Frank yoshiharu nishio

Frank Nishio was a very active, enthusiastic man who dedicated his life to helping and serving others. From time spent in the military to running his optometry practice, Frank was involved in countless clubs and activities through his senior days. As a young man, Frank served in the U.S. Army during World War II as an Instructor at the Military Intelligence Service Language School. During the Occupation of Japan he served as the Officer in Charge of the Toyama and Maizuru Counter Intelligence Corps; Assistant Special Projects Officer for the Second Regional CIC Office. Though initially, Frank was dismissed from any opportunities to serve, with the rampant prejudice against Japanese in the military. He recalls in the days following Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist in the Medical Corps but was rejected. “I said, ‘I'm volunteering my life in service to my country. And you say, you don't know what to do with us guys.’ And he says well, ‘It's not me, there’s a captain. He says it's Washington.’ I know I was – I didn't have that kind of guts or that kind of attitude. I was greatly disappointed and actually went into a kind of depression, I think.”

Frank passed away in 2012 at the age of 92.  

My name is Frank Yoshihara Michu. I was born in Parlier, California, which is a maybe 30 miles from Fresno. I was born on January 18, 1920. Born to a farm. I think my father was managing the farm there. I'm not too sure.

He was a labor manager or farm manager or a farm leaser. He came originally from between Stockton and Sacramento. There was a large Japanese laboring community there. Walnut Grove was one place that was almost all Japanese there. It still is there. And my mother and he were married in Japan.

I don't know how large the farm was, but I recall that just the Japanese alone, there must have been 60, 70, 80, somewhere around there, living in the camp there. And my mother was cooking for them. And during the crop time, harvest time, he also had a group of Mexican Mexicans living in tents on the other end of the vineyard. So there must have been over a hundred laborers that he [managed]. And he was so proud of the horse. He was able to ride around a white horse. And he took me for a ride once I was five years old. And I was so thrilled to be able to ride a white horse.

Since you were born in 1920, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, you were 20 or 21.

21. I was going to Fresno State. And they bombed Pearl Harbor. So the very next day I went to volunteer for the army. I wanted to volunteer for the Air Corps which was the best, you know. Best part of the Army. And the guy says, I'm sorry, it's filled. I guess so I understood what he was saying.

So I says, “In that case, I volunteer for the Medical Corps.” In those days, everybody wanted to be in combat rather than in the back lines. So in that case I'll take the Medical Corps, and he says, “Come over here.” He took me aside and he says, “You're Japanese aren’t you?” And I says, “No. I’m an American. And we both laughed.” He says, “You know what I mean?” And I said, “Yeah I know what you mean.” He said, “We don't know what to do with you guys.” And I said, “I'm volunteering my life in service to my country. And you say you don't know what to do with us guys.” And he says well, “It's not me, there’s a Captain. He says it's Washington.”

I know I was – I didn't have that kind of guts or that kind of attitude. I was greatly disappointed and actually went into a kind of depression, I think.

So 1941 was –

It was a hard year because they [my parents] both started new businesses. And George just bought a brand new, I mean, an old used car. But, you know, you just bought a car. We were very poor. Then this thing started. So it was kind of a very economic of small crisis. You know, it was not like these big people who owned a lot of farm and stuff like that. We didn't have anything, but we were in debt.

So do you remember the day Pearl Harbor was bombed and what happened?

Oh, yeah, well, I was out driving somewhere. And I heard on the car radio that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. So I drove back home and announced it to the family. And then the next day I volunteered to see.

You know, a lot of people I talk to the reality of the situation didn't really sink in because for many they thought, well, Japan's over there, I'm an American and nobody could foretell all these events to happen.

Well, it was coming. I think it was not anticipated in such a drastic event as Pearl Harbor. You know, we knew that relationships were very, very bad. But actually the the passenger ships were not coming anymore. They had just recalled it

In December?

In December.

And then now the Executive Order comes down in February. Do you remember reading the Order?

Yeah, it was all over and every telephone post had it. You see, the impact of being rejected for going into the US Army was so great that I quit college in February. And I was very happy doing day laborer work, kneeling down and capping vegetables and stuff like that. Very hard worker, staking beans, you know, post and stuff like that. I was very happy doing that because it bothered me so much that I was rejected as an American. I think I was relatively emotional, an emotional person that held things within myself, you know. The impact of the rejection was so great that these same things and stuff like that didn't bother me a bit. Relocation didn't bother me. Going to the assembly center didn't bother me. Most people were impacted by that.

So anyway, these posters came up on every telephone pole and we had to decide what to do with our stuff, you know. So everybody was selling, and we didn't have much to sell anymore. There were a lot of people who had just bought a new car and a new car in those days, like a Buick, cost a thousand bucks. And they were selling it for $100 because nobody would buy, they knew that they had to leave it so they offered very little. It's unbelievable what happened. It's like you cant just really describe it. But you know, after it was all over we are told that well it wasn't as bad as the Jews in Germany, which is true.

But we were citizens of the United States, which is supposed to be a democratic place. It's hard to visualize these kind of things unless you were there, you know. And when the war ended or when the war started, there were 5 or 6,000 Japanese in Imperial Valley. After the war ended, only 100, including children, returned.

What was it like to be at the assembly center?

We were in a 20x20 room. Our whole family was moved into. So we had eight, seven cots. Fortunately our family had seven members: father and mother, Joe and his wife, my brother George and I, and Joe's oldest son Herbert, that made seven of us into eight compartment room. So they didn't put a non-family member in there. So we had whole room to ourselves. We hung sheets. I was living in a real shack so there was no privacy. But we had a lot, a lot of people living in one place and a lot of young folks, too of the same age and we were all kind of searching around to get to know other people too.

I found a job as a stocker and staff was opening up a place that held hoes and shovels and stuff. And I gave them out to some old folk Isseis hoeing and stuff like that to clean up the place. I think it was around May of 1942, to the Fresno Assembly center, which is in the fairgrounds.

And in the middle of the summer, you went to –

Oh, it was in the fall that we went to Jerome, which is in Arkansas in the lowlands. Red clay, dirt swamp, where it's not swamp, which is a little river area. This red fine dust used to come into the houses, you know, through the cracks. Everything turned grit. After a while. Because you wipe it. I'm sure you're familiar with, with the inside of that.

[In terms of what happened in camp], one person asked me if I would teach his children judo. So I say okay. And we had a guy that was really, really entrepreneurial. He was only 18 or 19 when the evacuation came about. And, you know, the man thought that we were all going to have to go. So, no use crying about it. If I go in first, there are two most important things in life. Food and residence. If I go in there first, I will have my selection. And he became the man to control all of the mess halls so he would have the food. And he was a very good talker. He and I became good friends. So he says, “Frank, whenever you want to go outside we can manage that.” And he did this with others. So he got a truck. I was able to go get the judo gear and stuff like that. Otherwise there's nothing available in camp. Then we went out to the restaurant and ate outside this little Chinese restaurant called Shanghai.

What a privilege.

Yes.

So he became the head of mess halls.

Yeah. He was in charge of all the mess halls so he could get anything, any food any time. And when he went to Jerome he didn't work but he started gambling. We used to go gamble there and he would, you know, take part –

As the manager.

And he would give us whiskey, which was taboo in the camp. He had candy and potato chips and stuff like that, you know. And everybody was happy with what he was doing. He was furnishing us a place where we could play poker and besides you know, we can have things that we can’t get any more. In that area. It snowed too. And during the wintertime, we for the first time were able to play snow, snowball fights, you know. We had some very interesting things happen because there were a lot of young ladies in the area.

Well, I was just going to say you're 22 about that age.

And there are a lot of 18 to 20 year old girls. We started to visit, you know. Some of them rejected us, others accepted us and we had all kinds of people that we talked to.

Later on, a friend who visited Jerome, said they were looking for instructors from the University of Michigan. So somebody told me and I applied and I was accepted. Surprise, surprise. I was 23 years old.

23 years old. So that's 1943.

‘43 yes. And I was the youngest instructor there, and I was in the second group of instructors. The first group, I guess the youngest probably was the late 20s or something like that. There were some Isseis there, too, but they were very capable. Bilingual.

So here you are teaching at the University of Michigan. But your heart was still in going into the military.

Yes, I was thinking about it. But what happened was, I did not like teaching. Not as much [the] classroom teaching, but the staff meetings and faculty meetings. So I volunteered and they turned me down because it was higher priority. And I met with [Colonel] Rasmussen. And he said, “Okay, I'll get you in.” And I got in.

And when was that?

1944, December ‘44. I got in. And so when I got in, it was just before Christmas. I was at Fort Sheridan in Illinois. I went through school and taught school and then I got my commission with five other guys. And we didn't go to officer candidate school. We got our direct commission without going to officer training school and then we went overseas.

Now, when you went overseas, you mean Japan specifically?

Yeah.

And what year was that?

1946. And I stayed till ‘48.

I wanted to hear about the gambling.

Well, when I was in Missouri, there were four or five of us. We didn't do any gambling. But there were about five guys that gambled, and I cleaned them out the first night.

And this is poker.

Poker, yes. But after the payday, you know, we’d play and I’d clean them out. I was just lucky. And when I got to Kyoto, we used to play again with the new, group including some of these guys, too. I used to win, too. I was just lucky. And some guys still owe me from there.

How much do they owe you?

Well, some guys still owe me from Korea. Yeah, I won a lot of that there too. And I cleaned those guys out and I used to sit in the back $1,000, $2,000 at a time. When we were about to leave Japan, there were 200 some odd officers at the depot replacement depot close to Yokohama and a whole bunch of officers. Nobody knew each other. And somebody says, let's start a game. So two table started at about 10:00, one table folded. And four guys after midnight. And we broke up about six in the morning because we had to rush to embark on the ship. And by that time I think I had cleared a thousand bucks. I know in those days a thousand bucks was a lot of money. So when I came home, I had $10,000 in the bank. When I came back, I was still a second lieutenant because they were trying to talk me into reupping. I said, no, I'm going home. And finally they shipped me home.

So the redress comes together to make a petition against the government. Do you have comments about that?

I think it was the greatest thing that happened. As I understand it, it came out of San Francisco from this young man. I think he was from Hawaii originally. He was an instructor at San Francisco State. In preparation for this, I started to give talks and figured –

In preparation for the movement?

For the redress. Redress was being negotiated and investigated. And I says whether we win or lose, the people are going to wonder what the hell these guys are doing. So I went around giving talks and caught hell for it.

Who gave you hell?

Three, three of the big boys around here. I was giving talks to service clubs. There weren’t Japanese in there. This were all hakujin audiences.

So when you say that the redress movement was the greatest that happened, are you talking about for the nation?

For everybody in the whole world, because guess what's being brought up today with Afghanistan? The Japanese, you know, what can we do with the Arabs here, what we shouldn't do with the Arabs. And if it were not for the redress, we wouldn't even be talking about it because they would have said, “Well, legitimately they were incarcerated.” And I think that was one of the nicest things that ever happened for the betterment of everybody.

And it's going to be more and more important because the world is getting smaller. And the intermingling that is taking place not only in the United States but in other places, too.

Interview conducted by Grace Megumi Fleming. JAMsj thanks Grace for allowing the museum to archive and share these oral histories