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Play MovieImpact of the War
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How do you think you changed after the war?
It took me a long time to recover from the war mainly because when I went back to school, I had a lot of flashbacks and I both of my ears were damaged badly and my ears rang. One ear rings at about 5000 cycles and the other one at about 4000 and they sometimes (?) in between each other. So, when I went back to school I had a hard time concentrating and eventually had a nervous breakdown—almost went to the "nut house" but I wouldn't go. And so I went to work on the railroad. It took me quite a number of years to overcome that. I eventually went back to school, but I never did go back to a big university and take a graduate course. I took a lot of courses at the University of California—UCLA, USC, Irvine and Cal Tech, but I never did graduate from anything. But then it was in 1951 that I became a Christian and due to my Christian experience, then I could see how God has been involved in my life ever since I was born. I wrote a book about that. That's how the whole experience changed my life. I'm able to cope with all the deficiencies—or whatever you want to call it—that I have. I went to the Veteran's Hospital just last week—no it was this week—and went over the latest report and I couldn't believe it. It was 8 pages, single line typed, of all the times I've been to the Veteran's Hospital in the last 2 years and all the medication I take.
Describe more about the time period that led to a nervous breakdown.
After I was discharged from the army, I stayed out of school for another year, just to get re-acclimated and what not, and trying to deal with the prejudice and rejection that we still had. Couldn't get a job or anything. And then when I went back to school, of course, I didn't have but two or three of my same old classmates. They'd either finished school and gone on, or got killed in the war. So it was quite a difference to have to start over and then when you are going along on a steady course, and taking a course in school, and then all of a sudden you drop out for three years, then it's pretty hard to pick it up where you left off.
I should have really started over, and I think that maybe I would have... I might have been able to avoid the nervous breakdown, because that was a lot of pressure trying to keep up with my academics from where I left off. But physically and mentally, to have a nervous break down, it's really devastating. It's, because you just--my only description of it would be just go crazy. You don't think right, you don't do things right, and your whole outlook on life is different. Just having to quit school was hard enough on me. And then, to start flunking courses instead of getting A's all of the time, wasn't the best thing in the world. And then to be rejected because of my ethnic background was not the best thing in the world to cope with.
Did you think the racism would have disappeared after the war?
It took a long time. You know, that has, well, I was helping a lady when we came to Los Altos, when I moved up to Los Altos. And her name was Josephine Duveneck and Josephine was a real champion for the Japanese, way back in Teddy Roosevelt's time. And, she was speaking when I came to Los Altos. She was speaking at the women's, let's see, with the W, there's the YMCA, she's the... What is the women's?
YWCA?
Yes, YWCA, right, thank you. She was telling about—this was because there were quite a number of Japanese Americans that had experienced the war and had come back to training to get re-established in California at this YWCA—and so, she was speaking there and she told us about how back in Teddy Roosevelt's time, that she heard about—this is before she got married—and she heard that the Japanese Americans trying to go to school at the University of San Francisco were being rejected. They couldn't, they wouldn't allow it.
I don't know what year... the turn of the century, probably, somewhere in there. So she was one of these real champions, you know, women's liberty type, and she went to Washington DC and got on, Well Teddy Roosevelt was Secretary of State I think, then, and got on his case. She made so much noise that he came out here and they made it, inroads at the university such that the Japanese Americans could go to school there. Well, that sort of helped the prejudice that was going on.
One of the reasons that they, there was so much prejudice against the Japanese was the fact that they were good at doing things. I mean they were just inherently good at a lot of things, and they were exceptionally good farmers, and so that meant buying land. Well, California did not want Japanese buying land. They didn't want them owning any part of California. And so, that was one of the restrictions, and the prejudices that were just socially generated. And... it sort of carried all along, even through the war time. It got worse during the war, because Japan was the enemy, so they thought that, a lot of people thought that the Japanese were still enemies, even those who fought in the war. If they didn't, they were afraid to stand up to the public opinion because even if they were pro-Japanese, they didn't want to be identified with them, you know, because their friends were anti.
That made it tough on us when we came back. We couldn't get jobs, we couldn't own land, I couldn't own land. That's something that has taken several generations, because it takes the universities several generations to change things. Every class that comes along wants to change something, and they are champions of something. But it takes... it doesn't happen overnight, it makes a... it some times makes things worse for a while. I think that that's what happened to the Japanese situation. But I think that probably goes on forever.
In your life after the war, do you view your experience in the war to be an important part of your life, or do you view your life after the war to be more important?
I think that my experience during the war has been a very important part of my life after the war. It's very important to me that the Japanese American story gets told, and so it doesn't get lost in the history. Maybe some of the good things that we learned about the bad things can get corrected. But if people don't talk about it, and tell that story, then it just goes on, right?
Right now, I'm probably as busy as telling some parts of this story quite often. Just this week, well coming up Fourth of July, if you tune in on San José TV station, I don't know what time, but they're putting together a story about my old outfit, the 442 regimental combat team. Mainly because, this guy that's doing it, he's a veteran and he's very crippled, but he's a reporter, and he's very articulate and very good at what he's doing.
He wants to put together this story, and so he's going to air it on the Fourth of July, because he thought that that would be a significant day. And then there are quite a number of different opportunities lately that, in Washington DC and all over the country, that are promoting or telling this story. So you should, by the end of the year or so, gosh, everybody out there will have heard the Japanese American story in great detail.
Do you have a final message that you would want other students around the country and the world to hear? What's important about your story?
Well, I guess that one of the things that's important about my story or anybody's story is that we take the person out of the story and just focus on the details of what you're doing. That is, you're looking at the "Why did these things occur? Why?" And you've come up with answers. I think that's good. That's a thing that, when it comes to education, I think that there is no limit to how much a person could dig in, but what is important about doing research or doing anything is that it's accurate. To make sure that it's accurate is hard work.
I had a person the other day send me a copy of a newspaper that was putting together, that put together a story up in Montana, at the headwaters where I came from. We talked about Trident, and the name of the story was The Razing, R-A-Z-E, The Razing of the Trident, because it disappeared except for the cement factory. It talked about all of these old families that were there and different things. It was a nice, it was a big article, and it was four full pages. I got that and I thought "Gee, that's pretty neat." Until I read it. There were bad errors in that article.
A person who doesn't do the research on it would think that that's the way it was. Well it turns out that... we'll cite one of the errors, and that is that there was a photograph in this article, and it had a picture of a class of students. They were from Trident, Montana. One of the students was my sister, and they had my older sister's name on it. The names were all wrong on that picture. So I said, "Gee, I've seen that picture before." I had never paid any attention to the names.
It turned out that that picture came from a book called Headwaters Historical Society...something, which was written back in about 1960-something. It has a lot of things, articles in it about my parents, and all of the old pioneers around Trident, Montana.
This reporter, a young man, he's a good writer, but he took this book, and he just took that picture, pulled it out, and put it in his article, without really researching it to make sure that it was correct. Well you would assume that it would be correct because the museum, the historical society put this thing out at the Headwaters Museum that would be correct. I never paid much attention to it, but I did this time because I noticed it in the paper. I noticed that that's not my older sister, that's my younger sister! Then I looked at the other people, and I said "Well that's not so and so." The result was that I figured out that all of the people that were in that picture were my younger sister's class. I know each one of them. But I didn't remember what they looked like, some of them.
He called me up the other day and he asked me what I thought of his article. I said the article is good but it's full of errors. He's going to put out a revised copy.
And the point of that is?
Do your research before you write. Make sure what you write is correct. Especially if it's history and you are trying to educate some younger person. I think we should be a lot more responsible in making sure that the facts are facts, not something that we pulled out of something that's supposed to be facts. I think that history has a way of correcting itself, but sometimes it takes too long. In these days things are happening so fast with the computer and everything, they don't get a chance to get corrected. You got to get it right the first time.
I'd like to thank you for this. I would imagine that there is still more of this story to be written.
I don't know, we've covered enough.
On the Japanese with regards to the history. There's some holes in the history. There's information that's still classified that needs to be opened up.
If we ever get moved and settled down and my health gets better, I don't know when that will be, I'd like to go back to Washington, D.C. and dig through the archives to rectify the history that's been written about me on certain things that are incorrect.
