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Was your family still in Japan when the war started?
Yeah.
What was it like for you to be in America and for your family to be in Japan during the war?
For me it was hard because I was by myself. I had to earn my living and naturally it was hard in those days because you couldn't make much. I went out in the country and worked during the summer, but you could only come back with maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred dollars. That was about all you could save. But of course school was cheap at that time. We went for one semester for twenty five dollars at UC. That was cheap. Two semesters a year. School fee was cheap, but the living. You had to make your own living too. That's the part that was kind of hard.
Were you worried for your family when the war started?
No. I just knew that we couldn't do anything. When we went to war with Japan, there was no way of communicating anymore. So I didn't know anything until after the war. I couldn't go back right away because I didn't have money. It took a few years before we could get enough money to go back. Then I learned from my parents that they were almost starving. They said that there were days when they didn't eat anything, they only fed their children. They were starving that much. You knew that they were on the verge of collapsing anyway, didn't have to drop the bomb. If they waited out a couple more months, they probably would have surrendered. They were starving because they couldn't bring anything in from outside because the navy was abolished, almost. Airplanes were all shot down, almost. They didn't have any kind of a way of getting outside or communicating with the outside.
I looked at things that way when they dropped the bomb. I thought it wasn't necessary. I knew that from the way the war was going on that they didn't have very much left in Japan. As I said, the navy was shot to pieces and the airplanes kept being shot down. they didn't have very many airplanes left either. I knew that Japan was in a very bad shape. I knew that because Tokyo was air bombed even before the atom bomb was dropped. Tokyo, Dogobah sp? and other cities were air bombed already. If you knew Japan, Japanese cities were just like paper, paper and wood. They just burnt down. Tokyo was almost completely burnt out.
Do you remember where you were when you first heard about the bomb being dropped?
I don't remember exactly where I was. When I heard it was bombed, I looked at a map to see where they dropped it and they showed that the center of the bomb was near the center of Hiroshima and that's where my relatives were. I said to my wife "If they were home, they're gone." I found out later that they were home. They couldn't even find a piece of bone, they said, of them. My father's oldest sister and her family, three generations, were wiped out. Except her son, my cousin, and his baby boy were saved because they went visiting his wife's parents the day before the bomb was dropped. So they were saved. But the rest of the family was just gone. My father's youngest brother, he and his wife and he had a daughter, were wiped out. Nothing left of them. Those were the only things that happened to my family directly.
My mother was saying that they went out the following day to see if they could find our relatives. My mother and my brother's wife, the two of them, went out and looked around and couldn't find them. They came back, but they helped bring in some of the hurt people. Everything was wiped out in Hiroshima so there was no place that they could take hurt people. No hospitals, not even the schools. They were all wiped out. So they had to bring all these people out to the—they used the schools in the outskirts. They used the schools as hospitals. So they brought them out there. She was saying that some of them were so hurt, said their skin was draping down and they asked to be killed. They said "kill me, kill me" because they hurt so much. You know how much a little burn on you finger hurts? They had it all over their body. All burnt. You can imagine how much it hurt them.
Were any of your relatives or family members in the Japanese military?
No, not in my family. My brother was lucky because he was a Postmaster and naturally that kept him from getting sent into the army. He didn't have to go. He was lucky.
How did you feel about the American government after they dropped the atom bomb?
The American government and its treatment of the Japanese wasn't bad after the war. People in Japan were thankful for that too. You heard comments about that from different people. They said the Americans did treat them alright. We brought food in to them too.
Were you angry with the government?
No, I'm not angry with them. It's part of the war effort. I just looked at it as part of the war.
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