1 100 1 https://ndajams.omeka.net/files/original/214b88f5642312982f57f3ad86aa8bcb.pdf 814eddd238d4917fbddf09a5ec62dca7 PDF Text Text Go For Broke National Education Center Oral History Project Oral History Interview with Toshio Tsukahira, March 25, 2000, Los Angeles, California INTERVIEWER: [00:00] We are here with Mr. Toshio Tsukahira, formerly of the MIS [Military Intelligence Service] . The crew members today are ?Bobby Okinaka? on camera, ?Ken Shigemitsu? on audio, ?Ray Anne Gowinato? on cataloging, and myself, Dennis Yamamoto, doing the interview. It is March 25​th​, and we are here in Los Angeles, California. OK, Mr. Tsukahira, if you could state for us your full name, your date of birth and place of birth, please. TSUKAHIRA: My name is Toshio Tsukahira, and I have acquired, in the course of my life, middle-name George, which is official in the Army, and in my academic records, but not on my birth certificate. I was born in Los Angeles, California, and I lived here until I left in 1942, and returned after 50-odd years in the East Coast---on the East Coast and abroad, in 1995. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us your date of birth, please? TSUKAHIRA: I was born on December 22nd, 1915. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us the name of your parents, and where they were originally from? TSUKAHIRA: My father is named ?Kohe? Tsukahira. He was born in (inaudible), but moved with his whole family at the age of three, to Tokyo, where he grew up, and where his---most of his family remains. Those who remain are still living in Tokyo. My mother (inaudible) you have don’t asked, you haven’t asked about my mother yet. Not yet. INTERVIEWER: If you can also tell us your mother’s name, and where she was originally from. TSUKAHIRA: My mother was---[02:00] is Kohe? Tsukahira, and she was born in ?Nagano? (inaudible), near the city of Matsumoto. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us about your early years living here in Los Angeles? TSUKAHIRA: Well my father was a business man in Little Tokyo, and we lived---well first of all, my father came here in 1905, and started a business up in Oakland, California, but then came down to Los Angeles and opened his store, The Tokyo Company, on East 1​st​ Street. And after the business got established, he went to Japan in 1915, to marry my mother, who was living in Matsumoto at the time, and they met through mutual friends in Tokyo, and the wedding took place in Tokyo in 1915, and they immediately came back to America. And I was born in December of that year, in the west side of Los---well, it was West 36​th​ Street, one block east---west of Main Street, so it’s really down there by the Coliseum by the, what is now the USC area. And my father’s business was in Little Tokyo. At the age of about five or five and a half, I---we---my father bought a house on what was then West Temple Street. END OF AUDIO FILE 1 This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 1 of 25 �BEGINNING OF TAPE TWO [MISSING] BEGINNING OF TAPE THREE INTERVIEWER: [00:00] OK. Could you tell us a little bit about you were treated by the Japanese people and Japanese students when you were studying in Japan? TSUKAHIRA: Well, my experience---I had several good friends---well, from the start they Japanese members of the basketball team, introduced me to others and I got acquainted with fellow classmates. In the classroom it was very little contact with other Nisei, it was---you were on your own, and you were just a member of the class, and we formed---formed several friendships with---with Japanese students. As I say, they’re field of activity has---social activity, was very limited. You either went to their home, or you went to a movie, or you had coffee. A lot of tea---tea shops, or coffee shops, where you go in and buy a cup of coffee, and you listen to records. There was a sort of a jukebox with an attendant who changed the records for you, and you could request records. That sort of activity was---was the norm. But . . . So any group social activity tended to be with groups like to Pacific Young People’s Society, which we formed in Tokyo. It was made up of kids from ---mostly from the West Coast, all over, and you got---you formed a lot of friendships that way, that continue on after everybody left. Some of us returned to Japan, and so on. But the Japanese people---it’s hard to generalize, you---if you knew someone---[02:00] of course your relatives---but if you know someone, some way, you got into activities that you normally wouldn’t. For instance, there was a family that lived in---used to live in the Bay area, and it prospered there and moved into---moved back to Japan, and they lived in a nice neighborhood in, in Tokyo, and I don’t remember how we got to know them, but through some connection they invited me to their home, or invited me to a tea ceremony, which, as you know, involves a lot of sitting on your [laughter] legs, but it’s a very typical Japanese pastime, and you might even call it a social activity, in that that’s one of the ways people get together and enjoy each other’s company, although there isn’t much conversation at all. Things like that, you just don’t walk in off the street, you have to know someone, and it’s---that’s the kind of contact I had, it was very occasional and sporadic. Except for gatherings involving my relatives, and they had those---a funeral visit or a commemoration of someone’s anniversary, but for the most part, as I say, my free time was spent with American-Japanese. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us a little bit about what the political and social climate was like in Japan in the early ’30s? TSUKAHIRA: Well, looking back we were sitting on a volcano, but didn’t know it. Life was pleasant, the only hint that there was a war going on, and there was a war going on, Japanese [04:00] had invaded Manchuria, taken over the country, set up a (inaudible) in 1931 and ’32. During the early 30s, troops would be going off to Manchuria to serve, and you’d see, as you’d go to the train stations, and you’d see these troop trains, or trains full of soldiers with their families waving them off as they went off to the front. But aside from that, you never knew that there was any war involvement. What we didn’t know is, under the surface you had all kinds of movements among the ultra-national (inaudible) patriotic societies, within the military itself, and we really were living a false, in a false paradise, ’cause we didn’t know---we didn’t know enough about politics, and I don’t think most of the Japanese population knew either. It was only after, in fact the year I graduated, that you had the so called February 26​ ​Incident. That was on the day of my final exam as I was about to graduate, and I remember I left my boarding house in one part of the city, and for some reason I decided to go by bus, straight to the middle of town to (inaudible) where my university was, instead of taking the train that went a rather circ---circular route to get to the same place. When it got the This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 2 of 25 �center of town near a place called Akasaka Mitsuke, we were all told---the bus stopped, and we were all told to get off. We got off, we found it was a snowy day, incidentally, and we got off, and we found a line of soldiers blocking the highway, (inaudible) the main street, [06:00] and there were machine guns set up, and, you know, it was just so, you know, you couldn’t imagine what was happening. But I had my exam to make, and I had to get to school, so I finally got a taxi, went way around, in a roundabout way, and finally got to the university. Took my exam, and after (inaudible)---that afternoon, got out and immediately, of course, you’re gonna---want---wanted to find out what was going on. Went to the palace, and there were barbwire in front of the palace, and soldiers standing around, and everybody was all excited, wondering what was going on. Well, it turns out that a regiment that was stationed in Tokyo revolted, and they were gonna be sent to Manchuria, and they revolted against that, and they (inaudible) against the government and its policies. And they assassinated one cabinet minister and tried to assassinate the prime minister, and it all failed, but in the end a small group of the soldiers were holed up in a hotel near the American embassy, and they were surrounded by troops that the government had brought in from outside the city, and what they were doing is---talk---trying to talk them out of it through sound trucks, there were loudspeakers blaring out, “Surrender and you’ll be---nothing will be done to you, you---you’re faithful, loyal, patriotic citizens, and you did what you did out of a sense of justice, and we---you’ll be pardoned”, and anyway, they finally talked these (inaudible) that was holed up in this hotel to surrender, and the thing was over. And we didn’t get the [08:00] details and---until a few days later, when all the information came out, it seemed that the regiment had revolted, and had plotted with, and leagued with some radicals in the army headquarters to change the government. Well, that excitement was just a unusual sort of even out of the blue for us, and I left Japan shortly after, back to the States. Back to the States, of course, my interest in Japan had been kindled all along, and I finally had decided that that would be my object of study. Japan and US-Japanese relations, so I enrolled at UCLA in the summer of 1936, to continue my studies. But going back to the original subject about (inaudible) in Japan, I could say that this 1936 incident was a wake-up, and of course it was just that---I just---as a student I was very naive, because there were American reporters in Tokyo at the time, and shortly after, in 1936, I believe, this writer, Hugh Byas of the ​New York Times, wrote a book called ​Government by Assassination​, and he detailed the history of this ​ ultra-nationalist movement back in the---before the ’30s, and---and told what was really going on, or what it was---anybody who looked into these things would know. So, as I say, from my own experience, we were pretty naive. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us [10:00] why you decided to return to the United States after finishing your studies? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I was offered a job. I really wanted to get back, but I was offered a job to set up an English language newspaper addition of a Japanese newspaper. The ​Asahi​ newspaper already had an English edition. The ​Osaka Mainichi ​wanted to set up something in Tokyo, and so they were trying to recruit somebody who could handle editing of a English language edition in Tokyo. And my interest in journalism was still there, I was attracted, but the pay they offered was something I couldn’t afford, they offered 50 yen a month. Now a yen in those days was equivalent to much more than it is today. It’s---what’s it worth, at least $0.50 [laughter], that sort of like $25 a month. Well I was getting $75 from my folks as a student, just as a---for expenses, living---because I was living with relatives and I really didn’t need much money, but $75 I was getting, and here this job was offering $50, I mean equivalent of $25. Anyway, that, in addition to the fact that I really wanted to get back, made me turn that down, and I didn’t stay. But I’m glad I didn’t. [laughter] INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us what it was like returning to US after spending a few years in Japan? TSUKAHIRA: Well, as I say, I entered into UCLA right---as soon as could, since I got back, and it was summer school. My three years in Japan gave me a year and a half credit at UCLA. Ironically, a classmate [12:00] of mine, who went to This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 3 of 25 �Yale, also graduated at the same time, went to Yale, they evaluated his (inaudible) three years as a full undergraduate course, and he entered graduate school. I was admitted to UCLA as a sophomore. So I finished in three years, but my course aim had changed, I was going to go into Japanese-American studies, history, government, learn more about Japan, and US-Japan relations. So my major was history and political science, and I graduated in 1939. INTERVIEWER: What did you do upon graduating from UCLA? TSUKAHIRA: Well, ’course the Bachelor’s degree in those---in that period was worth nothing, I had to find a job or I could go to work for my dad in his store, but with my idea of going into an academic carrier I needed to go to graduate school, so I finally talked my folks into letting me go into graduate school, and I earned my Master’s, and was working toward a Ph.D. in 1942, when I left. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us what you were doing on December 7​th​ of 1941? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I was, as I say, pursuing an academic carrier, and I was a graduate student, and I also had---got a job as a teaching assistant, or TA, which got a pittance of a pay, but, you know, you’re basically a student, but you assisted some professor in his course as a teaching assistant. And I had---I was teaching assistant to a professor of Latin American history, and the system was this: he would lecture [14:00] to the class one day a week, two days a week his teaching assistant would sort of regurgitate the material covered in that lecture, and discuss it, and even test students on that. So my job was to meet his class, and as a teaching assistant on Monday December 8​th​ I had to meet this class. December was a Sunday, and I was really just preparing to meet the class on Monday, but when Pearl Harbor happened I wondered how it would be to face this class as a person of Japanese ancestry, and what kind of uproar this would be. It turned out it was as if nothing had happened. There was a discussion of it later on campus, but not in class, and---so what I was doing on Pearl Harbor day was just taking it easy, it was the day after the USC-UCLA game, and I had just taken a guest to that game, a Japanese business man who was the manager of the Nippon Suisan Kaisha, NYK line in Los Angeles. And during the game, we discussed the state of relation between Japan and the United States, because things weren’t---we were putting an embargo on scrap and we were protesting Japans actions in Chi---in Manchuria, and things weren’t looking too good. But he said, “Don’t worry, it will blow over, it’ll be---there’s gonna---not gonna be any trouble.” And it was with that in my ears that I woke the next morning to hear about Pearl Harbor. So that’s what I was doing on Pearl Harbor, just resting on---[16:00] it was a Sunday, and I was resting. INTERVIEWER: What was your immediate reaction when you heard the news? TSUKAHIRA: Well, you know, it’s a very difficult thing to say, you realize---your awareness of---you’re Japanese, and not like---the same as the rest of your fellow Americans. Yet all the while you’re---you think as an American, and my reaction to Pearl Harbor was that I think of most Americans. This is an outrage. It was [pause] terrible. And [pause] it was not in any sense wondering about what’s gonna happen to us or anything like that, at least at that stage. Or how we were gonna be identified with the enemy. We thought they were our enemy, we were we. We were on the American side. And I think this is true of most (inaudible). INTERVIEWER: What did you do in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor? This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 4 of 25 �TSUKAHIRA: Well you know, that was December, and I stayed on until February, so during those months, there were all kinds of rumors and counter-rumors and so on, but life went on pretty much unchanged. It was only when the evacuation orders began. And then course that effected our immediate families and so on, but somehow it was---well, this is inevitable, what can you do about it. And how are you gonna cope with this, not how are you gonna resist this, or get [18:00] outraged about it, it was, “how are we gonna deal with whatever comes along, what’s come along?” We didn’t know. Meanwhile, I had got---heard of this language school that the army’s starting in San Francisco. I applied, I went up there to apply, because I thought I was qualified, and two of my school mates from (inaudible) were already hired on the faculty. And I applied for a job, a teaching Japanese at this army language school in February, and was accepted. So I came back, packed again and went up there, left my (inaudible) job. It was after that, I think, that the evacuation reality became stronger. The orders were being issued, and people were being---beginning to have to think about shutting down their businesses and selling their homes, or getting rid of their---making arrangements to evacuate. And that was all while I was beginning my work at the language school. INTERVIEWER: Did you have any particular motivation for getting a job as an instructor at the language school? TSUKAHIRA: The motivation was getting a job, you know, and it was---there were no jobs. I---my teaching assistant job was pocket money, it was just barely enough to keep you going as a student. It was not a job, in a sense, it was not meant---thought of as a job. The object for everybody at my age then was to find some occupation that would pay a living wage. And an occupation that would be emotionally satisfying. Not just polishing apples or selling fruit [20:00] in a fruit stand, but something meaningful. And this teaching thing---given the war, and the fact that, you know, all bets are off now, the one thing that I could contribute was some knowledge of Japanese, and with that I applied and got my first real job. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us about the formation of the language school on the (inaudible)? What it was like -TSUKAHIRA: Well-INTERVIEWER: ---being part of it. TSUKAHIRA: ---it was---it was started from scratch. It began as I think I mentioned from---by somebody---I think of it from the bottom up rather than the top down. A military attaché, a couple of military attaches, who had served in Tokyo, began to advocate the idea of a---of Japanese language training, we needed more linguists who could read and translate Japanese, could speak Japanese, and that’s why the army always had this attaché system, they always had a few officers who were familiar with various foreign languages. Each country, each embassy had an attaché, a language attaché, not each country but the major countries, where the attaché was assigned, and they had to do was study Japanese or study German or French, whatever the language you were sent for. Two of these officers agitated for a school to teach Japanese, and this was in November of 1941, even before Pearl Harbor. And they finally got permission to start, but not much budget, and they were given an abandon hangar in Crissy [22:00] Field in the Presidio of San Francisco, and told, “go ahead”, and I don’t know what the budget---exact budget was. I wasn’t in on the ground floor. But they scrounged around and they got---in this one hangar, the partitioned off part for cots---beds where students could sleep, (inaudible) the scrounged up some tables and chairs for desks, and zeroxed old text books---well, actually the military attaches were studying under a very formal system of Japanese language This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 5 of 25 �training in Japan, under an instructor called Naganuma, and he had a series of textbooks called the Naganuma (inaudible), and started from very elementary Japanese to more complicated in a series of volumes. And they brought back a set of those books with them, and had them reproduced, and that was---they were the text books. But there were other language aids needed: dictionaries, all kinds---Japanese dictionaries, (inaudible) dictionaries, and Japanese---English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. All---and supplies and pencils and papers and things like that which they had to scrounge around the town to get, and they only had a small class going. That was in November, and by---it was February when I joined and there were nine faculty members by that time. And we had classes going in that hangar and the Presidio. INTERVIEWER: I wanted to backtrack [24:00] just a little bit. Did you at any time, before the war broke out, feel that there would be a war between the Japan and the US? TSUKAHIRA: I don’t know. It was sort of a science fiction type thing, speculation that “yeah, it’s a possibility”, and they---particularly since the Manchurian incident, they called it, in which the Japanese troops took over Manchuria and set up the emperor, Manchurian emperor, who was the last of the Chinese emperors, you remember, he was overthrown in the revolution of 1911, and he was a young boy then, but he was a grown man now, and became the first emperor of Manchukuo. This, the United States opposed, and the United---the League of Nations condemned, so . . . And they even sent a commission to---to Manchuria to write a report on the situation, and condemned Japan for unlawful seizure of another country’s territory. So these tensions were growing, and it was part of the debate, but not, I think, so much at the popular level. So while there was a possibility, and we imagined it as a possibility, it never really became immediate. We never really worried about it. And of course we were young, and the Nisei, I---we had some---my genera---my age, had oh maybe other Nisei who were five or ten years older. They were the upper---and even so, that---that’s [26:00] not very---very old, we’re fairly young, inexperienced group, and we---I think our leadership was---was not very good on that score. No one raised the alarm or---we just went with the flow. And when the war broke out, we reacted (inaudible), and we reacted to the evacuation another way, fairly---on a fairly immature level. INTERVIEWER: What was your initial reaction on hearing about the evacuation orders? TSUKAHIRA: Well, of course then it was---by then it was almost---it was a government action taken and justified by the war, and I don’t think we felt strongly on moral grounds that this was---or legal grounds this is unconstitutional, there’s a---we’re American citizens, blah, blah, blah, because while we knew we were American Citizens, we also knew that we were not first class American Citizens, and we lived with it. Evacuation was just part of that familiar syndrome, and besides, many of us were indignant or outraged by the actions of Japan, and we blamed the Japanese for their actions rather than the US government for the actions they took. So . . . I would say---personally I felt---outraged, but not at the Japanese---at the American Government so much, at the Japanese or at fate, the way---circumstances, how my father had to sell his [28:00] business, and I was there---I don’t know how I got there in those---when this was, because I went back and forth from San Francisco when I could, to come down here to help my folks out, and he was selling his merchandise at---even I, who is not really business minded, you know, was---at giveaway prices, and the brokers, who supplied the goods wholesale in the first place, were taking them back at a cut rate, and their making a profit both ways, when they first sold it and when they bought it back. And just---but there was no choice, it was---you could walk away, I suppose, and just leave it---leave everything there, but anyway, there was this process of selling this goods at the store and getting rid of that, and then making read---and then I think the---leaving family departure was when I was up in San Francisco. I don’t know the details of the packing up and deciding what to take (inaudible), but it ended up with our house being managed by some church group, and family taking their . . . This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 6 of 25 �END OF AUDIO FILE 3 BEGINNING OF TAPE FOUR INTERVIEWER: [00:00] Do you recall what your parents’ reaction to the evacuation orders was? TSUKAHIRA: I can’t---I wasn’t there at the crucial moment, when they first heard of it, and even when they were---eve---had to leave the house and go to Santa Anita. So I don’t know, but my impression was---I gather it was true of most these days, there was this feeling “it can’t be helped.” They were not citizens, there was a war, Japan had started a war, we have to bear what there is to bear, and they were very philosophical about it. I haven’t heard them---they didn’t get angry, or make much comment about it at all, and I---course, I didn’t see much of them after the evacuation. INTERVIEWER: Did your siblings react the same way, were they attending school? TSUKAHIRA: I don’t, I hadn’t---if there was any, I didn’t know of it. My brother was in the Army already, but what was---one thing that I felt strongly about then was---he was at Fort Louis when Pearl Harbor broke out, and the discharged him. So he came home. And I didn’t have much conversation, or chance to talk to him about it, but I felt, you know, this is ridiculous. Here he was a soldier in uniform, and they kicked him out because he was Japanese. And so he was evacuated with my folks, to Santa Anita and then to Heart Mountain. And so was my younger brother, but he was a kid then, you know very---youngest brother was very young. [02:00] He’s 14 years younger than I, so he was sort of a---a baby to me, you know, when I was growing up, and since I went to Japan, and then went away to school and---I lived at home, but you know how siblings are, if you’re a different age group you don’t have much in common in the way of activities. So I can’t say that I know what the reaction was of my brother. He was discharged from the army because of Pearl Harbor. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us how long you were an instructor at the Presidio school? TSUKAHIRA: Well, the school---after the Japanese were evacuated from San Francisco, I think for the same reason, but I don’t know---after all the school was made up of Japanese-American instructors and students, and we were given badges, or passes or permits to carry and if challenged we could show them. It sounded ridiculous, because San Francisco is full of Chinese, and who’d know if you’re Chinese or not, they were walking around quite freely. In fact, they---as a defensive measure, they said “I am Chinese, not Jap . . . [laughter] In case they were approached by anybody. But anyway, the school was moved, they decided to move the school, and we all formed little caravans, ’cause we could take our own cars, and we had a caravan about three cars and about a dozen people, including about four faculty members, [04:00] four students who were officers---we had some officer, Caucasian students, non-Japanese students, even at the Presidio, and they were sort of sent along as sort of an escort to us. And we just drove from San Francisco to Reno, and then to Idaho, to Yellowstone, we stayed overnight in Yellowstone, this was in May, before the park was really open, the place was deserted, and then we drove on through the Black Hills and the Dakotas to Minnesota, and ended up in a hotel, the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, I remember that. And we stayed in the hotel for two or three weeks, while we committed to this new campus. It was really an old man’s camp, it was sort of a cluster of log cabins, and it was sort of a camp for homeless men, that the Army had taken over and converted---converted these cabins into classrooms, built a headquarters building, auditorium and---and it This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 7 of 25 �became quite a structure. You can see from some of these pictures of the camp, that it was a fairly large thing. The student body was expanded to about 300 students, you know, almost overnight, and so the faculty had to be expanded too, and so we, as a small core of instructors, nine, I think, at the time of the evacuation, expanded to about 20 or 30, and then we were augmented by graduates of the first classes, enlisted men, who were considered good enough to be teachers, and they [06:00] took over some classes too, so we had civilian and uniformed instructors at the school. INTERVIEWER: Now the month before the school was moved to Minnesota, that was when you were married? TSUKAHIRA: Yeah, we were married in April, and the---the plan---our---we were engaged when the war broke out, and we had planned to get married in June, in a church in----on Normandy in uptown L.A., but the evacuation made it impossible for those plans to carry out, because of everybody being evacuated, and when word came out that travel will be frozen, my fiancé just got on the train and came up to San Francisco, where I was, because if she delayed any longer she couldn’t---she’d have to---she would have to stay and would have been evacuated with her parents. So she came to San Francisco, and we got married practically the next day at a church, episcopal church in San Francisco. The town had been---was deserted, was in a turmoil, really, because people were being evacuated from that area too. But we began married life in April, the next month we had to move, so we one month---oh, incidentally we had a honeymoon, we were given leave, written orders, military orders, “I see no reason why this---these persons cannot . . .”, and you know, we had certain areas in San Francisco you weren’t allowed to go in without a pass, if you looked like a Japanese. We honeymooned at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, one night, [08:00] and it was nice, but the trouble was, the orchestra---you know, they had a roof-top restaurant with an orchestra, very well-known orchestra---was on strike, or was on leave that night, and there was no orchestra. But that was our honeymoon, and the next day I had to go back to work at the Presidio, and we were getting ready to move out. So our honeymoon trip was really the trip from California to Minnesota, (inaudible), which was kind of fun, we were just sorta like vagabonds. A little caravan of three cars and a dozen people, moving along the highways up through, to Minnesota. INTERVIEWER: Was it difficult being a young married couple living in army facilities? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I have a picture of the cabin we were in, but near the main campus, so called campus, was another camp. This time it was for women, it was---or married mothers, I guess, or something---anyway, some sort place where the charitable organizations in the area would take care of people, and they had these cabins, they were fairly good size cabins, about the size of an Army barracks, it makes me think of the barracks in the relocation camps, but they were much more solidly built, and in the school campus they were used as classrooms. In this other place, which was about a half mile down the road, they were turned into faculty living quarters, particularly married. The bachelors had a bachelor building to themselves, [10:00] but the married couples had a, what we call, apartment. This barracks was divided into a kitchen, two bedrooms and then living room. It was heated by a pot belly stove, coal stove, in the middle of the room, which is supposed to heat all the rooms, because all the doors opened to the central space. And we had to shop---go shopping for our groceries, and it was sort of roughing it, but it was not---not a hardship thing. It was nothing like the---what I hear of the accommodations in the relocation centers, where you had to make your own beds and mattresses out of straw, had to go to mess halls, outside mess halls, and walk. The only thing about Minnesota---’course we were young, and we didn’t mind it so much, and we were just married and very, very happy---but it was cold”, and the first winter it was really cold. 30 below 0, and you know, we couldn’t believe it, but it was not that bad. Considering what our folks been subjected to, we felt we weren’t that bad off. Things look different as you look back, and you think, “My god”, you know, “what have they done to This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 8 of 25 �us?”, you know, “and why did we put up with it?”, but at the time you---you’re part of the climate of the period, and you can’t stand off and look at the situation from any theoretical ground, you just lived it as it came along. INTERVIEWER: Did you have much communication with your family who were in the internment camps? TSUKAHIRA: Not much, wrote letters, [12:00] and---we knew that there wasn’t much happening in the camps, and there was much that we were doing that we couldn’t talk about. That’s the whole thing about this military intelligence thing, they just automatically clamp a veil of secrecy over what you were doing, you couldn’t even tell people in---you make friends in the city, and they wanna know what you’re doing, and, you know, “What is this camp you guys are . . .” You can’t tell ’em. INTERVIEWER: Did you have much interaction with the surrounding population? TSUKAHIRA: Well, fortunately I did. I don’t think many of the others did. But I had a student, who was---I think I told you about him, he was a person who happened to visit Japan---he was a music student, very talented music student---happened to visit Japan, saw a Kabuki play, and fell in love with Kabuki. And then he went on to ?Indonesia? and studied the dances and music there, and then when the war broke out---well, he spent six months in Japan, studying the Kabuki, watching the Kabuki, and in the course of it, he picked on Japanese, so he’s really fluent, so naturally when they tested him, when he got in the Army and they screened him, they knew he had Japanese. Well, they let anybody in the Army who could say (inaudible), and say, “he’s a potential linguist.” And so we had a lot of duds, but we also had some of these people, brilliant people. Now, Faubion Bowers is his name, and he went through our school, ended up at Savage. He was not in any of my classes, but [14:00] we became friends, I forget how, and he was---he sort of liked us, both of us, so we went weekends---every weekend, Friday afternoon, there was a bus that took people who wanted to go into town, into town. So we went into town, or drove into town in our own car, and enjoyed the city. Well he is a person who is---makes friends and very gregarious, so he had friends in Minnesota, Minneapolis, that you wouldn’t believe. The editor of the newspaper, leading newspaper, had a beautiful home in the heart of Minneapolis, and he---she loved music, and somehow we got to be frequent guests at this woman’s house---parties---and because of our friend, Faubion. He also happened to know other people, and one night we were invited, he, my wife and I, to the home of Sinclair Lewis, famous novelist, and we had a dinner that you never---I still remember, it was pheasant, which is a native game bird in Minnesota, and wild rice, which is also harvested in---by the Indians in northern Minnesota, and that was---aside from meeting this famous character---but after dinner, one thing I remember about, what I talked to them about, is the evacuation. Sinclair Lewis said, “Why do you people put up with this outrage?”, and it was the first time that I heard [16:00] someone say that, look at it that way. And of course we---there was nothing we could do or say, why, you know, how can we not, you know, we wanna gonna to jail and something, and maybe shipped off to Japan or something. No, we just had to take it, but the fact that he, a mid-western figure, who probably had not contact with Japan or Japanese before that, would say that, it left a real impression on me. But I get away from my subject, my host, Faubion, was the man who---through him made our stay in Minnesota very pleasant. The school was interesting professionally, because we had all kinds of challenges there too. But socially, most of the guys went to town, and went to bars and got drunk or something, or had dinners or something, with their pals, but I think we were privileged in that we were allowed to sort of have a glimpse into---oh, there were other people too, besi[des]---I won’t go into it, but there’re other people who were prominent people in the city, in the society of Minneapolis, and that made our whole stay Minnesota very pleasant. INTERVIEWER: In know you have an interesting story to tell about Faubion as well, about his activities after, World War II. This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 9 of 25 �TSUKAHIRA: Well, why don’t I tell it now? He graduated, ’course he was a buck private like all the---and we had a few---later on we had whole classes, I was in charge of the Caucasian classes, because these were officer candidates, [18:00] and they had been drafted or picked from various universities throughout the country, on language aptitude. They said at the University of Michigan, and when they graduated they were sent to our school, we were sort of the finishing school, because we specialized in military Japanese, called heigo, and military terminology and names of weapons, and names of, you know, divisions and units and ranks, military ranks. That vocabulary we taught. And I had the charge of the so called officer (inaudible), OCS, students, and there were about five classes of those. He was---Faubion was mixed in with the rest of the Japanese, and he was not---and they were graded according to ability. The first class were mostly Kibei, educated in Japan, fluent, didn’t need much instruction at all, and on down to the section 8 team, which was barely struggling along. I think Faubion was in the third or fourth section from the top. He was good. He graduated eventually with his class, and went overseas, and immediately he was picked to be the aid of General MacArthur. He was promoted to major, he was a major. From private to major. And then, because of his interest in Kabuki, he decided he’d finagle a job for himself as theatre censor of SCAP. Now SCAP was demarketizing Japan, and one of the things they did was get rid of these futile remnants, like Kabuki, you know, about loyalty and Yamato-Damashii and all that ?tapu?, and they wanted to destroy, in fact, destroy the Kabuki [20:00] theatre, because it was not teaching democratic values. Faubion was able, somehow, to rescue, somehow manage things so that the Kabuki was not touched, and ’till he died, he was a hero to the Kabuki. Even to years ago, when the Kabuki sent a troop to Los Angeles, he came along and invited me and my wife to the party that the Japanese consul gave in Los Angeles. That was two years ago. He was regarded by the Kabuki people in Japan as a savior of Kabuki, and there’s even a book written about that. About Faubion’s life. He died last year. It is very tragic case, but he was a very talented person. I have much more to say about Faubion, but we won’t have time for all of it. INTERVIEWER: I think it’s remarkable that you were able to meet someone like Sinclair Lewis during the war. Could you tell us a little bit more about your personal impressions on him, about him? TSUKAHIRA: Well, as I say, it was not our doing. We were just sort of saying, “Yeah, you guys wanna come along, we were invited to dinner.” Sure, we went along, and, you know . . . It wasn’t that we had had advanced---we had worked to get this invitation. I found him---you know, he’s not a very attractive man, he’s got red (inaudible), but, and I was sort of shocked to see him at first, but when you got to talk to him, he was fascinating. And then again, I forget what we talked about. It was just a small group of us, in front of his [22:00] fireplace, but the remark that I mentioned to you already is what sticks in my mind. But he was a true, what we call old fashioned liberal, and who’s novels were sometimes critical of American life. In fact they were a critique of American life. His ​Babbitt, ​ George Babbitt, was the typical American business man, had, you know, no outlook on the world, and he thought America was like that. He was part of a generation of Minnesota people---one of the women I was introduced to was a columnist in the Minneapolis paper, and she wrote a very interesting column, but her background is interesting. She was one of the people who revolted in the ’20s against life, beau joie life in this (inaudible) Minnesota City, town, and Sinclair did the same thing. His ​Main Street​ is a critique of American life as it was lived by most people. But she went to New York, and was a rebel. She was sort of like a hippie long before the hippies. She was a rebel, she was one of these---I forget the name that they gave to this group that was critical of American life and revolted against it, went to New York, Greenwich Village, or some went to Europe, and hobnobbed with the artist (inaudible) ex-patriots, Americans who went to Europe because American life was too pedestrian or too backward for them. [24:00] So to---that’s a long answer to your short question about Sinclair Lewis. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us what a typical day was like as an instructor at Camp Savage? This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 10 of 25 �TSUKAHIRA: Well, as I say, we lived in a community down the road, and we got in our cars in the morning and commuted to the school, and went to our classes, and . . . First---I forgot how it was done, but we had a big unit with desks, and I have picture of myself at a desk, but that was the faculty room. We---all of the faculty had desks, and we planned our lesson for the day, and we’d meet the classes. It was like a regular school schedule, and . . . Beginning time, and we had a break, the only difference was, we taught Japanese grammar, text book, reading, Kanji, writing---you had to memorize so many Kanji a day, and then you’d give an exam every day. You’d break for lunch, it was a mess hall, Army style, and ?everyone went? to mess, one o’ clock, back in your classroom, and I think we went on until dark, it was six o’ clock or so. Broke for supper. After supper, two hours of study, supervised study. And even then---in other words, you were totally immersion in Japanese language, from morning ‘till night, ‘till after supper, and . . . Even at night you’d find students studying lessons with flashlights in the John, in the toilet. Or in---[26:00] (inaudible) couldn’t get away with that very easily in the cots, you know, reading under the blanket. That wasn’t because they were so motivate---well, I guess they were motivated, but not in the sense that they wanted to learn, they . . . There was something about that whole war-time period. Whatever you were doing you wanted to do well, and the Nisei had this---I don’t know where they got it, it was sort of some Japanese feeling, group feeling, that you cannot do anything that will embarrass your group. You had to make sure you upheld your end. This was true (inaudible) jumping ahead. In basic training we had target training, and half the team would man the targets, and after the shooter shot, the targets would be pulled down, and they would be examined to see where the bullet went, and then we reported back. They put up a number: 30, 20, or something. And the Japanese group that was training at that time scored the highest in the history of the camp, they told me. And the reason was, if you were on the line, the Japanese score would give you the benefit of the doubt. Where the other squads that did the same thing, you know, there was sort of a rivalry. The shooter, you’d make him look bad, and if you could get away with it, you lowered their score. The Japanese were always trying to promote the group, make the group look good. That attitude prevailed in the school too, and they studied hard. And it was grind, grind, grind, I’m afraid, it was . . . Until---toward the second year, when we had a lot of Caucasian [28:00] Officer candidates, and these kids were bright kids, they had passed well on language aptitude tests, but they also had very interesting backgrounds. The Nisei background was pretty uniform. Pretty drab, to tell the truth. But these guys came from the theatrical world, and they were all bright, and---so not only did they study hard, and they never got as good, some of them not really became expert Japanese, but they were there to become the bosses of language teams, so they---each team, after they graduated, would go out with one leader, who was an officer, a Caucasian, and then a couple of, or three or four Nisei would be part of his team, typical thing. But they put on a music . . . END OF AUDIO FILE 4 BEGINNING OF TAPE FIVE INTERVIEWER: [00:00] OK. When we last stopped you were talking about the musical comedy that was staged. Could you continue with that? TSUKAHIRA: Well it was---it was called ​Nips in the Bud​, and---because they were students of Japanese, and it was a series of skits put on very professionally, because we found out that some of the people involved were people actually professionally involved---experienced in the New York stage. Lot of talented people. One became a leading economist, several became professors of Japanese in various universities after the war, one became a columnist for the ​New Yorker, and they were---they were people of great talent, but they weren’t what you call whiz kids in ​ Japanese, they just had---they were smart, so they learned quickly, but it’s limited---you can only learn so much in six months, which is about the longest that students were kept in the class, you couldn’t---I mean you had to keep sending off---there was a great demand for these, once the field got to know the help that the Japanese language, the This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 11 of 25 �Nisei interpreters and interrogators could do for them, there was a great demand, there was---so they went out recruiting students in the camps. That’s when my brother was reproached, and he ended up in the school, in uniform for the second time. After he got kicked out he went to evac[uation]---relocation center, he was drafted from, or volunteered from the relocation center, and ended up in camp, ended up in the school. So there were recruiting teams, there were---I understand there were riots [02:00] in some of the camps when some of the recruiters came along, because by that time, the bitterness among young people had grown, that they opposed any effort to aid the US war effort, and anybody who volunteered for the US Army was attacked by these radicals in the camps. This is all just heard by hearsay, but there was a great demand for the product of the school, you had more and more people coming in, became a big institution. And the stories of some of the people who actually saw exciting---had exciting experiences in combat, are told in many of these books that are now being published about the (inaudible) experience. I unfortunately never did get overseas, but by the middle of 1944, I’m seeing my all my---many of my students shipping out, wanting to be part of the action. Minnesota life was very pleasant, even in the middle of the war, because it was sort of, you know, the Midwest is pretty much an isolationist place, and the people were friendly. Not only the people I mentioned that I knew, upper crust people, but the tradesmen and the garage men, the local garage men. In fact, Savage was a very friendly town. All of a sudden you have 1,000 Japanese young people plunk down in your neighborhood, and there was no trouble, no incident. ’Course you brought business, but not much. GIs don’t bring you much business. So that was the atmosphere of the school. And . . . What---do you have any (inaudible) . . . INTERVIEWER: Were you [04:00] the only instructor in the special section, or were there several other instructors? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I forget exactly the details, but you had---the school was divided into classes, but classes were divided into groups, and some of the senior instructors---which I was, since I was a pioneer, one of the pioneers from San Francisco---were put into supervisory positions, and I was called Chairman of the Special Section, which was a block of classes, including some Nisei, but the Nisei were not the top linguists (inaudible), not top in linguistic ability, but five classes of these Caucasians, with whom I became very friendly, because some of ’em were very attractive personalities. There was---I forget the terminology, but there were chairmans of this branch, this group, this group, and then we began to get more and more specialized. We were first teaching only language, then we began to teach interrogation techniques, and you went through dramatize, some of us were made to dress up in Japanese uniforms, and then the classes were told to interrogate us, or handle us, and---in Japanese, and exercises like that. We had lots of specialized classes in kinda interrogation techniques, and other skills that we learned were necessary in the field, ’cause we got feedback all the time, when graduates come back, tell us, you know, this is what should be part of the training, and so on. So the whole curriculum became more and more sophisticated. [06:00] But I, for some reason, because of my academic background, I guess, was interested in Japanese as---languages grammatically. Most of the instructors were very fluent, because they had been educated in Japan. You’d ask ’em, “Why do you say ‘wa’ instead of ‘ga?” “Why is this that, and why does that . . .?”, and they’d say, “Never mind that, that’s nonsense, just do what I say”, you know, in other words, they were illiterate in grammar, and they didn’t think it was important. And I personally don’t think that language skill comes from knowing grammar. You know a lot of grammar, you can know a lot of technical stuff, but it doesn’t help your fluency. But there was a demand. Since I had these officer classes, they wanted to know why. Why you say this, and why you say that, and why do it this way and that way. So I and another instructor, who was an interesting person in his own case, he was an American named Richard ?McKinlin?. His mother was Japanese, but his father was American, and he was an instructor in Hokkaido, so Richard grew up in Hokkaido, but he went to the Japanese schools up through Kotogakko (inaudible)---Kotogakko, yeah, preliminary, preparatory to university, when the war broke out. His father was interned, because he was an American, and he---and a lot of Americans in Japan were shipped back to the States, and from that group that were shipped back, we got some administrators, and we got Dick as a member of the faculty. Now, he and I got along very well, and we compiled a Japanese grammar, and we [08:00] laid down the rules for grammar, so I taught grammar, Japanese grammar for a while, to these officers who’d say, “You know, This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 12 of 25 �we can’t just follow you by example, we (inaudible), we like to know why this verb is---comes out this way, and that verb comes out that way, and so we had to tell ’em about the conjugations of Japanese verbs, and all that sort of thing, which we---we knew part of, and part we had to look up. We taught grammar. So as I was saying, the school curriculum became more and more complicated as time went on, but I was getting bored, because I---you teach one class, and you go teach another class the same old thing, and pretty soon you say, “Geez, there’s no more fun in this.” I wanted to get in---go where these---my graduates were going, and people were writing back, and see some action, so I enlisted, and people thought I was crazy, I was giving up a GS12 civilian job to be a buck private. The next day my pay from there to down here. But I felt that I had to do it, and I did. In June ’44 I enlisted. And of course the shipped me immediately to basic training. I won’t go into that, unless you wanna hear more about basic training, but we went to McClellan, Fort McClellan in Alabama, and we went through the regular basic training, but it was short. Shorter than the 13 or 14 weeks normal basic training. We were eight weeks, and we were all made up of people connected with the school, the language school. In other words, mostly Nisei students. [10:00] In other words, we were segregated, but we didn’t think that it was racial, we thought well we were special intelligence, we didn’t expect to go into combat and shoot rifles and stuff. We will go to combat, if we do, to accompany these field units, but mostly, we were going to translation centers and places back from the frontline. The only thing I wanna say about basic training is, I mentioned already how the Nisei tended to cooperate with each other, and try to make the best record of any unit that trained. Our officers and, and non-com instructors were all Caucasian. The only thing I wanted to mention about this basic training experience was that, we didn’t feel segregated, but we ran into seg[regation]---I did, ran into segregation in its rawest form for the first time. That was after---when after basic training was over, and we were shipping back to our---going back to the school, and to the train station, they---we were---our buses---mostly people from our group, but there was a single black negro soldier on the bus with us. He was being shipped out too, from the camp, and I learned that elsewhere that there black units, all black units, being trained. When we got the station, got off the bus, we were told to go in through that door, and it said “White waiting room.” The one black was told to go to the other door. “Black.” That’s when we first ran into [12:00] segregation in the camp, now of course in Alabama, you’re right in the middle of the deep South. I didn’t leave camp much, because I was 29 years old. My colleges were young students, they were just about to enter the school, I was going to leave the school. The age difference was tremendous, but we had pride, and so when the exercised during the day, we made---there were a couple of us older types---made sure that we weren’t gonna fall behind our younger colleges, and we lasted through the day, and after supper we went back to our quarters and just flopped down on our cots. The younger recruits were---were just as tired, they flopped down too, but within a half hour they were up and said, “OK, now let’s go to town”, and they went out, out of camp into Birmingham, Aniston, and, you know, relaxed for the---the way that young people would do, but we were---I was knocked out. That was it for the day for me, until next morning, we had to get up at six, or something like that. So this basic training experience was rather short, eight weeks. It was physically exhausting, but I think that experience of seeing this soldier on---and in addition, when we got on the train, we found that there was not room for all of us on that train, in the car, so they moved us into the next car. Well the next car was a black car. So they told the blacks to get out, half of the car had to get out and go to another car, and they marked off half of the car [14:00] for us. So here we were, half Japanese-Americans, half black, segregated, and we were treated like, you know, we were shoving them out, it looked like we we[re], we were, we were shoving them out of their---even their segregated area, because we were a little better than them. And that was my first experience with racial segregation in America. INTERVIEWER: Did you experience anything similar to that from the population outside--TSUKAHIRA: No. INTERVIEWER: ---the area? This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 13 of 25 �TSUKAHIRA: Well, basic training, as I say, I never left camp, I never made any contact, but on our marches outside of camp, we could just see it was a very poor section, a rural section, and you have these shacks, and black families, white families, living like you’ve seen pictures of the Depression of people, you know, no shoes, houses falling apart. You see them as you march down the road, but we had no contact with the people. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us where you were assigned after you finished your basic training? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I got back---we got back to Minnesota, and we found that the school had moved. They’d closed Camp Savage and moved everything into Fort Snelling, which is right in town. And that---it was new era for the, for the school, ’cause Camp Savage days were over. I was promoted within a few days to master sergeant, I was a buck private, I was master sergeant, and shipped to---told that I was gonna have to go to Camp Richie, Maryland. And I found that it was---I wasn’t alone, half of the faculty, [16:00 the enlisted faculty, and some of our best students, were also assigned to this new facility in, in Maryland, which was a translation unit called the Pacific Military Intelligence Research Section, PACMIRS, and we, we mainly translated high level strategic documents [coughing] for the Pentagon. [clearing throat] And we were stationed up near the Pennsylvania border about 60 miles from Washington City, Washington D.C. My wife found a job with the Pentagon, in Washington, and had an apartment in Washington, so I would commute every weekend from Ritchie to Washington, there was a bus Friday afternoon, take us into town, and there was a bus at 11 o’ clock Sunday night, to take us back to camp, Camp Ritchie. Well, you know, you leave at 11, you go 60 miles, and they didn’t go direct, they went to Baltimore, and then back, so that was oh about 80 miles. And we got to camp about three or four in the morning. And we had to wake up at six o’ clock, start the new day on Monday. So we only got two hours in our bunks. Those who were lucky went to the baggage racks on the bus, where they could stretch out, and they slept the whole time. We---that’s what we did. At Camp Ritchie I was also commissioned an officer and put in charge of the translation control section, they called it, which all the work done by the translation crew, and there was a whole bunch of translators given documents, we had to go over these documents, Japanese original, the English [18:00] translation, and edit it. And my college was a lawyer named Davis, Bob Davis, who became very good friends of mine, a very good friend of mine, and the two of us sort of edited all the documents produced by this section. And then they were sent to the Pentagon to learn---to take classes in certain military things, and all in all it was a very pleasant place, because it was---it was a training camp. When I---I must tell you this. When I first came to camp, I found a platoon of German soldiers marching down the road and I said, “My god, what is this?” And then, a little later, I saw some Italians. I found out that this was a military intelligence training camp, and we were a part of it, but the camp itself was dedicated to training intelligence officers for the---for the whole Army. And they took these captured soldiers, Germans and Italians, who spent the night in a stockade at night, but during the day they were put in their own uniforms and told to march up and down, or to do certain things that they were trained to do, so that the military intelligence officers could learn uniforms, unit names, and tactics and stuff like that. In other words, the prisoners were used as, as models for military intelligence officers to train on, and these guys were sent to---on fi[ve]---before graduation, were sent on all night patrols. They were supposed to go someplace with nothing but a compass and a few directions, and find their way back at night. But we were sort of in the camp and isolated, we were a special section, devoted [20:00] entirely to translating Japanese documents. And we were not only US, but we were allied. We had Brits, we had Canadians, and we had people from other units, in fact our commander was---at one time was---was a British colonel. So it was a allied effort (inaudible). INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us what a typical day would be like? TSUKAHIRA: This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 14 of 25 �Well, I---I don’t remember the workdays, ?it was?---because, you know, it was pretty (inaudible). But we’d have---an officer’s life was not bad, because you had a lot freedom, and the food was excellent. They had a club, officer’s club, where the chefs were from the Waldorf, they were people who were drafted, and they ended up in the----in these---in the kitchens of these---of this camp, and Walter Winchell (inaudible) wrote up this camp once in one of his columns. He called it the country club camp. Anyway, it was famous for that. But our day was---we slept in barracks, and at reveille we got up. We worked six days a week, and the one day off was a half day. Well, we got off on Sund[ays]---well, we got off on weekends, now how does that work? He had what they called ban[d], band day, which was Wednesday, when the classes were---and instruction was suspended, but the typical day began with our reporting to our, our---everybody went to their job sites and started producing their---their work, and we reviewed their work, and I don’t remember---we had a library section, we had a printing section, and [22:00] when the documents left us, we don’t know what happened, but eventually it came out in various published forms and sent to people who were interested in the material. It was a very routine sort of operation, but it was not very exciting. What else can I tell you about Camp Ritchie, it was . . . As I say, 60 miles from Washington, so the thing was to get in, get back to the city whenever you can, and we were able, as I said, to go home on weekends. INTERVIEWER: How long were you stationed at Camp Ritchie? TSUKAHIRA: Well, we went there in the fall of ’44, and the war ended next year, so it was---wasn’t even the fall of ’45, it was less than a year. And I remember the day that the war ended. Of course the war in Europe had ended before that, and we were---it was, I think the (inaudible) day we were supposed to relax, recreation day, and we were watching somewhere---watching a baseball game in the field. And there were a lot of car[s], people watching the players, the players were sort of a pick-up team from the, the larger camp, and someone was listening to news on the radio, on car radio, and said, “Hey, Japan has surrendered”, and everybody stopped, and stood there for a while. Then someone said, “Play ball, let’s play ball!” And the game went on, that was it. That was how we observed Japan surrender. INTERVIEWER: I wanted to backtrack just a [24:00] little bit. I know you visited your family in Heart Mountain as a, as an officer. Could you tell us about how you felt? TSUKAHIRA: Well, that I think was the most painful experience, when I . . . By that time, (inaudible) become, you know, you’d become more---one of the things about evacuation was that it freed the Nisei, west coast Nisei, from their little neighborhoods, and exposed that to the rest of Americas. Sure, it began in camp, but they were allowed to leave the camp if they found something they could do, or go to school or some[thing], get them into a school. So by that time we had reconciled ourselves to the idea that the camp existed, but, and that things---there were a lot of volunteers from the camps in the school, and when I was going to go overseas, I asked for two weeks leave to go to visit my folks, who were still in Heart Mountain, in camp there. So I remember, there was a long train ride, all alone, through the upper states, the Dakotas and into Montana and, and finally I got off at Billings. I took a bus from Billings down into Wyoming to the camp, and they dropped me at the entrance to the camp, and I marched in, and I was an officer so the guards saluted me. And I went in and saw how my family had lived for---during all that time. And they lived in this barracks, with other families, and separated in some---with a blanket hung across the ceiling. But they had to eat in the mess hall, and [26:00] my parents really never complained. My mother went in for a lot of volunteer work, sewing and (inaudible) pictures of her. There was a picture of the camp life in, in a documentary shown on TV, and there I saw a picture of my mother sewing by a sewing machine. But they would occupy themselves with that kind of activity. Some of the men said, “Never, I’m not gonna work for anybody”, and they just didn’t do anything, they didn’t lift a finger, wouldn’t volunteer for anything. Others did all kinds of handy craft. You go to the museum, you see a lot of their work. They took pictures, and incidentally cameras were forbidden, This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 15 of 25 �but the somehow smuggled some in, and there are some pictures of camp life still preserved. But when I actually visited my folks, it sunk i[n]---struck me the first time that this thing was really an anomaly, you know, it was contrary to any principles---all the principles that we were taught about, American citizenry and equality under the law and that sort of thing. We had taken it because it was war---it’s a war time contingency, but more you had thought about it, you realize, “Why is it confined to the Japanese? Why not the Germans and Italians, who were also in war---at war against us?” And you know, these sort of things began to sink in, and the bitterness began to grow. But there was nothing you can really do about it, and I understand that in some of the camps by that time, there were these riots, and there were no-no protestors, refused to sign the loyalty oath. They were shipped to Tule Lake, and there was all this sort of growing awareness of the injustice of it all, but I---I got a whiff of that [28:00] on my own, and . . . But I was reassured by my folks, they didn’t feel bitter about it. In fact, some of the older men were saying, you know, “This is the first vacation I’ve had in my whole life, I’ve worked and worked, and so it’s OK if the government wants to keep me in idleness, I’ll put up with it.” And there were some who were defiant and said, “Japan’s gonna win the war, Japan’s gonna win the war”, and you know, they were just fanatic about it. But (inaudible) were really, I think, the victims, because if . . . The Nisei, they said, “You know, we can’t leave the children---separate the children from the parents. The parents have to go, they’re not citizens.” Well, they’re not citizens because they weren’t allowed to since 1924, and even those who were citizens---there was a guy whose name is Slocum, I think, I think adopted by a an American family, but he was pure Japanese, but he had a veteran of World War I. He was an American citizen, but they interned him too. And you know, it just sort of---the whole thing was an anomaly, but I think it was due to the indifference of Washington, they were---and political reasons, they didn’t wanna pose any strong request, but the thing in California, I think, was---was prejudiced. END OF AUDIO FILE 5 BEGINNING OF TAPE SIX INTERVIEWER: [00:00] When we last stopped the tape, you were talking about some of your thoughts on some of the causes of the evacuation. Could you continue on with that? TSUKAHIRA: Well, this is my, my feeling, and my maybe just a theory, but looking at the history of Japanese in America, the discrimination---anti-Japanese movement began after the Chinese---anti-Chinese legislation. The Chinese were brought over in great numbers to build the railroads, do labor for the development of the West, and they---after the---that work was done, they thought that there were too many, they thought, and they passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Now, the Japanese came and sort of---they were, they came a lot to Hawaii, because they were in demand as a labor, and they came to the States, and at first they were welcomed, but there’s a long history of growing anti-Oriental feeling. We sort of inherited some of the prejudice against Orientals. But this prejudice was fomented, motivated largely by business interests, our cultural interests who felt that the---that the Japanese were---had occupied the best farmlands and things that they wanted. So there was this rather organized movement against the Japanese, and (inaudible). I think of the ​Sacramento Bee​ and the Central Valley areas as the center of this anti-Japanese agitation. Now, when [02:00] my dad arrived in San Francisco, there was this famous school incident, which mainly had Jewish-Chinese students, who were excluded from the regular schools. But the bitterness---the anti-Japanese feeling among the populists was fostered by---I think by very cynical motives by business interests, our cultural interest, who stood to gain or stood to lose from Japanese presence, or stood to gain if they got rid of them. And so when the war broke out there was this natural hyste[ria]---anti-Japanese hysteria against Japan, but give the atmosphere, that included all Japanese. You know, it’s a---“A jap’s a jap”, as one of the generals, General DeWitt, said. And this local bitterness---or this local prejudice was the motor, I think, that fueled the---the motivated the legislation that Washington issued. And Washington was not that concerned about---they were---they saw the big picture, the war. The war was the big thing, and US---US Navy was attacked, and people were killed in a---in a surprise attack, which Roosevelt said was, you know, infamous. But the emotion came from This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 16 of 25 �California, the legislation came from Washington, and it was largely that combination that---the indifference of Washington to the actual situation, that I think [04:00] made the evacuation possible. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us about what you did immediately after the war? TSUKAHIRA: Well, after the war, I sort of merged into civilian life. I was---our---it was---our organization in Camp Ritchie had moved to Washington, became the Washington Document Center. Again, it was an allied joint, by which I mean it had Brits, Australians, Canadians, and Americans, and we had Army, Air For[ce]---or no Air Force then yet---Army, Navy, Marine, all in---brought together. It seems like they---all these units that were working in intelligence during the war, were brought together in this organization. And I was still in uniform when they sent a team, or sent a group they called the Washington Document Center Advanced, to Tokyo. And I was in charge of a field team section, that’s the section that’s sent out, that supervised the teams that went out throughout the countryside, and largely in the military headquarters to seize documents that were of military intelligence value. Now the war was over, so it was not the tactical strategic stuff, but more long range, plans, war plans [coughing]---excuse me---and other information that the Japanese archives were thought to hold. So again, I was in a supervisory position, (inaudible)---picked the destinations for these different teams. And I was headquartered in Tokyo. So it was a pretty much [06:00] office kind of a job that I had, even though I had come to occupy Japan, barely recovering from the war---[in] fact, they hadn’t recovered at all. The war ended in, in August, surrender was September, we arrived in November. And---the city was still no signs of reconstruction at all, they were just still trying to stay alive. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us a bit more about your impressions of Tokyo at this time? This would have been I guess your third time there. TSUKAHIRA: Yeah, well I had a rather sentimental attachment, first as a child, I lived my---spent a good part of a year in Tokyo at my uncle’s place in Shiba, near Shimbashi Station, was about a mile from Shimbashi Station. So I remember---and we’d walk from there to Ginza, and I remember feeling very familiar with Tokyo when I arrived again as a student, own my own, and as I mentioned earlier, this was a very enjoyable time for me. I was learning a new skill, I was meeting new friends, and all kinds of exciting experiences, seemed every day was a new adventure. So I grew to become a very favorite---I mean a---admirer of Tokyo, one who considered himself sort of a (inaudible), you know, which is a Tokyo-born Japanese. So it was a shock to see Japan after the war, (inaudible) so [08:00] soon after the war. I [re]member we landed at (inaudible) airfield, which is down---north of---or east, I guess---anyway, close to Yokohama, and we drove in on a truck---we were driven in an Army truck which was covered with a hood, but it was open in the back, so all we could see was the receding landscape as the truck drove down the Yokohama-Tokyo highway, and it was really a unmitigated scene of destruction, just---collapsed factories, burned out houses and things, all the way from Yokohama to Tokyo. Then we got into the city, and I expected to see---well, here at least we’ll see some buildings. Well, we didn’t drive by the headquarters or the Marunouchi section directly from a point of view or position where I could see it. We drove up to the NYK building, which was still standing, and for a while that evening, it seemed like, “Well, at least this part of Tokyo is standing”. Tokyo Station was there, the building---NYK building was there, and everything looked pretty much normal, until we got inside, we found that who floors had been cleared out, and the radiators had been taken out. I don’t know what made them do that, but I---I think someone told me it was for scrap metal. Except the radiators were cast iron, and they couldn’t reuse the cast iron, so they were dumped in the back there, in a [10:00] rusting pile. Meanwhile, the building had no heat, so the Army set up stoves. [I] forget what they burned in them, it was not wood, but it was coke or something. And of course that made smoke, and you couldn’t have smoke in the interior, so you had (inaudible) going up to the ceiling, and ceiling to the windows, and through the windows, (inaudible) This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 17 of 25 �taped out. And that’s where we lived, they had these folding cots scattered around the floor, and we slept there. That was my first night in Tokyo. INTERVIEWER: Could you describe what---any interaction you may have had with the Japanese civilians, or your relatives? TSUKAHIRA: I had none, except for the relatives. My relatives---one relative worked for (inaudible) Whale, whaling, and he came to visit me and brought---not for me, because food was short---but he worked for this company that had a source of meat, and he brought a package, oh about two or three pounds, of meat. When he called on me at the NYK building, and the guard told me I had a visitor, but they were detaining him because he had some meat, and (inaudible) he ‘d stolen somewhere, black market or something, so I had to come down and examine it and asked him about where he got it, and he says, “Well this, this is whale meat.” [It] looked like beef, but, you know, it’s sort of red, and I told the guard, “This is whale meat”, and when he learned that he realized that, you know, this guy had not stolen any GI supplies, because they didn’t have whale meat. The other contact ?I had?---oh, I had [12:00] two others: I had an uncle that---my cousin came to the headquarters. I wanted to see my uncle, and he---my brother was incidentally also in Japan at the time. He invited us to dinner. And we know that---knew that it was against the rules, occupation rules, to go into any Japanese restaurant, but they didn’t say anything about being invited to a Japanese home. In any case, many people were invited after the (inaudible) made friends, and they always brought C-rations as a omiyage to compensate for the food---meal. My uncle’s sukiyaki dinner was unusual in that it was fish, not beef, but we enjoyed it, and I enjoyed that reunion. My other uncle, my mother’s fa[ther]---brother was a editor of a Tokyo newspaper, English---foreign language editor. In other words, he took the foreign language news and got it printed into the Japanese paper. He lived out in the suburbs, and we drove up. My---a friend of mine and I drove up in a Jeep, because it was too far and transportation was broken down, and I remember that when we drove up and came up to the door, they wouldn’t open the door. They had seen who we---us approach. We were in uniform, the Jeep was at the front of the gate, and fin[ally] we convinced them---I convinced them who I was, and he let me in. And he said, “We were afraid, because there are so many of these GIs robbing people, going around robbing people.” So that’s---that’s about the full story of my contact with relatives, and as for the general population, I don’t think I [14:00] met anybody that I know, or----or any of the general population, except see them. I see them packed in the trains, I did go to Osaka once, and we had---railroad cars reserved for the occupation troops only. The next car may be jammed with Japanese civilians. The windows were broken, and they were cold, and yet, that was it, that was the occupation system where they---if you were US Army, you had first class accommodations, and so you---it was sort of difficult to make friends, make---that you didn’t know already or have any contact with. INTERVIEWER: How long were you in Tokyo with the Washington Document Center? TSUKAHIRA: Well I think I was there from November till about March, when my father was hit by a car. He had come back to LA from camp, and he had no job, his store was gone, his business gone. And I don’t know exactly, I’ve never heard the details to this day, but I know that he was looking for some work, and I don’t know what work he found, but he came home and he had no car, so he commuted by streetcar, which ran in front of our house. He got off the streetcar one night after---one evening, it was dark. There was not---no street lighting, and the safety zones, instead of being raised, a raised platform, was just simply a---marked by buttons, you know, these street buttons. So he got off the streetcar, and a car came speeding by and hit him, and then he died, so word came to me in [16:00] Tokyo that my father had died, my brother and I were ordered to immediately---were put on orders to return home. But I couldn’t get a plane, although I was---I left my job, went to a sort of a hostel, or----actually it was the bus station, which on the first floor was sort of like a departure area, where you had the departures posted on a blackboard. Upstairs you had a sleeping area with cots, rows of cots. And we’d stay there for about two weeks, going down This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 18 of 25 �every morning, look at the blackboard to see if we had a flight. And when it looked like there was---were---was a possibility, we always got bumped. We, I say we, ’cause another lieutenant and I were on the---on the same orders to go home. We got bumped by colonels that are higher rankers. And the reason there was this problem was that there were no shortage of---there was a shortage of planes. The reason was, enlisted personnel were being discharged very rapidly when the war was over. Only the officers were slower in getting their discharges, but the enlisted personnel were the maintenance crew. They kept the planes in fine condition, and more and more, the planes were grounded because they didn’t have enough people to maintain them. Well, to make a long story short, we eventually gave up on this method, went to Yokosuka, where the Navy had a similar setup for people who wanted to go back to the States, and they---somehow we managed. My college was a very smart guy. And he managed to [18:00] finagle us a ride on a Navy plane to Hawaii, or to Guam. The trouble was, the---there was no ongoing flight from Guam immediately. We waited a week in Guam. So two weeks in Tokyo, a week in Guam, and still no planes. And finally we got on a ship that went---on an airplane that flew to Oakland. I got off at Oakland, hitched a ride to L.A., Long Beach airport, got on the red car---we used to have a red car, now the blue line---into town, and finally made my way home, one month after my father’s death. The funeral was---they held it, but it was---couldn’t hold it any longer, it was over. That’s how I got home from overseas. INTERVIEWER: When were you officially discharged from the Army? TSUKAHIRA: Well, I went back to Washington, the Washington Document Center became a civilian operation, using both civilians and military people. In January of ’47, I was discharged. I went up---I was told to go up to Fort Dix, got my honorable discharge, paper (inaudible), medical exam, and all that, and then I came back to the job as a civilian, and this organization was called the Central Intelligence Group. But I had my eyes on going on with my academic studies, so I resigned and in September of ’47 drove my family---I had a daughter by then, born in Virginia, my wife and I, three of us, and she was just still on the bottle, bottle feeding. And we’d drive up to a gas station and warm up the bottle and feed her, and we’d---I drove from [20:00] Washington to Boston, and I began my academic carrier in September of 1947. My doctoral carrier. INTERVIEWER: I have some more questions about what you did after the war, because it’s so interesting, but before we get to there, I just wanted to ask you to share with us your thoughts on the contributions of the MIS. TSUKAHIRA: Well I think we---there’s no way of knowing, because it’s sort of abstract, you know, you didn’t wipe a unit, or you didn’t sink a battleship or anything, although we contributed to these victories, and to the death of---well, I don’t know if MIS was involved in this---the death of admiral Yamamoto was attributed to intercept messages that told us where he was gonna go when. And so the planes went out and shot him down. That could’ve been a radio intercept and not have anything to do with MIS, but MIS work, in total, I think contributed a great deal to shortening the war, because we were the eyes and the ears in places where the US Army would’ve been blind and deaf. So according to one high official, and you never can tell where they get their figures---someone said that the MIS shortened the war by two years. How do you figure that, but (inaudible). All it means to me is that we did make a contribution, a significant contribution, to the war effort, and to many small victories and perhaps contributed to the larger victories. Because we had people, not only in the Army, in the jungles of the islands, the pacific islands, but we had, you know, this translating in Australia, but we had people assigned to the Navy in Hawaii, [22:00] and the fleets, and we had people assigned in Washington who were secret, so hush, hush we didn’t know about them ’til after the war. Assigned to these offices that specialized in radio intercepts, and all this is, you know---you might say, “Well, it’s the technology that we had captured their calls, we had intercepted their transmission wave lengths and so on”, but once you get this Japanese message translated, what good is it unless it’s translated into English. This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 19 of 25 �Interception is part of it, but the translation is the final necessary element in this business, and the MIS certainly contributed to that in many, many places throughout the war zone. INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the MIS got the full credit that it deserves for its contributions? TSUKAHIRA: I think with all the tributes after the war, (inaudible) the combat teams in Europe, the high generals (inaudible) adequate tribute, they had to, they couldn’t ignore a very obvious fact, but I think the general public never really got the full---full appreciation for the work that individual MIS graduates did. Because it’s kinda hard to explain, and besides that, there was a clamp on publicity for several years after the war, in fact some things cannot even be discussed today, technically. Although there’s nothing really sensitive about them. Military intelligence were---was pretty much, you know, undercover and kept secret, our kept [24:00] unpublicized, I would rather say, compared to the exploits of combat troops, who, you know, would be in the papers every day, and their achievements are very easy to see. You conquered so much territory, you captured so many prisoners. The intelligence work is invisible, and with this publicity clamp, the nature of the kind of work they did, the general public never got, and then a general may say at the end of the war, “MIS shortened the war by two years.” Well, people may read that, or they---it doesn’t really sink in. INTERVIEWER: Could you tell us a bit about your academic carrier, right after you were discharged from the Army? TSUKAHIRA: Well, that’s---that was my main aim, you see, so the reason I quit the government job, which is a very good job. The group that I was with eventually became the CIA, the next year, I think. And if I had been on the ground floor of this organization, who knows who interesting the work might have been. But I was determined to pursue and academic carrier. I had met Colonel (inaudible) in Washington. He is a great authority on Japan, and you may know or have heard his name, but he encouraged me to apply to Harvard. I told him of my interest in pursuing this thing. He says, “You know, I have a bunch of ex-veterans, mostly it turned out people who worked under him in intelligence work with---in the Arlington Hall in Washington, and they were bright, mostly Caucasian. One or two---I guess I was the only MIS in the group, and we studied Japanese history under him. Well, he encouraged me to go---he got me a scholarship with the American Council of Learned Societies, [26:00] he got me a scholarship to pay part of my tuition at Harvard, and---just out of the goodness of [his] heart, he doesn’t know me that well. But with that help, I was able to bring my family and live in, you know, family quarters, and presume my studies. And I spent, let’s see---I hate to think how long it was---’47 to ’51, you know, so almost four years, studying for my Doctorate, and the problem---well, I’ll stop there. That began my . . . END OF AUDIO FILE 6 BEGINNING OF TAPE SEVEN TSUKAHIRA: [00:00] . . .and preparing for the Doctorate. Are we on or are we not yet? INTERVIEWER: OK, now we’re on. CREW MEMBER: We’re on. This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 20 of 25 �TSUKAHIRA: After spending all that time getting my Doctorate, I finally graduated in 1951, and---with a Doctorate in history and far-eastern languages. And I was offered an instructorship at Harvard, which was---for which I was very grate[ful], ’cause I loved Cambridge, and I had my family and my daughter growing up, and my son was born during that period, and we had a nice house, we had faculty housing, and I taught Japanese history for three years at Harvard. But that was the limit, you had to go out---if you wanted a permanent appointment, you had to have had some experience elsewhere, it’s a Harvard policy. A job at the University of California Berkeley came up, and I took it, and I taught for a year. I enjoyed that too, it was great. Except that I was there because the professor I was replacing had gone to Japan with the Asia Foundation. [He] was planning to stay a longer period, but suddenly decided he wanted to come back, and he had the rights to the job, I had to get out. So I applied different places: University of Hawaii; the University in Santa Barbara, which (inaudible) the UC Santa Barbara; I applied at UCLA, but they had already found someone. The Israeli consul in Los Angeles came up and interviewed me and wanted to offer me a job at the Hebrew University in Israel. Hawaii and Israel, I ?thought? , “No.” And Santa Barbara didn’t open up, [02:00] and of course---oh, the other offer was non-academic, was from the State Department. They wanted me as a researcher in Japanese ?contemporary? in Japan. And they offered more money. And I had had experience with that, during my Harvard years. In the summers I would come down and do summer work for them. So they knew me, and that’s why they asked me if I’d be interested. So given the alternatives, I said OK, and I took my---my little family, who was very happy in Berkeley, loaded them into the car, we got a trailer to put my books and other things, and drove back to the East Coast, and joined the State Department. That was my academic carrier. Before that, I want to mention one thing---two things. One---this group of scholars, of Japanese Studies---history and literature, and anything, things Japanese, under Reischauer and another professor---were the people who manned---brought to life Japanese Studies in the United States. Before the war, there were a few centers, like Washington and Stanford. The professors were very distinguished people, but they didn’t even read Japanese. Research was not required in Japanese. Now, in order to do any research at Harvard, for anything in an upper degree, you had to know Japanese, or Chinese, or Korean, or do research in them, ?not? just learn to say a few words. And so we brought this higher standard, and these professors were in great demand in the various Universities, and one of my classmates went to Washington, one came to Berkeley, another came to the Literature section at [04:00] UCLA, and various other universities, Northwestern. All members of this class. And they set up modern contemporary Japanese Studies. Now UCLA has a faculty in Japanese Studies alone, of about a dozen people, looks like, you know. It’s gone beyond any of our dreams, but the beginning seed was planted by this group from Reischauer disciples in U---in that period. The other thing I wanted to mention was, there was my first experience with prejudice. When I graduated---all my colleges were going to these cushy jobs, these great demand throughout the country, and I was finally interviewed for a job at the Washington University. And the professor came out, the head of the department, and he thought I did pretty well, but then he said, you know, “Sorry, we can’t accept you, because we don’t think the student body is ready for a Japanese instructor. That was my first experience of discrimination based on race. He thought my qualifications were OK, but I might not sit well with his class, while on the West Coast, that problem didn’t even arise. But in Washington, which Washington University was in St. Louis, Missouri, right in the middle of the Heartland, there weren’t very many Japanese. Now it has a fine Japanese arts department, and so on, but the---being the first one there, I didn’t make it because of this feeling that the students wouldn’t like it. I was told that, and I thought, “Are you kidding?”, you know, because I had gone up through the war, through my graduate [06:00] school days, feeling that, you know, I had an asset that was in great demand, and now this guy told me that. That’s the story of my academic carrier. INTERVIEWER: I think this would be a good time to ask you to name your family members, because they all went with you when you joined the State Department, and we didn’t have a chance to put that on tape, so if you like, you could---if you can tell us names of your family members. TSUKAHIRA: This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 21 of 25 �Well, my daughter is named Margaret, Margaret ?Minhe? Tsukahira, ’course known as Peggy. She was born in Arlington, Virginia while I was in Washington as a military person. Took her to Harvard, she grew up at---in Harvard, went to Berkeley with us. Meanwhile my son Peter, Peter ?Ken?, was born in Boston, so when we went to California there were two children. And we had a very happy time in Berkeley, where we had a house, and the kids went to school---local school there. Then we had to pull ’em out again, and bring ’em back to the East Coast, and then they went to school---the local schools in Virginia and Maryland, and when---then when I went overseas, I had to pull my daughter out of junior high school, which was a bad wrench because it was just, you know, the age when you had made friends that you were gonna be friends for life, (inaudible) brought her to this strange environment in Japan. My Peter---my son Peter took---took it a little better. In Japan they were educated at the American school, which is more American than most [08:00] American schools [laughing]. They were all children of American businessmen or bureaucrats, diplomats, and their whole ambition was to go to college in America. And the campus was, you know, very American, and everything was very American. And so---well that’s the story of my children. You wanna go further, my children eventually graduated from high school, while we were still overseas, and my daughter went to Columbia---or what’s the girls’ school there, and graduated there alone. You know, we were overseas all the time. My son went to Fletcher up near Harvard in Cambridge Massachusetts, and graduated and went on to their careers. INTERVIEWER: And your wife’s name is? We should probably get that on tape. TSUKAHIRA: Oh, Lilly. Her name is Lilly ?Juri[ko]?. INTERVIEWER: And if you can tell us a little bit about your career in the Foreign Service as well. TSUKAHIRA: Well, that [is] a long story, and I (inaudible) sort of (inaudible) just hit the highlights. When I was brought---it happened that my old professor at Harvard, Reischauer, was appointed by president Kennedy to be president---no I mean ambassador to Japan, which is an excellent choice, and one that would native been done, I think, unless it was (inaudible) Kennedy type gesture. And he was ’course well admired and liked in Japan, and the ideal person for---at that particular stage, when there was still tension growing between---this is the ’60s, [10:00] Japan had recovered from the war, was recovered from the occupation, and was beginning to wanna---feel a bit constrained, and there were strange---students were turning radical and anti---against the relationship with the United States, against---anti security treat[y], treaty. So it was a good time for a person like Reischauer to be ambassador. He happened to come to---before his---after his appointment became---he came to the State Department to be ?briefed?, talked to the Japan desk, and of course I got---I met him, and he learned that I was in the Foreign Service and he asked me if I’d wanna serve in Japan. I said, “Sure.” So next thing I know, I was transferred to Japan. And I spent a lot of time there, because I was brought there in the first place---this is contrary to the ordinary custom (inaudible) they’d like to send you as a beginning officer to some other place, other than your specialty, but I was already, you know, in mid-career. I was not admitted at the bottom. I was brought into a middle grade immediately, as a Foreign Service officer, and my specialty was Japan, Japanese, and that’s why they wanted me there, so I went there. And that---my work was---well, over the years I stayed there longer than most people do. Two tours in a row, and then a third tour in (inaudible), and then a tour in Thailand, and another fourth tour in Japan, so a total of ten years in Japan. And that’s unusual. I was---my work would---held---had to do with language at first. [12:00] I edited the translations, this time from English into Japanese. But the embassy had a translation staff, and when the president made a speech, it would be translated into Japanese and distributed to the Japanese public, and any news, Washington news, would be (inaudible). So there was a outpouring. USIS, attached to the embassy, did this publicity to the Japanese public, and Ja---and the ambassador hear from some of his friends, “You know, that translation is kinda awkward, yeah, funny Japanese”, so he immediately put me on that job, he says, “Look at that Japanese translation, This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 22 of 25 �see if it’s accurate.” And there were a lotta---these translators were very excellent, Japanese trained linguists, but they were not familiar with American colloquialisms and the everyday situation and terms that even some of us would not be familiar with, if you we were, say, abroad for a long, long time. And so, when these colloquialisms, these expressions would come up, they didn’t know what---how to handle it, and they did the best they could. Most times literal translation, and sometimes (inaudible). And so my job was to edit the translations, or examine the translations that this team put out. Reverse of what I did for the military during the war, and that went on for a while. But I began to chafe, I said, “Here I am, a Foreign Service off[icer], I don’t wanna be stuck with this kind of job permanently.” And then I finally got assigned to the labor attaché’s office, and then got---made contact with the labor movement in Japan. [14:00] Then later I got transferred to the political section and was in charge of the opposition parties, mostly the socialist party, and got to know a lot of the functionaries at that party. Although they were anti-US, personally they were very friendly. And then I was transferred to---assigned to be consul in Fukuoka, the American consul, and that was great, because consul is a direct appointee of the President, you get a charter signed by the President, saying, “I appoint you to this job.” And you’re on a different level, but the same kind of process that an ambassador is appointed. Everybody else in the embassy is a staff assisting this ambassador, and the consulate was a small staff, about four people, plus a lot of Japanese employees, but the four people were under you, and you reported to the embassy any news or imp[ortant]---of importance, and you were in effect one of their outlying branches, but as consul, you were the American represen[tative] for this whole area, and I had all of Kyushu and Yamaguchi, and three bases: Naval base, Air base and a Marine base, Iwakuni. And you were the number one American, and so you were automatically a member of the Rotary Club, all the groups, civic groups, and you played golf with the leading citizens, you visited the governors. When the ambassador came down, you took him around and introduced him to your new friends, the governors of each of the pr[efectures]. It [was as] great life. That lasted ’til 1968. And then---I hadn’t been home---done any home service, I went on home leave in between, [16:00] but I hadn’t been home. They said, “You wanna go to Thailand?”, and next thing I know, I was assigned to Thailand. I spent three years there, as political military officer, and that was important because it was the midst of the Vietnam war. And Thailand was the base for all the bombers, you know, the infamous bombers that bombed the jungles of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and there was two or three fighter bases, American fighter bases, in Thailand, and they flew outa Thailand into Vietnam, and came back to Thailand. It was their safe haven, and the Thai government, in their support of the US effort, backed all this up. So it was a rather unusual situation, but we had a large political military section. And that’s where the action was, and I had a very enjoyable tour in that---in that particular job. And then I was---when that tour ended, I thought I’d be assigned to Europe or to the States . . . No, I was assigned back to Japan, so I went back to Japan for another three years. And that’s my c[areer]---and outline, that’s my career in the Foreign Service. INTERVIEWER: Is there anything that we’ve left out? TSUKAHIRA: Well, you left out all the interesting details. I don’t think I have time to (inaudible), but I mentioned that it was a time of strained relations between the left. The government was locked in with the US, but Japan was tied to the US with the Security Treaty, and there was opposition to this connection by the left, and this included the students of the universities, and they formed this organization known as the Zengakuren, All-Japan Student Federation, and the labor unions were all controlled by the socialist [18:00] or the communist, and they were agai[nst]---anti-US. And they’d mount these huge demonstrations. While I was first in Tokyo you had these parades, it was red flags, it was sort of amazing. And they’d parade, and they’d chant, “Down with the US” and thing[s]---anti-US slogans, and it was sort of the stuff that’s in the news. A period anti-Japane[se]---anti-American sentiment in Japan. When I was Fukuoka, the same sort of thing continued at the bases, and there were demonstrations mostly from Tokyo. Students would come down all the way to (inaudible) from Tokyo, and demonstrate against the Navy, US naval base (inaudible), and of course I had to sort of observe this whole---all these things, report them back to Washington and to Tokyo, and in a way it was exciting---you never felt a real sense of threat. It wasn’t as, you know, they’re gonna kill somebody or overthrow, or burn down the embassy or consulate or anything like that. It was---on their part, it This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 23 of 25 �was obvious they were very---just outward show, because they couldn’t stay in Sasebo, and they had to live---they---or accommodate in dormitories at Kiuchi University in Fukuoka, which is about a good half hour train ride away. So every evening-- and this lasted for three or four days--every evening at five o’ clock, when the last train to Fukuoka left, they quit and went to the station, and then came back the next morning. And they also demonstrated only where the television cameras showed them. It was quite a spectacular sight, to see these students come down with helmets, red flags, green flags, you know, and then they’d start marching down the street, toward the gate, like they’re gonna crash through, and then the long line of policemen stopping ’em, and then they would thump and they’d go a little bit of jostling, and then that would be over. But, you know---and in a way, we realized [20:00] that this is all kind of ?pantomime?, but nonetheless it was a protest against the US presence in Japan, US military presence. So that’s one of the things. And in Tokyo there are lot of detail, some interesting, some not, but it---as I mentioned, I had several jobs, so I got to see---I got to know a lot of Japanese bureaucrats, and a lot of Japanese diplomats, some of whom I maintain contact to this day. And one politician invited me to his son’s wedding in Tokyo couple of years ago. Paid our fare, my wife and I, round trip, just to attend this wedding. And one ambassador, who was---a ?fellow of? my rank, but who has since risen to ambassadorship, with ambassador---Japanese ambassador to Vienna. He invited us, I think five years ago, six years ago now, to Vienna spend a week as his guests, and that was a exciting experience too. But that’s part of the cream that comes with Foreign Service life, but the nitty-gritty everyday work was---it was interesting too, because you dealt with things that potentially affects the national wellbeing, the national security. INTERVIEWER: Is there a message that you would like to pass on to future generations? TSUKAHIRA: What---generation of what? Of all . . . INTERVIEWER: Of Nikkei--TSUKAHIRA: Nikkei . . . INTERVIEWER: ---in particular. TSUKAHIRA: Well, I’d like to get them more interested in government service. Now, you know, the thing is, pictures change. We were---the first generation were denied citizenship. Second generation had citizenship technically, but were too young really, to exert any influence. It was only after the war [22:00] that we had people like Matsunaga and Inouye, senators, and Matsui and Mineta in the Congress. But that was the fruit of the efforts during the war. Now, that generation has passed. I know it’s still there, Mats[ui]---others have died or quite, Matsui is still there. But I don’t see any new politicians rising to national rank. And I don’t see them entering the bureaucracy, and I, as I’ve explained to you before, I think it’s because there’s better opportunities outside. Also, there’s less a sense that you’re a marked minority. I mean, if anything it’s---it’s an advantage rather than a disadvantage. So there’s less incentive for you to go out and prove yourself. Just be like, you know---why should I be any different from anybody else, do anything any different? Go out and make your mon[ey]---bundle, you know. And . . . So the lack of motivation, la[ck}---not lack of opportunity, but lack of motivation and too many good alternatives, makes it less attractive, but nonetheless, I were giving advice, it’s advice that---based on my own outlook and experience. I think more Nikkei should be out there in pos[itions]---seeking positions of some influence and power, not only in the business world, but in politics, in the bureaucracy. This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 24 of 25 �INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else that you would like to add before we conclude, Mr. Tsukahira? TSUKAHIRA: [24:00] No, I just wanna say I enjoyed this experience and the chance to voice some of these things that I’ve been thinking about. Some of it I already told, but not in this overall fashion. And I hope that there will be some value to my---to what I said about my experience, that it would---might influence somebody or inspire somebody to do something that will benefit himself, herself or the Nikkei group. As I said, the Nikkei group, no longer an oppressed minority. Maybe still a minority, in fact, it’s disappearing. Both my children are married non-Japanese, and this, I thought---well, I realize it’s not atypical. Pretty soon there won’t be any distinct Nikkei minority. Except there may be a new rerun of the thing, of a new---the new Shin Issei. You know the term Shin Issei? There are new immigrants, directly from Japan, who are going to begin life in America. And that may be another story. But the Japanese, the Nikkei element in America, that I knew, and know and---still exists in the offspring of these ?Shin Issei?. It’s changing, and it’s maybe just a spot in the history of the Amer[ican]---in the American history. But I think it’s [26:00] been an honorable one, and the achievements that the pioneers did, our parents, are still under recognized, and I think they should never be forgotten. And I hope this helps preserve some of the rec[ords]---for the record anyway, the history of what happened when they were in positions achievement doing something. INTERVIEWER: Thank you very much. TSUKAHIRA: Well, thank you. END OF AUDIO FILE 7 This transcript is hereby made available for research purposes only by Go For Broke National Education Center. Page 25 of 25 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Toshio George Tsukahira oral history interview, March 25, 2000 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Toshio George Tsukahira oral history interview transcript [full interview], March 25, 2000 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tsukahira, Toshio: narrator Yamamoto, D.: interviewer Go For Broke National Education Center: publisher Type The nature or genre of the resource Transcriptions Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Extent The size or duration of the resource. 25 pages, typescript Language A language of the resource eng Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2000-03-25 Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Los Angeles, California Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Go For Broke National Education Center Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 2000OH0108_T_Tsukahira