<Begin Segment 8>

AI: Well, speaking of the end of the war, what was... do you recall about when you heard the news and how you felt about that?

MY: I recall very distinctly, because I was sitting in a dentist's chair. I had to have my wisdom, I had to have my wisdom tooth removed and they, I went to this surgeon, oral surgeon. And I was sitting in the dentist's chair and he had the radio on all the -- because he said, "Did you know that, you know, they're signing, it's the end of the war," and all that was going on in Times Square and so forth, and of course in those days hardly anybody had a TV set so the radio was blaring away. And I'm sitting there with my mouth open -- [laughs] -- on the dentist's chair listening to this, to the news, that the war is, you know, "Did you know that the war is over?" And that was, so that must have been, what, August? After the Hiroshima bomb was bombed, was dropped, in August 9, 1945, and I think the surrender papers were signed around August 20th or something like that, I don't know if you remember the exact dates. But it was, you know, that day, I think, when the, when the news came out, the war's over, Japan has surrendered. And it was soon after that, that I left for, I left for New York, but I was in Cincinnati having my wisdom tooth, my wisdom teeth removed. And I was in so much pain for a couple days, I think he left a tooth, chipped tooth inside my gums, and it had become infected and so I just don't remember very much, for a couple of days I was in this agony. And there must have been a lot of things going on during those two days.

So, but I was getting prepared to leave for New York and so when I got to New York City, you know, people were just about ready, about even, let's see, September -- October when classes started, the GIs were already coming back from overseas, being mustered out of the army and coming out. My brother came soon after that. And I had moved out of Mrs. Nomura's -- no, Tosh came and I was still living in Mrs. Nomura's and we decided to get an apartment together, and so we found this little apartment for $35 a month, right outside of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. And we moved into the apartment and so that was quite an adventure. And I loved New York City and I loved -- the students were, of course, there were just droves of GIs coming back, which gave the whole student atmosphere, very different. And I felt older than most students, you know, because I had missed several years of, after high school, graduating from high school in '42, '41 or '42, and this was in '47, so you feel -- then before I went to University of Cincinnati, so it just made me about two or three years older than the average college student. But then with the GIs who were coming back, were about my age, they had lost several years of school years, too, and they were just coming back to school on the GI Bill. And so I felt like I had a lot in common with them. You know, we talked a lot. And I think I had written at one point that the first time that anybody asked me about the camps -- nobody ever asked me in Cincinnati or, you know, as I was traveling through -- but one of these returning soldiers from Europe, from the European field, asked me, "Do you know anything about this -- I heard that there was a concentration camp for Japanese Americans here?" And I thought, oh, that's -- and I said, "Where did you hear about it?" And he said, "Well, I heard about it in Europe." And the thing is, we were criticized, you know, at the end of the war when the Nazi concentration camps opened and you saw the horrible things that were happening to the Jewish people, we were criticizing the (Germans) for letting this happen and there was a lot of discussion about that, and he said, and the Germans said to them, "Well, you people, your people, the Americans, put people in concentration camps, too, you know." And he said, "That's ridiculous, we'd never do anything like that." And then he came back to New York and he asked his parents and they said, "No, nothing like that ever happened here." They talked to some, you know, their relatives and nobody knew anything about it. And so he was asking me -- he didn't ask me, "Were you in one of those camps," he asked me, "Did you know anything about..." and I go, "Yeah, where did you hear about it?" So it was kind of a shock. And I said, "Yeah, I was in one of those camps." And he'd go, "Oh, tell me about it." We were at a cafeteria talking and he picked up his chair and sidled closer to me, and was really very interested in knowing about it. And that was the first time that anybody even showed any interest.

And, I think the difference -- I remember I had this feeling when he was asking about it, but there was always this comparison between what happened to the Jews and Holocaust and what happened to us, and the sense... we were trying to, I was trying to examine for the Last Witnesses, you know, the article, why that we didn't tell the children about it, we didn't talk very much about it. It was that, we just had a sense that it wasn't that bad, you know, I mean, we didn't get gassed or tortured or anything like that. And that, that was a very much of a kind of a sticking point. You know, where you felt like the unfairness of this comparison, and I didn't know exactly why it bothered me, but it did bother me that we were making -- that you were sort of compelled to say, "Well, it wasn't that bad, you know, we didn't suffer very much," and so forth. And you had this sense, you know, that, that the United -- this democracy wasn't as bad as the Hitler's regime and as bad as the Nazis were in Germany. But I found that to be a very interesting period, readjusting to not talking about the Japanese American internment and then to talking about it, but just in such a way to minimize the -- not even the importance of it, but the impact of it on our lives. And I've had to really think very hard on it later on, in years.

So that was -- so anyway, on the whole, I loved New York City, I loved the theater, you know, I always loved theater. I loved the Shakespearean plays, I loved the experimental theater that was going on at Columbia University. So I saw a lot of plays by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, you know, brand new operas that were being written at that period, and Rose and I went around, we went to museums in New York City. Great museums there, as you know. Whatever time we had, you know, when weren't working, we had -- and I was doing freelance work for a publishing house to earn some money to pay our rent, our $35 rent, which we were sharing, and after -- and then Tosh left to go to the University of Washington while I was, I think the first year I was there. And then my friend Rose graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and she came to live with me, and so then we acquired a third roommate and we lived at this little two-room apartment in New York. And it was a very, and as I said, liberating experience for me. That was the first time I think since leaving camp that I really felt like I could explore and become, you know, in the cultural milieu in New York.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.