Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Julie Otsuka Interview
Narrator: Julie Otsuka
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 2, 2005
Densho ID: denshovh-ojulie-01-0002

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TI: And then tell me about your father. Where was he born?

JO: He was born in Gumma-ken, Japan, in Omama, which is, it's a tiny mountain village about sixty, I think, minutes outside of Tokyo by train. It's a very, it's a tiny, tiny town.

TI: And so how did, how did he come to the United States?

JO: He came here in (1950) as a student, and I was doing some research, I think it was very difficult during those years, right after the war, to get a student visa, but somehow he managed to. So he came here to go to graduate school. So first he went to University of Maryland, and then later he ended up at Stanford. And I remember him saying, I think when he first came here, he told people that he was Chinese. So it was probably not a great time to say that, to admit that you were Japanese, but I think that he was treated fairly well.

TI: Hmm. It seems, yeah, it would be... and what was his field of study?

JO: Electronic engineering. Yeah, I do remember him saying that he had one Filipino classmate who one day showed my father his wrists, and he said, "Do you see these scars? Do you know what they're from?" And my, my father said, "No," and he said that he had been dragged around -- I don't know if it was in Manila, by Japanese soldiers, and they tied him up by the wrists. So, but I don't think -- I mean, if he was ever attacked for being Japanese, I didn't hear any of those stories. He just missed being drafted by two weeks, and his uniform was all laid out and ready to go, and then the war ended. I remember, I mean, it's interesting for me to hear his side of the war. He, all the students then had to work in, I guess, the munitions factories after school, and so he would go in and he said that towards the end of the war, there was so little material left that there was just nothing to do, so they would go there -- I don't know what they would do. And I remember he also built -- 'cause he's an engineer now, remember, and he built a crystal radio set and he would listen to it, which was illegal, but he would listen to it, and so I think he knew that Japan was losing the war. (Narr. note: Actually, he converted a regular radio to a short-wave radio, which was prohibited, and listed to "Voice of America.") And I remember he, I think that he would listen to the radio reports that were issued by the government and they would say, oh, that the battle would be, I don't know, a hundred miles away from the coast, and then the next battle would be eighty miles, seventy miles, sixty miles offshore. And so even though Japan was reported to be "winning the war," the battles were coming closer and closer to shore, so clearly something was going wrong for the Japanese. So, and he, I think, knew... I think he knew that Japan was about to surrender before they did, just 'cause he, I think he was able to listen to "Voice of America" on his crystal radio set.

TI: Well, things like the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did he learn about that on the radio?

JO: Actually, I don't know. I should ask him, 'cause he's still, he's still around. I don't know how he heard about that. I don't know.

TI: Now, I've heard that right after the war, most families in Japan suffered incredible hardships, I mean, because, right after the war. Do you know how it was that he was sent to the United States at this point?

JO: He, well, for one thing, he lived in a -- it was a small town, and so it was too insignificant to be bombed, although I can, I remember him imitating the sound of a, I guess it was a (B-29), I think they were (B-29) planes, the sound of the plane. They would fly overheard every night on the way to Tokyo, but I don't think that their town was ever hit. And he came from a fairly well-to-do family, so they were landowners, and so they had tenant farmers. And so his family was never short for food. I think most of their land was taken away by MacArthur after the war, but he, I don't think he ever went hungry. I know that he, he hates to eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, because all they ate, I think, during the war, they ate a lot of yams and pumpkins, so that's one thing that he really can't stand. But, but they were never, they were never hungry, and I don't know how he -- I guess there must have been enough money to send him over. I don't know if it was, I think his, actually, his mother, his father was, I think, a banker or a businessman, and his mother was a pawnbroker, and she actually did much better than her husband. And they were a fairly prominent family in the community, and he was the only son, and he apparently knew that from a very early age, that he wanted to go to America. I don't know what his parents thought when he was leaving, I don't know if they expected him to come back at a certain point, but I think that he knew that he was going for good.

TI: Did you ever get a chance to meet your grandparents on your father's side?

JO: No. Well, I was, when I was eighteen months I went with my parents so they saw me, but, of course, I don't remember them. I think his father was dying then, and then his mother died a few years later and so I never, I never really knew them at all.

TI: That's interesting. And so after he graduated with his electrical engineering, what, what kind of work did he do?

JO: He went to work right away in Palo Alto, I think, for Varian Electronics designing communication tubes for satellites. So he worked in satellites for all of his professional life. That was his field of specialty.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.