Hiroshi Kamei

Before the war, Hiroshi Kamei was born and raised in what was once Orange County’s sprawling farm country. His family were hardworking, modest farmers from Wakayama prefecture, whose ingenuity in farming created fertile, profitable land. But after Pearl Harbor, everything changed. The FBI had kept track of all the Japanese American farming families, and came knocking on the Kamei’s door almost immediately. “On this map was where every farm was located. And I think our number was 161, 191 or something, and that was our family number, which listed my father's name, my mother's name and how many acres we farmed. So they went through the trouble, many many months before Pearl Harbor of keeping tabs of where everybody lived. Nobody can tell me that Pearl Harbor was a surprise.”

When the war broke out, the Kamei family was forced to leave their home - and their prosperous farming property to their landlord - behind and move to the desert landscape of Poston, Arizona. There Hiroshi witnessed his grandfather (already compromised with a weak immune system) suffer from the unbearable heat and become hospitalized. But the family survived relatively unscathed, and Hiroshi himself was on his way to college when he was drafted for the service in 1945. A natural student with a keen intuition for math, Hiroshi became a medical technician for the U.S. Army in Japan, and parlayed this experience into a degree at Caltech in Pasadena. For the rest of his career, he worked and lived in the same area in which he grew up. Hiroshi passed in 2007 at the age of 80, survived by his wife of 51 years and four children. 

Today is February 20th, 2006. Would you start out with your birth date and where you were born? 

Well I was born in Gardena, California. LA county. I was born in October, 1st, 1927. Well my mother told me it's October 1st but my birth certificate says October 2nd. 

Can you tell me your mother and your father's names? 

Oh my mother, name was Shizu Kamei. And my father's name was Toranosuke, Tiger. Kamei is my mother's name because my father was the yōshi [adopted into wife's family and takes the wife's name].

Oh, okay. Do you know his last name?

Well he has a very rich history but his family that he went to as an apprentice was Wada. So he came to the United States as a Wada. He had different last names. I don't know too much about it. But my mother and my father were both from Wakayama.

Would you like to say anything about your brothers and sisters? 

Well let's see I have a large family. Seven altogether. My oldest actually, when she was born she went to live with my grandparents. So she was more or less not in our immediate family. But then I have, the first three were girls. My oldest who lived with my grandparents was Tomiko. 

Were your grandparents in Japan or here?

No, no they were here but living separately.

Oh where did your grandparents live?

Well grandparents were from Wakayama, too. But my grandmother was from Hiroshima.

I'm sorry I interrupted, you were listing your brothers and sisters.

Well my oldest sister was Tomiko, then my next oldest sister was Kiyoko. She lives in West LA. And my next in line is Miyoko. She lives with Kiyoko right now. And then the next in line was my older brother. His name was Henry, Minoru was his given name. And then me, and then I had a younger sister, Natsuko. But she passed away. She's the youngest girl in the family, and she's the first one to pass away.

Oh that's tragic. 

Yeah, then I have a younger brother. Kiyoshi. And he lives in Orange County.

We're generally a year or two apart. We lived and farmed and when I was born, I was born in Gardena. And we farmed there. And my mother told me that she worked the day before and the day after I was born. And I was delivered by midwife. In those days, we couldn't have the luxury of going to hospital.

So in nine years your mother had seven children.

Well yes [laughs].

 A very strong woman I would think. 

Oh yeah. The first rest she got, first vacation she had was when we were evacuated. 

When she didn't have to work quite as hard. I'm sure she still had laundry, unless she ordered the girls to do it. 

No my older sister [did that]. They all cooked very well and took care of the house. 

Well let's talk about your father, too. He must have been out there farming, too.

Ah yes, he farmed but in his younger days he did other things. He was a fisherman at one time, on a fishing boat. 

The impression I get when you talk about yōshi is usually, the wife's family has more money and it's sort of like if the husband can't pay or--how did it happen? 

It's that my father was not the oldest son from my understanding.

Oh I see. So he doesn't have an inheritance. So he became a yōshi.

But that doesn't mean that my mother's family was well-off. It's more, perpetuate that name.

Alright. So he was a fisherman. And did he do other things besides farming? 

Well I only learned a these things when he has too much to drink and he talks a lot [laughs] about what he did in earlier life. But I don't know that much.

Well, a lot of Issei men did have the reputation of drinking too much sometimes. And as strong as they were as pioneers, their wives didn't always like the way they were treated by their husbands.

Yeah. But then in those days they, you know, gaman.

Well would you like to paint a picture of what life was like for you growing up before you graduated from high school?

Yeah. I consider myself from Orange County. So I was born in 1927 and about 1930 or thereabouts, we moved to Orange County. And so we lived in Orange County, three or four different places before the war. And so farmed, small truck farming. Grew tomatoes and at one time we lived very close to where we're at right now. But the first to move into Orange County was to Buena Park. We farmed in Buena Park for several years. I started kindergarten in Buena Park.

Do you remember starting kindergarten?

Oh yes. I remember. We lived in Buena Park, it was probably a three or four mile walk into school. So we all went, my brothers, older sisters and I [walked]. And I went to kindergarten on Grand Avenue, which is now Beach Boulevard I remember. I remember going to kindergarten. I used to walk home myself as a kindergartener. Sometimes I'd wait around for my older sisters to walk home with them but later on, I was walking home myself. I would stop at the post office and pick up our mail and walk several miles.

And then several years from then, we moved to Irvine Ranch. And we leased some land from Irvine Company and lived in their housing. And people in those days they farmed in Peter's Canyon which is a ways in but we live in the housing which is in the lower place. Everybody had a pick-up truck and drove to Peter's Canyon to farm. 

Was the whole of Irvine owned by this one family?

It was Irvine Company, yeah. Peter's Canyon now is well developed into housing.

You've seen the whole place transform.

Oh yes. And then I started out second grade at Tustin grammar school. And in those days, everybody moved every three or four years because most--you couldn't own the land. So you leased the land; well you usually you sign a three year lease on the land. And some say that you moved every three years because in those days you couldn't afford the fertilizer. So you used the land for three years and then you moved someplace else, hope to find a more fertile piece of farmland. And then you stayed there for three years and then you move on. In-between leases, the land lays fallow and revitalizes, so someone new can come through and then it proves for a year. And then they move on to the next place. 

And then from Tustin we moved to Santa Ana Canyon right here, what is now Anaheim. And I went to third and fourth grade, all of this just a couple miles down from here. And then when I was in fifth grade we moved to Westminster.  And that was in June of 1941. We had a small farm, we farmed strawberries and tomatoes in the summertime. And celery. And in the wintertime we grew cabbage and broccoli and things like that. And that September I started Huntington Beach High School. 

So here you are, you started high school, you're pretty excited.

Yes I started high school and this is in September. And Pearl Harbor happens two months later.

Right. How was that?

Well I was going to Huntington Beach High School as a freshman, I was doing very well scholastically. And then after Pearl Harbor, well some people went to school usually through until Christmas break. 

Monday was a school day so I went to school. And then that's when we had the assembly during school hours  and that's when we heard Roosevelt there before the speech.

So that was live on radio? 

Yeah, on radio. 

How did it feel to be with all these students and listening to this?

No, I didn't feel anything particularly. I didn't feel threatened you know with physical harm. You felt uncomfortable because you know that you're Japanese and you know that most people don't know the difference. And  you certainly can't tell the difference looking at you. But no I didn't feel threatened. I think I quit school as much for staying home helping on the farm to get things ready. And you know, I didn't go to school because everybody else quit. Just about all of the Japanese quit school. 

Well you know I've talked to a few people about their experiences right after Pearl Harbor and one woman said that somebody started a fire in her front lawn.

Oh yeah, well I'm sure that there--because we had some experience. So Pearl Harbor Day one of the neighbors so was a Marine in WWI. And he had a little bit too much to drink and so he came to our house and came and told my father, yelling outside the house, "Come on out and fight you yellow-bellied Jap!" So it wasn't all peaches and cream. But that night, FBI people came to our house and my father wasn't by any means community leader and he didn't belong to any clubs or anything like that. So they had no reason to take him away. But they came to our house.

We had an ofuro outside. It was detached from our house. And two of my sisters were taking a bath and soaking in the tub. And here comes these FBI guys with a flashlight, shining light [laughs] It scared the wits out of my sisters. 

Oh I'm sure!

But they took away community leaders and anyone they thought might be of--would assume any leadership role. They took some people away that night and they never heard of them for six months or so. They knew where every family in Orange County lived. Every farmer in Orange County, they knew were they lived. And the reason I say that is because some years back when I first knew Dr. Hansen from Cal State Fullerton. He showed me a map of Orange County put out by the what is now AAA. Southern California Auto Association. And on this map where every farm was located. They had a small number. And I think our number was 161, 191 or something, and that was our family number. And then there was another book separate from this. And then they would say it was "161, then list my father's name, my mother's name and all the children, and how many acres we farmed. 

Oh my gosh. 

So they went through the trouble, many many months before Pearl Harbor of keeping tabs of where everybody lived. Nobody can tell me that Pearl Harbor was a surprise. There was an expectation among some people.

So in hindsight you found out that the FBI had pretty detailed notes about your family. That was in the last 10 years that you found out?

More like 10 to 15 years ago. 

So did you feel scared when the FBI was there? Were you feeling indignant?

No no. For one I was too young, 14. And they talked to my father separately.

Did your father understand enough English to--

Probably. But you know, he didn't understand that much English. I quit school in the week after Pearl Harbor. I went to school a few days. I might not have even given gone a week and went to farm.

That was must have been kind of lonely. You know, you had your friends there--

No we had things to do on the farm. I was not “big man on campus” or anything. And I'd only been there for a couple months. So I barely started. But I was a good student. I was a straight-A student. So when we were evacuated, then we all went to high school to get our transcript. 

But going back to Pearl Harbor day. We really didn't know that the attack on Pearl Harbor. But our landlord came -- we came home for lunch break -- and the landlord told us to stay indoors the rest of the day. He says, "You stay in the house the rest of the day because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor." This is before the Marine came along. There may be some bad treatment. So we were told to stay in the house. And I don't know whether somebody told him or he just did it on his own.

To me it's ridiculous that people will confuse some farmers in America with the Japanese Imperial Navy or kamikaze pilots. I mean you're thousands of miles away and in some people's minds it's like, "Oh you did this." I don't understand that kind of simplistic thinking that's so illogical but then I wasn't there and the hysteria. It must have felt really strange, not that like you said, most people were following the news on the newspaper or whatever. And I'm sure your family knew about Japan advancing into Manchuria.

We knew mostly through the newspaper, Japanese paper. My father took the Kashi Mainichi. And so, you read about the Japanese in China, the war in China.

But it wasn't a surprise to everybody that they'd come across the Pacific. They'd already gone to the Philippines, right? They were already starting to attack parts of the Pacific. They weren't just in China. Some farmers were literate, like your father, and read the newspaper and those literate people read the newspaper for the illiterate. And so everybody knew. 

I remember one thing, you asked whether my father was fluent in English or not. I remember one time, someone came to collect some bill from my father and my father didn't have the money to pay him and my father said that, you know, he was broke. And the guy, he took a matchstick and broke it and said, "You're always broke," he told my father. "You're always broke." I remember this as a probably 10 year old or so. And my father took this to mean that the man told him he was crooked. He broke the match and he was crooked, and my father really got mad. I remember my father really got mad. It was a misinterpretation, my father took it as crooked. And he said he meant to say he was broke. 

And what happened after that? 

Well, there was some hard feelings because of the language barrier.

Yeah. Big big difference in the meanings.

You know, I wasn't part of the conversation with my father and the FBI, for example. I don't know what was asked or what he said. I'm sure that there was some language barrier.

We've been talking about Pearl Harbor Day a lot. And please add more if you like. but as you said we need to go on to maybe the next topic, which is probably the beginning of evacuation.

Nowadays February 19th is a big day. But I don't know -- most people didn't know that President Roosevelt signed that.

If he did sign something but it didn't affect me at that time. Not that day. It's just another day.

So when did you and your family find out about the evacuation order?

Well, there's a few things that happened before. We had to first turn in our so-called contraband equipment and so we didn't have anything except we had a radio that had shortwave thing in it. So we dutifully we took that to the police. headquarters in Santa Ana. And after the war when we came back, we still had a receipt for this radio. And so we went to claim our radio in Santa Ana. And the man goes back and looks for it and comes back. He comes out with just the shell of the radio. Someone had taken everything out of the radio and just left the plastic case. And they returned that plastic case to us. In thee the police department basement [laughs].

That's pretty fishy.

Anyway, that sort of thing happened. There was few things -- we went to the meeting and each family was told they could send one or two representatives to these meetings and so we listened to what was going on. This was all after they posted all these notices on the--well there were lots of these notices tacked on to just about every telephone pole and it wasn't just one, it was just about every building. A lot of the telephone poles had these notes about the evacuation. So we had to leave on such and such day and "know what you can take" and this sort of thing.

How was that because it's so public? 

Well what this led to was these evacuation sales. You had to get rid of your property. Everybody knew you had to leave on a certain day. So like everybody else, we had this evacuation sale. And I remember the people -- cars were lined up for quarter mile down the road, both directions. You know they lined up because they wanted to come to our house.

And then they're going from house to house to house right? 

And they came to see what they can get for nothing. We had a refrigerator we had recently bought. GE refrigerator. We sold out for five dollars. And we had a Model-A pickup. We had just put brand new tires and tubes on it. Costs us over a hundred dollars to put new tires and tubes and put a new battery in it. And we sold for a hundred dollars. And we grew celery. And celery you have to spray it so the leaves don't get diseased.

And we bought this sprayer. And so we had to modify it-- it's an orchard sprayer with it. We wanted to use it for celery spraying, so we had to do some welding on it and do some changes on it. So one of the neighbors had a welding machine, so gave him $15 to do some welding on it to modify it. So this man comes up to our sale at the house. And he wants this sprayer. So he says, "I'll give you $15 dollars for it." Well my father says, "Well I just paid you $15 to do some work on it." And he says "Well you take it or leave it. I'll come back tomorrow and take it away for nothing." And so that was the attitude of people. "Take it away for nothing tomorrow."

Well we were supposed to leave May 17th. We were supposed to leave a week earlier. But my grandfather lived in Torrance at the time and we lived in Orange County. But what we had got them to move over close to our house and we built a house for them and they moved next to us so we'd be together when we got [inaudible]. [But] my grandfather got sick. So we couldn't move, so asked for an extension and they gave us an extension -- I think it was a week or two week extension. So we left later than other people in Orange County. And they didn't go to any assembly center. We went directly into Poston, they opened up Poston. And the northern Orange County people went into block five to about Block 12. And then we went a week or two later as I recall. And we went with Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and Newport people. And we went into Block 37. 

When we left, we had growing crops. We had to leave the growing crops on the field.  And so the crop was another thing -- that was really our biggest loss in the family. And after we had gone into camp, and of course there wasn't anymore people to harvest them. And so then the prices naturally skyrocketed. So if we'd still been here, we would've made a killing. So we lost a lot of opportunities.

Well I was talking to this Caucasian woman and she says her husband who grew up in this area, who was Caucasian too, remembers after the Japanese Americans went to camp, there were just fields of ripe strawberries and he just went into the fields. He knew that they weren't going to get picked. So he just ate as much as he wanted.

Yeah. Our landlord was a chicken, egg farmer. And he had this five acres of extra land, that's what we farmed. Well after we left he said, "Forget the eggs." He's gonna farm. And so he grew cabbage. And cabbages is the easiest thing to grow. Anyone can grow cabbage. One crop after another. When we came back, he was a multimillionaire. 

On the five acres?

Yeah of just growing cabbage. Forget the hens, just growing cabbage.

And he was able to do that because you had improved the soil?

No the soil was there, but he could make more money growing cabbage. You know probably 90% of truck farming was done by Japanese. Well while all the Japanese are gone, anybody can grow something and make a lot of money. 

That must have felt so strange when you came back from the camps and you're dead broke and your landlord is this rich man. Prices go up during the war, too. 

Oh yeah, prices go up. Because there's a scarcity of people doing the farming. Everybody wants to be a defense worker.

That's really too ironic isn't it. 

But getting back to evacuation. We were told to go to the train station in Anaheim so we went there. And we got on this train, we didn't know where we were going they didn't tell us. Everytime we go into a city, we were asked to draw the drapes. These old cars, they are dirty and they hadn't been used in years -- probably since World War I. And they really did have GI guards, MPs, with rifles. You know, front and back of each car. And this was my first train ride. It was first time I'd been on a train. For that matter, it was the first time I'd been out of either Orange County or L.A. County. Never before been out of the county.

I've heard quite a few people say that at least the teenagers, they were kind of excited to go in a train and I know one woman, she had made an outfit for herself in home economics class. And she wore it for the first time on this trip. And she said it was disgusting because it was so dirty. She ruined her nice outfit.

Yeah. All the windowsills were black soot.

And of course, we didn't have any priority on any railroad tracks. So everytime a train came by, well we were shuffled off onto the side somewhere and sit there for a while and then when the tracks get clear [inaudible]. So in morning we leave Anaheim station and just before sundown, we ended up in Parker, Arizona. And then they put us on these open bed state trucks and we're all standing there packed, jam packed, you know. Everybody's standing in this truck. And the road wasn't even built yet, this is on the Indian reservation. And 17 miles later we were in Poston.

How did the old people do? I mean if they couldn't stand--

Well my grandfather got -- first week we're there -- the heat got to him. And he lost consciousnesses and the ambulance had to take him to the hospital. So this is first few days after we'd been there. 

Yeah, the stress of it all.

When we went to Poston they gave us shots there. And then they gave us our housing assignments. Each person got an army blanket and a cot. And no sheets. No pillows. They had a pillow case, which they called a pillow case which is a canvas.

Like a rice sack?

Yeah. And you put the straw in this mattress cover. And that was your mattress.

I knew that they did that at the assembly centers but they did that--

This was like an assembly center because we were the first ones there, they just opened the camp. They didn't have any more room renaming in assembly center. And they were building Poston as we move in, they're building the next block. You move into one block and they're building the next one. And because they're so rushed for time, the contractor -- Poston was contracted out to Del E. Webb Company -- and they're rushing to build the camp. And they--I don't know whether they're trying to save time and material but you just slap these things together. 

And to save material maybe, or save time at least, they put these boards up. And there's big gaps between the boards. And they covered it up with tar paper. Well in wintertime of course, the wind blew so hard the tar paper would tear off anyway. And then all the more the dust would go into the buildings and everything's covered. Even the floors had gaps, quarter inch, half inch between the floorboards. Well eventually we got linoleum. And did the mess hall first. They had to pull up every board from the floor because of the gap.

Well that wasn't a time-saver was it?

Well of course, now they had cheap labor. The internees did that. My brother was on the crew that did that. And eventually we got wallpaper. And of course for privacy they had to hang up blankets or whatever. But we got wallpaper, very thin, almost like it's pinkish thing but the paper's like newsprint paper. And that was put on the inside walls and. The linoleum and the wallpaper was a gift of the Spanish Council. Spain was a neutral country. It was so-called [inaudible] between U.S and Japan. But the Spanish Council donated the wallpaper and linoleum. I don't know for the other camp. 

I didn't know that at all. So I guess they felt that badly about American citizens. And they went out of their way to help.

So the barracks eventually became semi-livable. At first we had a lot of canned Vienna sausages. And I developed early hatred for Vienna sausages. No milk and such except for the babies. 

Yeah, the whole discussion about food. You could go on and on, couldn't you? 

And they gave us a lot of mutton. Not lamb but mutton. People can't stand mutton now. 

And sauerkraut, did you have sauerkraut?

Yeah yeah, sauerkraut. The Vienna sausage and the sauerkraut, that came in gallon cans. Everything came in gallon cans. They also gave us so-called clothing and the clothing was WWI, what they called blouses and which is a military jacket. 

Did they fit you?

Oh no I didn't get anything. Some people were lucky enough to get peacoats. But we worked for $16 a month. Well if you went to school then you can only work half time which meant half time with $8 dollars a month. And the going rate for for a full time worker was $16 dollars a month. And then if you were a professional or if you were some administrator, then you got $19 dollars a month. And they did that so that nobody got more than $21 dollars a month. $21 dollars was a significance of that an Army Private got $21 a month. You know it was a prevailing thing -- nobody was gonna get more than the buck private in the army. 

And so a lot of people didn't go to school. None of my brothers or sisters above me went to school -- they're still in high school age and they left our California high school, and hadn't finished high school except for my oldest sister. But no one went to school. 

They wanted to make money. 

Because of the difference between $8 and $16 a month. And school, we didn't have to go to school. School wasn't compulsory. And the reason it wasn't compulsory was that the teachers weren't accredited. Maybe half of the teachers were internees and they weren't teachers. Maybe they had a college course back home or something like that. And the rest were Caucasians that they hired. They had to compete with the defense plants and so they had to offer high wages. Half of those teachers weren't qualified teachers, the just came for the money. You had some teachers that were dedicated and they came because they felt--

Called to service or something like that. 

Yeah, and so they came to help. And they're probably better teachers. But the schools weren't accredited. And so a person like me in high school who wants to go to college, it's very difficult because you went to four years, three years of high school that wasn't accredited. And then you're supposed to go to college and compete with all these other kids that went to a regional high school. And I was fortunate I got into Iowa State. And the reason I got into Iowa State was because my vice principal was my trig teacher, knew the registrar at Iowa State. And so she got me there, but then I still had to pass an entry exam.

Like I said, our teacher was the vice president. So she was in the office most of the time, when it came time for trigonometry class, there were maybe seven or eight of us in this class taking trigonometry. And nobody took trigonometry if you didn't have to because you know it's one of the harder courses. So it affects your GPA. Well, the vice principal came and took roll and she turned the class over to me. And she figured I was her best student. So she said, "Okay, Hiroshi. This is your class. You answer anybody's question help out anybody that has a problem."

Oh my gosh -- you were a math whiz, huh? 

So I taught trigonometry.

Well good thing you took that class. 

Now this vice principal wrote a book. It's called "The Harvest of Hate." Her name was Georgia Day Robertson. I wrote one of the forewords to the book. She lived here in Orange County until she died. She died at the age of 105.

Wow what an amazing woman. 

A little bit about the camps themselves. I saw quite a change from the first year, dust storms, the tar paper blowing off in the barren land, real hot, to the end where it was semi-livable. And of course they brought the water, a canal in from the Colorado River to the whole valley and they made it irrigated farmland, just hundreds of thousands of acres of this land in the Indian reservation. And the Japanese cleared the brush, leveled and graded the land, brought the canal in. And of course this canal they routed through each of the camps. In the middle of each of the camp they had a wide spot and they called this the swimming pool.

So they have this swimming pool in each of the camps. And of course there's enough water, people planted trees alongside their barracks and some people even landscaped their barracks. And so by the end of the third year, it's quite different. And so it was quite a contrast. I don't think that anybody else except the Japanese would have been able to cope with that and would even be willing to do it. 

Right. Well it's the tenacity, the gaman. So you survived the camps, but everybody in your family survive the camp?

Pretty much so. I'm the only one in my family that went to college. As I said my oldest sister finished high school in 1941 but my next sister and my older brother didn't bother going high school. To this day they don't have a high school diploma. My next younger sister and brother finished high school in California.

Does that make you very different from them? 

Well I guess I was always the black sheep in the family [laughs]. I think even before the war. I was the scholastic one. I was the one who'd probably gone to college.

Did you go to Iowa State before the war ended?

I went to Iowa State in September of '45. I wasn't there long. I went one term. I started September, of course in October I was turned 18. So I left camp in June of 1945, 17 year old with a train ticket, $25 government check, and just the clothes on my back. And I ended up in Des Moines for the summer. A week later I'm flat broke and I started working as a busboy in a nightclub. And then got a better job as a busboy in a golf country club. And then in September I started school. And then I turned 18 so I got drafted.

By that time, they had closed Poston II, so my family came back to [inaudible]. And so I hadn't seen them for a while. So then, actually I left my draft notice in my mailbox and I came back to California. But I'm drafted and I had my draft transferred to California. And then I went into service from Orange County. And I was kind of processed in Camp Beale in California. I had the best test score and in my battalion. So then they said they wanted Signal Corps officers, I guess, so they sent me to Camp Polk, Louisiana. Well Camp Polk also the place where medical department. So when I did my basic training it was either signal corps school or medical department school and they assigned me to medical department. So I spent my service in the Army Medical Department which was very fortunate for me. And then I saw some service in occupation in Japan. I was a draftee. So they decided to let draftees out after one year of service. So here my one year is ready to come up and then they decide to send me over to Japan. So strange the way the Army operates.

How long were you in Japan?

I spent a couple months only. I spent about as much time in the Pacific Ocean as I did in Japan.

[laughs] Yeah. Well were you able to treat patients?

Yeah, I got basic medical training. I was the medical technicians but maybe that's fancy name for a male nurse. But we had to learn medicine. 

So were you treating soldiers?

Well, soldiers and actually, turns out, Japanese civilians, too. 

Which year were you in Japan?

End of '46 beginning of '47. 

So you still saw the devastation.

Oh yes. I was stationed Nagoya. Nagoya was just completely devastated. And there'd be a building here and there and these were the concrete reinforced buildings. Now ones that were usable were actually occupied by the occupation forces.

Some of the Japanese American soldiers stationed in Japan did all that they could to help the Japanese. And here you were either providing medical treatment.

We were in the Sumitomo Bank building. And I was with the medical detachment to the MP battalion. So I had the best of two worlds when I was in Japan. They they really treated me well. For example one time a Japanese boy, he was some kind of a cap, anyway a small explosive device went off in the building and then he had some shrapnel in his lip. And so the doctor which is a Canadian doctor who is my commanding officer treated him. And he gave me the shrapnel to dispose of. I put it in an envelope and put it in my desk drawer. And then a few days later a congregation of Japanese came to see me and they said they were worried about some repercussion about an explosive going off in this building. And so he wanted to know what happened, what's going on. They were really worried, concerned. I said, "Well the captain gave me the shrapnel and so I put it in the desk." And I said if he asks for it, I have to give it to him. If he doesn't ask for it then I'll address it and get rid of it. And so they're real happy that it was me, you know, looking out for that.

I used to, in my free time, I'd like to go around and have tea with the old men, and you talk to them as much as I could in my broken Japanese. And one time I went to the Nagoya Castle. It's famous now. Then, it was bombed out. And you know, the two old men, just two old men rebuilding the castle. And I sat down and had tea with them. Two old men. And they were probably doing it on their own time. They're doing some repairs and things like that.

Yeah. There's so many stories about devastated Japan, and there you were. Did you stay in the medical field?

No, no. After I came back from Japan I started applying to Caltech. So I went to Pasadena for both my Bachelors my Masters in Chemical Engineering. 

For a lot of Japanese Americans the resettlement years were even harder than any other time to restart their businesses. Or begin life anew. A lot of Isseis were too old to have that energy. How did your family do?

When my family came back, they work for hourly wages doing farming. My brother, my mother, my sisters. Even while I was at school. We were fortunate to pool our money. And so we were fortunate or gutsy enough to go ahead and buy some land -- we started farming. And even when I was in Caltech I spent my summers, all my vacations, helping the farm. 

And then after I finished college and started work at North American Aviation in Downing. And we lived on Harbor Boulevard, our farm was on Harbor Boulevard. AndI used to drive by and I saw Disneyland being built. I saw some tractors in the orange grove one day and wondering what they were doing and eventually they're making Disneyland in the orange grove. 

It sounds like your family was able to stand on its own feet as it were. 

We eventually sold the land. 

Well I'm gonna fast forward to the '80s. And I need to ask you about redress and then the last question will be - just to give you a heads up - what message would you like to give to the young people as a person who had gone through the whole discrimination and all those experiences that went with WWII? But did you think that the Redress Movement would actually come to fruition when it started?

Oh well, I was very active in it, and my daughter was very active in it. My daughter was a second year law school in Georgetown in Washington D.C. and she was a Hayashi scholar. So when some Senate subcommittee was going to look into the whole internment experience, they asked the Washington JACL chapter to help them write some papers on different aspects. One of the things that they wanted to do was the Supreme Court cases. And so my daughter was there. She was a law student but being a Hayashi Scholar she was also visible at the JACL office there. And so she being the closest thing to a lawyer that they had, they assigned her to the Supreme Court cases. So she wrote the paper on the Supreme Court cases. My daughter and I both attended the signing of the bill in Washington D.C. when President Reagan signed it. I also testified in Los Angeles, when they had the commission hearing. 

And so you were involved from the very beginning 1980 or so?

Yes. 

I mean if you talk to some people they had started writing in 1947 or something like that. But JACL got fully involved during the '80s. Did you believe it would happen?

Well yes I did. It was really a grassroot type of thing. 

Obviously you believed in the whole movement. Do you think it made the impact you wanted to in terms of young people, generations of young people taking the lessons? 

People, the kids now are different than we were. They're more assertive. Who knows what if, our generation was like kids are today whether it would have turned out the way it did because there would have been mass protests and anything else. And in the end in our generation, we were the humble, obedient citizens. Things might be different.

Do you think young people appreciate the work that you put in?

I think, certainly things like the Day of Remembrance they have that they actually perpetuate, I think helps.

I'll go ahead and ask the last question which is, if you could give a message to young people of America based on the experiences that you've gone through what would it be?

Well, they should cherish their civil rights. It's easy to lose and so you have to be on guard.

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