When Rusty Kimura was two years old, his family moved to Oroville, Calif., a small rural town north of Sacramento, Calif. After graduating from high school, Reverend Johnson of the First Congregational Church offered to help him attend the California Institute of Technology.

Kimura's younger brother fell ill, so instead of going to college Kimura started to work to help his family, missing college altogether. He moved to Marysville to work first as a store clerk and then at a laundry. He moved to Oakland and found a job at a large Japanese laundry and became a supervisor for one of the departments. 

Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and his family in Oakland was evacuated to Tanforan Assembly Center in March 1942. Instead of accompanying them, Kimura decided to take the car and move inland back to Marysville. His mother suddenly died in the Assembly Center, and with the permission of the Provost Marshall he took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco:

__BEGIN_QUOTE__
At the bus station in San Francisco, a young man, much bigger than I attempted to provoke me into a fight.... I then transferred to another bus where the driver made a special stop for me at Tanforan, formerly a racetrack. I could hear the snickering of a few of the passengers, especially the women as I got off. It had been raining and the mud was ankle deep. I recall seeing some of the elderly internees slipping and falling in the mud. It wasn't a pleasant sight. [Oral History]
__END_QUOTE__

He attended his mother's funeral and decided to stay with the family. In September 1942 they moved to Topaz Detention Camp.

Kimura helped build the camp in the first month. When Army recruiters came he immediately signed up. On December 5, 1942, he arrived at Fort Snelling, Minn., and then transferred to Camp Savage. After six months of language studies, he moved to Camp Shelby for basic training, and finally in January 1944, he arrived at Brisbane, Australia.

Kimura worked in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Services (ATIS) as a translator until October 1944. With 20 other Nisei linguists, he went to Bougainville Island and quickly was dispatched to the front lines where the Australian troops appreciated his attitude and outspokenness. 

On Bougainville, the Japanese had two large guns that the Allied Forces could not take out. Kimura artfully interrogated two POWs and figured out the exact location, within 40 yards, of the two guns. His captain radioed for planes that successfully destroyed the guns. 

Australian soldiers went to the artillery site and brought back boxes of documents from which Kimura discovered that the Japanese planned an attack the next morning. Excited with the find, he notified his captain, who doubted the authenticity of the documents and who thought the troops were 20 miles south. Regretfully, Kimura did not further pursue the issue. The next morning when the Japanese attacked at precisely the given moment, the captain finally agreed to the authenticity of the document, but by then a company of Australian soldiers had already taken on the brunt of the attack.

After his stint in Bougainville Kimura returned to ATIS in Australia and moved with the section to the Philippines. When the Army recruited him for the Occupation of Japan, they made him a second lieutenant. 

Pay for civilian work was two-and-a-half times that of the military, and like many other Nisei linguists, Kimura began working for the Army as a civilian. During his 19 years in Tokyo, Kimura never returned to the United States and only kept in touch with his family by mail and telephone. 


Kimura, Rusty - bio.doc



Scott Hoshida	Page 2	4/4/03






