Prior to the draft, Charlie Hamasaki worked on the family farm in Los Altos, California. At the time there were a few Japanese families in the area. One of these families owned most of the land and had donated a section to establish a Japanese school. In this one-room school building, Hamasaki and other Nisei children studied Japanese. 
<br><br>Soon after completing his basic training at Fort Ord, Hamasaki was recruited for the language school at Camp Savage and graduated in 1943. Upon finishing school, he participated in campaigns at Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and Luzon in the Philippines. One incident he remembers vividly is when he witnessed for the first time a Japanese soldier killed in action: "I will never forget that he looked just like me--war is no good!" During this incident he served in the division headquarters on Rendova Island and participated in securing the entire island for the Allies.
<br><br>At times, Japanese-American soldiers faced situations in which they were mistaken for the enemy. In Guadalcanal, Hamasaki remembers a U.S. Marine approaching him with a gun pointed directly at him.
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Major Wright and I were walking toward the prison stockade there and all of a sudden this Marine comes up to us and pulls his .45 out and starts to point it at me, you know. So I jumped behind the Major. It was scary then. I was wondering how long that was going to go on. But as it turned out as time went on, the troops over there began to know us.
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<br><br>In another incident, Hamasaki was forced to give up his newly acquired promotion to Tech Sergeant when a lieutenant arrived to replace Major Wright at the headquarters. Hamasaki remembers the new officer in charge being disruptive to his interrogation work and scornful of the way Hamasaki was conducting interrogations. Rather than prolonging the conflict between the two of them, the G-2 commanding officer upon hearing about the problem decided to have Hamasaki leave headquarters and step down to join the regiment, reverting him back to the rank of Private.
<br><br>Having accumulated enough points, Hamasaki was granted discharge and returned to the United States in July 1945. He reunited with his parents who were still interned at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. He followed his brother to California to begin work in gardening, but he recalls the postwar days in California as unfriendly to the Japanese Americans.
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There was one barber...I went to high school with him and [with] his older brother too. But his older brother was killed in the war. And somehow, he just didn't care for Japanese anymore so he wouldn't cut any Japanese hair. And my brother and I found another barber...And we were going to him for a long time, over a year, I think. Then, all of a sudden one day, when I went in there, he said, "I won't be able to cut your hair anymore--customers are complaining." So we had to look around for another barber...
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<br><br>In 1953 Hamasaki decided to shift careers and entered the electronic industry where he remained until his retirement in 1982.
