Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: James Yamazaki Interview
Narrator: James Yamazaki
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Van Nuys, California
Date: February 4, 2005
Densho ID: denshovh-yjames-01-0034

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TI: So we had a short interruption, and then I was asking about how you got your job with the atomic bomb survivors to go study that. But before we do that, I just wanted to just touch upon, when you were in Philadelphia doing your, it's your internship at that point, residency, okay, residency, because you wanted to get more training in pediatrics.

JY: Oh, no, it just happened I got into pediatrics. Aki wrote a hundred letters, because everybody's coming back from the service and wants some training in medicine after their experience. And most, a lot of the young guys like myself just spent nine months or so in our internship, and there's hardly enough to prepare us for practice.

TI: Oh, so your wife wrote a hundred letters all around the country looking for a place to get more. And so she found it in Philadelphia. And I imagine the hospitals had their pick of whoever.

JY: Absolutely, because they would tend to focus on people that left their institution to go to war. And we were reminded of that repeatedly.

TI: So in terms of supply and demand, they had a huge supply to choose from, so they probably didn't have to pay you very much.

JY: No, that was the usual routine during that period of medical training. Most good hospitals did not pay.

TI: So residents were not paid.

JY: No.

TI: So how did you survive during this period without getting paid?

JY: Aki was working.

TI: So what kind of work did Aki do?

JY: She worked as a secretary to the president of the American Friends Service Committee, who eventually became president of Haverford. Extremely bright guy. But Aki said she never had to correct anything he did. Whereas mine had, requires at least ten times to get a near acceptable letter.

TI: And so you were here for... oh, one or two years?

JY: About, little over a year.

TI: Okay. And so living off of Aki's salary. And also probably it was a great time for the two of you just to get reacquainted, too.

JY: Hardly, because we spent so much time at the hospital.

TI: Oh, so you were so busy, you didn't get a chance...

JY: Yeah, maybe, what is it, one night out of three?

Off camera: Out of forty-eight hours, I saw him eight hours.

[Interruption]

TI: Okay, so fifteen months in Philadelphia, you got this additional sort of training. So then what happened next?

JY: There was an opportunity to go to the children's hospital in Philadelphia, which is one of the leading children's hospitals. Not that it was, you could compare the two hospitals, they were both excellent hospitals. And we were able to obtain a residency there, so we transferred to that hospital.

TI: And how long were you there then?

JY: Another two years.

TI: So you were there in Philadelphia for a good period of time, over three years.

JY: No, fifteen months in Philadelphia, then I went to Cincinnati to the children's hospital.

TI: Oh, Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Okay, and so you were there for two years.

JY: Yeah. So there were people like Albert Sabin was there, the person that developed the Sabin vaccine for polio. So it was that caliber of people in research and teaching there.

TI: So what a great opportunity to learn.

JY: It was.

TI: And what an interesting career. Up to this point you had this sort of really hands-on battle experience, and then now you get this...

JY: Extremely... to top off my medical education that way was really, I felt I lucked out.

TI: So after these couple years in Cincinnati, then what happened?

JY: Well, after one year there, the director of that hospital who was really a fine person, and got to know Aki well because of our housing situation, we were still facing that in Cincinnati. And just to the south is, the south of the border is the South. And he got to know us quite well, and he was on, a member of the National Research Council, that's part of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. And he was appraised of the work going on in Japan when they were looking for recruits. And so he came one day and said, "Hey, Jim, got this situation that they're just starting this program in Japan, and we'd like you to think about it." So he explained that he had taught in China, and that being with a different culture and different people gave him a tremendous different perspective of medicine and people. And he thought this experience in Japan might, in a way, be like that, an unheard kind of experience people had never before, and I'd be on the ground floor of atomic medicine. "Why don't you go home and talk it over with Aki?"

TI: And so this was even two, three years after the actual bomb had dropped, but it was to really study, in some cases, the aftereffects of the, primarily the radiation on the human body.

JY: Yes, and especially the children.

TI: Children and genetics and things like that.

JY: Right.

TI: And so you talked it over with Aki, because this would be going... for you, you had never been to Japan.

JY: Never been.

TI: Aki had never been to Japan.

JY: That's right.

TI: And so what did you decide?

JY: Well, those were factors, too. Economically we never thought we'd be able to afford to take a trip to Japan, that never entered our minds. That, and besides, I still was concerned about the war and what it all meant. And then Aki said, gave her okay.

TI: I'm curious, did you ask your parents about this decision?

JY: No.

TI: Even though they were from Japan, you never...

JY: No, we didn't. Of course, we let them know afterwards. But with Aki, she didn't raise any objections.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.