Born the third child of four, Moffet Mitsuo Ishikawa grew up in San Jose, Calif. He attended San Jose State University for three years when the Pacific War began:

> I remember vividly the morning after Pearl Harbor because I had received orders days earlier to report on December 8 for a physical prior to being drafted into the U.S. Army. To put it mildly, I felt quite apprehensive about reporting that morning at the San Jose Civic Auditorium. Although there were several hundred Caucasian young men undergoing physicals, I was relieved that nothing untoward happened to me. [Autobiography]

On January 14, 1942, he entered the Army and did his basic training at Paine Field near Everett, Wash.
When Executive Order 9066 forced all people of Japanese ancestry off the West Coast, the War Relocation Authority sent Ishikawa and other West Coast Nisei soldiers to Fort Riley, Kan. They received orders to pick up scraps of paper around the post while Military Police followed behind them with loaded rifles. Originally, the Army assigned him menial labor, usually Kitchen Patrol duties, so when the chance to sign up for the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) came, he jumped at the opportunity.
In the summer of 1942, Ishikawa went to at Camp Savage, Minn., and began studies that fall. Like many other Nisei, he received furloughs while at the school and visited his parents who were incarcerated in Heart Mountain Detention Camp. The following summer he graduated from MISLS.
On Columbus Day 1943, Ishikawa shipped out for Noumea, New Caledonia, in the South Pacific and translated documents on the island. In early 1944, he left Noumea and finally landed on Guadalcanal with a team of nine other linguists joining the 40th Division from Hawaii. In April they sailed northwest toward New Guinea and landed on the southern tip of New Britain. They conducted reconnaissance during the "Encirclement of Rabaul"--one of the Japanese strongholds in the area. By the end of 1944 they began preparing for the invasion of Luzon, the main island of the Philippines.
On D-day, January 9, 1945, he landed at Lingayen Gulf in northern Luzon. The 40th Division advanced southward through Luzon toward Manila, but pulled back and landed on Panay and Negros Islands. On Negros, they advanced into the mountains to where Japanese troops had retreated:

> As soon as I arrived, I went to work to familiarize myself with the terrain and what knowledge we had about the Japanese forces. Absorbed in my work, I had forgotten to dig a foxhole and as the afternoon faded into darkness and I could no longer continue working, I spread my poncho on the ground and lay down to sleep. Around midnight, as the saying goes, "All hell broke loose." Mortars began dropping in and machine gun fire raked the area. All I could do was hug the ground and make myself as flat as possible. [Autobiography]

Throughout his time in the jungle, he always had a Caucasian bodyguard accompany him wherever he went. When he told his bodyguard that the U.S. government had sent his family into a detention camp in Wyoming, the Caucasian soldier was incredulous that such a thing could happen. He offered to write to his hometown paper about the injustice. Other soldiers looked at him and could only see his Japanese face.
While Ishikawa's unit prepared for the invasion of Kyushu, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the war ended. In September 1945, his division went to Pusan, Korea, for Occupation duty.
Only a few months later he returned to the United States and met his parents in San Jose, Calif. Ishikawa traveled to Chicago, but the cold weather turned him back to California where he began a career working for the post office.