When Roy Takai was 11 years old, his father took him and a troop of Boy Scouts to Japan for a tour. This was Takai's first visit to Japan. During his military career, he would have many more opportunities to visit the country.
<br><br>When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Takai was attending the University of California at Berkeley. Upon hearing the news on the radio, he immediately thought of how the event would impact Japanese Americans like himself.
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I knew that when they attacked, that the government of Japan had sacrificed all of the Japanese living in the United States because they knew that all Japanese would be considered enemy aliens. I suspected at that time that we would have a hard time. This fact struck me in the face when I was commuting to Berkeley on a streetcar. Americans would look at me and there was talk about sneak attacks and Japs, etc...coming home to Oakland you face the same thing every day. Life was pretty miserable.
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<br><br>Shortly after, the FBI picked up his father and incarcerated him in a Department of Justice detention camp in North Dakota. Presumably, the elder Takai was apprehended for his prominence in the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in Sacramento and for his involvement in taking a Japanese-American kendo team to Tokyo for a commemorative celebration. The rest of the family, including Takai, was sent to the Poston Detention Camp in Arizona.
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The evacuation and interment of our family resulted in the loss of our furniture business in Sacramento. My father, after his release [from camp]...was not able to regain his pre-war status as a businessman. My stepmother, who was a Japanese language school teacher during pre-war, was never able to teach Japanese again...
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<br><br>Remembering the words of his <i>kendo</i> teacher who always stressed the importance of loyalty to one's country, Takai became desperate to leave the camp and join in the war effort. He found such opportunity and volunteered to attend the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) in Camp Savage, Minnesota. To avoid possible conflicts between those advocating loyalty to the United States and the pro-Japan internees, the Army slipped the seven Nisei volunteers out of Poston late at night without anyone seeing them depart. Still, after he left the camp, his stepmother had to endure sneers from internees who opposed Japanese Americans serving in the U.S. military.
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I heard that someone had placed a bone at the footstep of the barracks where my stepmother lived. In Japan a bone indicates dog or "<i>inu</i>" (Japanese word for "dog). <i>Inu</i> is a spy in Japanese slang.  That was an indication to my mother that her son was an <i>inu</i> or a traitor.
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<br><br>After language training, Takai joined the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) Team and accompanied the British forces in chasing the Japanese out of Burma. In early 1944, the Japanese had laid siege to Imphal, one of the largest British/India supply points, and cut off all ground communications into the area for a few months. In March, the Japanese then began an all-out attack, but due to weather their supply lines were cut and they quickly ran out of food and ammunition. Meanwhile, the British and U.S. troops maintained air superiority and were able to keep up the food and supply line into Imphal. Takai remembers, however, that their daily food intake was scant.
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Our daily rations were limited to a slice of bully beef (corned beef) and hard tack biscuit, I lost 25 pounds during a four-month period. A can of beets airdropped to us with other supplies was a treat for us.
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<br><br>While a member of the Southeast Asia Translation and Interrogation Center (SEATIC), Takai fell ill with amoebic dysentery and malaria. After spending some time in the hospital, he returned to New Delhi. The war came to an end soon after the Burma campaign, and Takai and others from SEATIC found themselves becoming members of the Occupation forces stationed in the Malay Peninsula. Having been promoted to Second Lieutenant, Takai took charge of a team of 10 Nisei soldiers to assist in the disarming of the Japanese army forces. The team also helped locate and register British and American weapons that had been airdropped to the Chinese Communists fighting in the region.
<br><br>In October 1946 Takai left for Japan to become a member of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS). One of his first assignments with this section called for him to lead a group of Japanese-American linguists to establish the Maizuru Debarkation and Interrogation Center. At this center, the MIS men processed thousands of Japanese repatriates who were coming in from Russia and China. Under this situation, the Nisei had opportunity to screen for and obtain intelligence information of immense value. Takai considers this experience one of the most satisfying in his military career.
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These people hadn't seen Japan for many, many years....Some of them went over as civilians with the South Manchurian Railroad and they got shipped from China to Siberia. They spent many years in Siberia and then they were repatriated back to Japan....you could see the happiness and in some cases, sadness, in the eyes of the people when they came into the port of Japan...
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<br><br>Takai also had a chance to interview top Japanese officials under an assignment to obtain historical data from the Japanese perspective on the war against the United States. Ultimately, the information would be compiled and made into military history from the Japanese point of view. The officials he interviewed were incarcerated in Sugamo Prison, awaiting the Tokyo International War Crime Trials. Takai found that most of the high-level officers, including such famous men as General Hideki Tojo and Admiral Shigetaro Shimada (Navy Minister), were not forthcoming with their experiences or opinions.
<br><br>During the 1950s and 60s, Takai continued to work in military assignments in Japan. Most of them involved liaison work with the Japanese security and intelligence agencies at the regional and national levels. In 1955, he took a year-long course in Mandarin Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in California. He thought that this language training would lead him to an assignment in which he would use Chinese; instead, he left for Japan once more, this time to join the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) unit in Nagoya.
 
In August 1965, Takai presented a short VIP briefing in Japanese to the chief of staff of the Japanese Self-Defense Ground Force and his staff during their visit to the U.S. Continental Army Command. Takai remembered that exactly 21 years prior to this event, he had used Japanese military terms for the first time during an interrogation of a Japanese buck private captured in Imphal. His ability to communicate in "<i>heigo</i>" (Japanese military language) carried him from working with the lowest ranking Japanese private to interacting with the highest ranking army officer from Japan. 
<br><br>Takai retired as a Lieutenant Colonel on March 31, 1966. Thereafter, he worked for the federal government as a civilian investigator, employment specialist, and assistant appeals officer.
