were taking
anybody who could fly a plane. This one guy
they got
was a 35-year-old civilian pilot working for a
civilian pilot, a commercial pilot,
and he had a wife and children. And what he
did, he swore to crash his plane,
bomb-laden plane, into any kind of a ship he
could see in the bay there. What he
did was pancake his ship along a convenient
naval vessel and wait for
help, for the Americans to fish him out of the
water, was he. Under interrogation
he said, I knew I was supposed to die for the
Emperor, but I have a family and I
have children and a wife. I didn't want to just
kill myself. I suspect that there was more
than he who felt the same way, you know. But
that was the
exception rather than the rule? Probably,
probably, but one of the
people said this morning there were about, the
Japanese had a garrison of
about 90,000 or 100,000. In terms of the ratio
of prisoners to the existing
pre-battle troop strength there was the highest
percentage of 9% of some of
that meant 9,000 prisoners were taken. I
suspect they're not all. And there was a
suicide, suicide by civilian suicides. So would
you say your time on Okinawa,
mostly you were translating documents and were
you involved in any
interrogation while you were there? No, not
really. Okay. Except for this one guy who was
fished out of the water.
There was another, there was a man named Donald
Keene, K-E-E-N-E. He was a person, he was a
genius, one of these
linguistic geniuses who was a, excuse me,
studying Persian at the Columbia University in
New York. The Navy got a hold of him, turned
him into a Japanese language
specialist, and he was with Third Amphibious.
But for some reason, they
sent him to the 24th Corps Headquarters, and I
worked with him, and
interrogated this pilot we pushed out. The
pilot you were speaking of that they
Yeah, right, and he was also the one who
thought of the idea of propaganda, you know, producing
propaganda leaflets to drop on the troops, and
there were no, leaflets, yeah, no, we're
not going to murder you, we're going to treat
you damn well, you're going to be fine, we'll
treat you well. There was a Japanese Army
lieutenant captured with his Okinawan
nurse girlfriend, and I think that the reason
he absconded was because he
didn't want to, he wanted to stay with his
girlfriend, he didn't want to die for the Emperor.
So when Donald King had this idea that we can
use this for propaganda purposes,
and he suggested that a couple of expressed an
interest in getting married,
so why don't we hold a Shinto ritual ceremony,
marriage ceremony, for this
couple, take photographs of this, print this on
these propaganda leaflets, and
show them how we treated POWs and prisoners.
Let them marry.
And let them marry. And I don't know how
effective those propaganda leaflets were, to
tell you the truth.
Even that one that was dropped down. But that's
the kind of thing. I remember another thing.
I told you about that guy. Oh, excuse me.
I told you about this guy who had spent his
formative years in Japan, not knowing he was an
American citizen.
He could barely speak English when he came back
to the United States.
And we boarded that troop ship out of Hawaii, I
think in maybe July of 1944,
and we eventually landed on Lake in October.
Several months we were aboard that ship. We
landed at Eniwetok, where we had a beer party,
and we landed in the Manus Islands someplace.
With that guy, Hiroshi Ito, they'd been
scumming before,
Hiroshi, I didn't get it, H-I-R-O-S-H-I, Ito,
I-T-O-W. Hiroshi Ito spent all of his time aboard
studying the Japanese-English dictionary, so
that he could be, at least, have gained
some reading fluency in English documents. But
he was our social
specialist, the cursive script specialist, and
he was the one who, if we captured a
document that was handwritten in the cursive
style, it would be very difficult.
We spent hours translating, we turned it over
to him, and he would provide the
block print version of it, and we transmit from that.
Yeah. What else happened in Okinawa that you'd
like to tell us about?
Well, I remember talking to Donald Keene about
the nature of loyalty.
One of the reasons we were evacuated, the
Americans were evacuated,
was because we were considered to be disloyal,
possibly disloyal,
potential spies, and so forth. And I said,
here's this guy, Hiroshi Ito. He's Japanese
through and through.
When he's drafted, he goes into the army
without objection.
Right now, he's helping us translate these
documents that are going to
kill off Ryuzan and the defeat of the Japanese
troops and so forth, and he's
doing this. How do you explain loyalty? How do
you define loyalty when you come
to an individual like that. And these words
that we use, honor, duty,
countryism. Even country. You know, people come
up to me and say,
what did you do in the war? I was in the U.S.
Army. There was a Japanese name
specialist. Oh, where were you born? In
California. Oh, well then, how do you feel
about fighting your own people. You know, they
have this stereotype of...
That you're still Japanese and not American.
Exactly the case. And so, what was I saying
before that?
What was I talking about? I was talking about
Hiroshi Ito, but something else came along.
We're under...we're under stereotypes. And,
yeah, the stereotype of a Japanese is, uh...
Once a Japanese, always a Japanese, kind of.
Well, in general, they would put it more
crudely. Once a Jap, always a Jap.
In the Congressional hearing in 1943, the
hearing on the evacuation,
was asked by the Congressman, well, why can't
you separate the
lawyer from the disloyal? And that's when
General DeWitt said, once a Jap, always a Jap.
You know, that was the, those were the words
used by the McClatchy press in
Sacramento being in North California, and by
the Hearst papers, the Los Angeles
examiner, the San Francisco examiner, created
these monsters, especially in the
thirties. Stereotypes, barbed-toothed, wearing
glasses and looking like
apes, gremlins, you know. And they used the
word Jap freely. But we also had our
stereotypical notions about loyalty. How is it
possible? Just because you're born
in the United States and you can be a loyal
American citizen? I
think not. But how is it possible that this
guy, Hiroshi Ito, is so loyal to his
country of birth? So that kind of thing is, I
still don't understand it.
And that other thing that I don't really
understand is why the Japanese were so
careless with their constant information. I
think it may possibly be because of
racial superiority ideas in the Japanese, that
Japanese is such a complex
language to understand and master that there's
no way Americans can figure it
out, learned how to figure it out, and they
didn't have to worry about it. You know, if
American officers are trained that, if they're
face-captured, what you do with
those classified documents is to burn them or
throw them in bags with stones in it, sink
them, and all this kind of thing, you know.
Japanese officers apparently were not trained
to do that. This is something that's very
puzzling to me, because they should have been
aware, were aware, must have been aware,
that the importance of securing these
documents, in some cases apparently did,
but throughout the war in the Pacific, all
these top-secret documents keep
popping up all over, you know, and the
intelligence gate from then was almost as
important, I think, as the radio intercepts
that were decoded and
Let me ask you a general question, you saw and
heard of the Japanese atrocities quote
unquote during World War II, even though you
were American your parents came from Japan
you knew them and how they were, were you, and
do you think they, were shocked
to see how the, what things the Japanese did or..
. You see it starts in the
1930s. This is about the Japanese's atrocities.
Japan invaded North China.
Well, Nigeria in 1931, but in 1937, North
China, then for an invasion of, that's in
North China, Central China, Shanghai, 19, then
there's the Rape of 19. Right.
Infamous Rape of 19.
I was, 1937, I was still in high school, but I
remember talking to Argyle, my father, about
place. And he didn't accept it, or didn't try
to explain it, or condone it, but he
had a different perspective than I. I was an
incipient pacifist. I was reading
Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. You know, they
both, Gandhi was heavily influenced by
constant non-violent resistance to evil. That's
how we brought the British Empire
down. And when I was in college I became more
of a pacifist and among other
things I did not like what the Japanese were
doing in China and Korea, treating
people as subhumans, essentially, in order to
do that. Now military discipline may
break down in battle, and you may get all kinds
of atrocities, but you still don't...
And that happened on both sides? Yeah, you
still don't condone it.
And then, I'm not sure when I became aware,
maybe it was after the war, about the
biological experiments that the Japanese ran on
Chinese in Manchuria.
How are you going to get scientists to do that
kind of thing? Who knows? But, well, we had the
same kind of thing
happening with great doctors in Mississippi
infecting negros with Syphilis and observing them.
in Germany as well. Well, sorry, you look for a
Transnistrian friend, but you don't have to look
for a Transnistrian friend if it's so blatant
as it were in the case of the Axis powers, you know.
And then your sensitivities or your
sensibilities or your ethical way of looking at
life becomes
changed. You know, the 20th century, the latter
part of the 20th century is when total war begins.
War used to be between military units, but when
Mussolini started bombing the civilians in
Abyssinia in the early 30s, or mid-30s, Rape
and Uncanny, and then the mass bombing by the
Germans of London, the retaliatory raids on
Dresden. This is total war. You don't
care about what happens to, in essence, you
don't care. You have a firebomb near Tokyo, and
the atom bomb near Hiroshima. You don't care
about it. That's part of the mindset now.
There's nothing in the law, international law,
there's something maybe in
your conscience that might break your
conscience, but there's nothing in the
there's more prohibiting this kind of behavior.
It's total war. So I don't,
still don't condone it, even if it's total war.
I'm very... But you said your
father had a different perspective. Well,
especially later. He said, you talk
about, he says to me, and not in direct answer
to my complaint about how the
the Japanese are acting in China, but so you're
talking about democracy. Look at
the way you're being treated today. At least
the Japanese are trying to
are trying to correct that kind of blatant
racial... I don't think so at all
that it works quite that way. I think there's a difference.
Interesting viewpoint, though. That was his
viewpoint. Well, it was at that time.
But, you know, he was interrogated by an FBI
agent, he told me, when he was in camp,
in a relocation, we used to call camps,
relocation center, and they had a loyalty
oath administered to all males, alien and
citizens. When we got into the age, there were two
questions there. Would you forego allegiance to
the Emperor of Japan? Yes or
no. Would you be willing to fight in the armed
force of the United States, yes or no? And my
father refused to respond
positively to these two questions, and he told
me that the FBI agent came last
morning, and my father said to him, well, you
know, your laws make me ineligible for
U.S. citizenship. If I lose my Japanese
citizenship, then I become a stateless
person. I have no protection from anybody." The
FBI agents saw the, you know, it seemed
a reasonable argument, so they didn't question
him further. But my father was
kind of, he had some contradictory feelings
about this, because one of the
reasons he came to this country in the first
place was because of this talk
about American democracy, freedom, and justice
for all, all this kind of thing, so
you have to believe that. But then after the
war, in the very famous case,
Constitution, there was a woman named, well,
there was, you say woman, was a civil
servant in the state of California. She had
civil rights lawyers in San
Francisco sought her out as a candidate to test
the constitutionality, Mitsue
Endo. It's her name, M-I-T-S-U-Y-E, second
family name Endo, E-N-D-O. Endo K. Sweets
found a red baby corpusin when she was
turned at the Temperan racetrack. And that case
went all the way up to the Supreme
Court. It was finally decided in December,
Mid-December of 1944, and the Supreme
Court found that she had been
unconstitutionally detained, that the army
had acted wrongly and that she should be
immediately liberated and freed. And it
was the day before the War Department had
reached the same conclusion. They
issued a notice, announcement, saying that the
camps would be closed and the
evacuees would be free to return to their homes.
And that was late 44? It took a
whole year for that to happen. But, of course,
by that time, there was a record
established by the 442nd in Europe, and the War
Department was certainly aware,
if the rest of the country was not, of the
contributions we were making in the
Pacific, and this contradictory, fundamentally
contradictory policy of
been turning on the one hand, Japanese
Americans, and exploiting them on the
battlefield, on the other, could no longer be
sustained, especially when the
publicity arose about the exploits of the 442nd
U.N. So the War
Department backed on, determined by that time
that no, there was no real threat as
far as loyalty and potential spies and
saboteurs and the people in the camps.
then he said that they would close the, close
the camps. As I say, it took them a
whole year. The next day, the Supreme Court
came down with this decision on the
Endo case. At the same time, it's very
interesting, there was Fred, the man named
Fred Korematsu, K-O-R-E-M-A-T-S-U. Every legal
student knows about the Korematsu
case, because it involves a very fundamental
constitutional issue. Can a
citizen be deprived of liberty without due
process? Korematsu violated the
Exclusion Zone Act, or Proclamation, because he
wanted to stay behind, you
he had a girlfriend who was smart. And he took
surgery, but he was eventually caught and
arrested and tried and convicted of violating
that proclamation. That case
wound up to the, eventually wound up, that was
in mid-1942, that case wound up tied to
the Endo case, Kurematsu ex Parte Endo. He was
convicted. Why? Because under the
doctrine of military necessity, the president
can suspend the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln did, and he jailed a lot of
legislators in their
the Civil War, only because one of the, I don't
know if it was a slave state, if they
voted for, to, to join the Confederacy, then
there would be Washington, D.C. between,
be surrounded. Between Virginia and, and so he,
and that would impair the security of the
State Department. So he had a good reason. And
so he, one of the latest
letters was caught in a mob trying to burn
railroad bridges in
north of Baltimore. And, you know, that would
cut the line of supply going into
Washington from the north, and he had their
connection to a prison in Baltimore.
Okay, so what else can we talk about today?
We've heard your experiences
and lately and... Okay, let me say something
about... What else would you like to say?
Let me say something about why I think my faith
in my country was vindicated.
Okay. Because there were people in the camps my
age who said no to those two
questions that I'd let the questioner. They
said, I would say yes, yes to both
questions if you restore my constitutional
rights. And they were
tried, convicted, sent to prison. And they were
later pardoned by President Truman.
You know, when the 442nd final elements of the,
last elements of the 442nd
returned from Europe in 1946, they were royally
treated in your city and invited
to the White House Rose Garden for a reception,
and Harry Truman famously said,
you fought prejudice at home and abroad. And
so, and he was the one who
desegregated the military in 1948, I believe it
was. And then there was the Brown vs. Board of
Education, which made them separate but equal
educational facilities,
are concessional, and as Mr. Campbell came
along with this, I have a dream speech
forcing the American people to realize that the
dreams that he is
talking about were the dreams of the founders
of the Republic, and there's
enormous change. And that's what's restored
your... Well, it did... I never lost
my faith, but that it simply reinforced what I
had believed in was right to
begin with. We're not perfect yet. We still
have a way to go. But look what's
happened to me in my own career. I got a
government job that I could not have
really aspired to, and I went up that ladder
because equal employment and all
that kind of stuff, you know. I wound up with a
very important position at the
Library of Congress in the senior executive
service. That could never have
happened in Pre Pearl Harbor, United States. So
we've made a lot of progress. We've made
an enormous amount of progress. I'm proud of
that, but we still have a way to go.
And when I look at the... Asians as a group,
Asian-Americans as a group, have
benefited from that. And I think in large some
measure because the
contributions of people like me who served in
the Pacific and people who
served. Now, the thing about our service, it
was kept secret until fairly late. The first
published book, as I know about, was something
called Yankee Samurai, by a guy
named Joseph Harrington, published in the
1960s, I believe. The best book on the
subject was published in 1993 or 1995. I think
it's still in print or maybe
be available by eBay, it's by Lynn Krost,
L-Y-N-C-R-O-S-T, and it's called
Honor by Fire, and she covers, Lynn Krost
covers both the both the 447 and the
MIS, and it's a chronological narration of
World War II with alternating
chapters covering the two battlefields. She
lived in what she's a Washington, D.C.
office, a resident was, a graduate of Brown,
and she came to see me to
when she was doing conductive research on this
book, when I was an officer at the Library of Congress.
And we became very good friends.
And I once asked her, she's not dead, but I
once asked her
how it was that she came to be such a champion
of Japanese Americans.
And I knew that she had been a journalist,
a foreign reporter for the...correspondent for
one of the Honolulu papers, and she
said that it begins this way. I grew up in a
excluding Irish family, but my
grandmother, who was a first immigrant, was
there separately, and she lived...she grew up
mostly under her grandmother's influence. Her
grandmother faced discrimination as an
Irish person, as a person of Irish extraction,
and she was very much for the
Downtrodden and the champion of the people who
hadn't received a break in
American society. And after she graduated
Brown, she couldn't get a job, this is
1937 or so, she went to Honolulu where she had
an aunt, and she got a job
reporting as a society editor for one of the
newspapers, and then when Wu came
in the 100th Infantry Battalion, which is
Hawaiian, in the 442nd, which is largely
Hawaiian, who was sent to Europe, she got a job
to accompany them, reporting
to the back to the newspaper. And then, so she
came to know these GIs, you know,
wanted to say something, write something about
them, so she published this book.
And she wanted to include the MIS because there
was very little published about the
MIS. So that's, that's why she came. But it was
because she basically... I found this
interesting, because my daughter married an
Irish-American, and my son married a
Polish-Irish-American, and my eldest son
married a Taiwanese.
You know, our generation married all the
Japanese, and our sons
are married all over the map.
But the thing is this.
Polish-Americans, Irish-Americans, were at one
time considered minorities.
Poor Irish and all this stuff, they were dumb fools.
And they weren't treated as equals.
So I think that part of the reason
that people were treated that way,
Jewish-Americans also.
A lot of intermarriage with Jewish-Americans
in this country.
And so that's, you know, it's these, well,
as far as I, as far as personally I'm concerned,
I think that I would never have gotten the opportunities
get the kinds of jobs if I had not had the
education which I got through the GI Bill of
Rights, and if I had not, if the job, if the
barriers to
opportunities in this country had not been
removed through the
Civil Rights Movement and so forth. The
barriers had to be removed, but you also had to accomplish.
Exactly the point. You had to have your
credentials. If you had your credentials, then
you can move up.
Yeah. And that's changed in this country and I
think therefore I was not mistaken
in saying that if people in my generation were
in positions of political
power this evacuation never would have happened.
Well Warren I want to thank you
for taking the time today. I'm very happy to do
this. It's been a it's been a
fascinating listening to your viewpoints and
your experiences and we don't have a
a lot of your kind of experiences in our
archives, so I think it's really expanded the breadth
and the perspective of our collection, so thank
you so much for taking the time.
Well, thank you for letting me speak to you.
Okay, thank you so much.