Francis Sogi had an early start in military training as a member of the ROTC at the University of Hawaii. The Hawaiian ROTC would eventually become the Hawaii Territorial Guard. Nisei members of the latter group, however, were discharged by the Army soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
<br><br>In late 1943, Sogi and some others who had been released from the military attended the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) at Camp Savage, and Sogi stayed on as an instructor for two years after his graduation. While some questioned the Nisei's willingness to volunteer for service, Sogi felt that the prevailing mood at the time was "all war effort."
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The feeling was very strong, wanted to serve in the military. So volunteering, and also many people, not individually, but as a group for example, men of my classmates at school all rallied and said that they were going to volunteer. And the feeling was very strong and so volunteering was like something you would do in ordinary course and that's why we volunteered.
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<br><br>Upon receiving his commission to Second Lieutenant, Sogi volunteered to extend his term of service for one year and headed for Occupied Japan. Sogi clearly remembers the devastation of the war and the way U.S. soldiers tried to allay the situation.
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The only thing remaining...were chimneys, stacks, here and there, factory chimneys all over the place....The people, their clothing was very old, I guess shagged and very, very, very sad. People were cutting their cherry trees to cook their food and so forth....they [the American soldiers] would give away a lot of food to their friends or whoever. And I think that kind of personally, was quite, quite prevalent among all military people, maybe more so among Japanese Americans...
<br><br>We felt a great deal of affinity to them [the Japanese] because, you know, of our parents. We knew Japanese and they were as polite as the Japanese as we knew when we grew up. And seeing them, it was kind of pathetic. Not really of pity, we never felt that we were conquerors, that we were better than they were. It's like seeing someone on the street suffering. 
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<br><br>He spent a couple of months with the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) in Tokyo before heading for the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) school. After graduation, he took an assignment with the CIC headquarters in Sapporo, Japan. His primary duties were to conduct investigations of Japanese military returnees from Russia and monitor communist activities among major political parties and left-wing activities involving labor unions.
<br><br>A discovery he made during his visit to Fukuoka made Sogi realize just how much his family was involved on both sides of the war. In talking to his relatives, he learned that his uncle, his mother's youngest brother, had been one of the pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor.
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They showed me his medal that he got from the Emperor. He was one of the few, I mean, most of them came back of course. Maybe about 30-40 got killed in that attack...And I found out on the Battle of Midway, on June 6, 1942, on the second wave, he was killed there....
<br><br>...when I first went down there to see them [the relatives], I noticed they're very, very cold....And the more I heard and I realized that there are about five or six cousins on my mother's side, children of her sisters and brothers, died in the Pacific because many of the units from Kyushu went to the Pacific...
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<br><br>After being discharged, Sogi attended law school and eventually opened his own practice in New York. Sogi attributes his life successes not only to his language skills but also to the sense of responsibility and confidence in work that he developed as a member of the Military Intelligence Service.
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I think the affinity, the comradeship, the solidifying effect of the units at Fort Snelling, Camp Savage, put them [MIS members] together and they were very strong inside....And so I felt that because of what they went through [in] school and their knowledge and the fact that they were confident within made them strong and able to do good work. Because you hear stories of some interpreters translating, being asked to translate, interpret documents that were critical to a very large number of soldiers. But one translation, if it were wrong, may have been disastrous to the whole unit. And that's how valuable they were. That's how heavy the responsibility was for them.
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