<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Did you see, when you went to Nagasaki, the damage from the atomic bomb?

BB: Some of it, the edges. Believe it or not, it was all covered up. They had put a sort of a canvas or cloth fence all around so you couldn't see anything. So you walked in a corridor down and nothing, you see nothing but cloth on one side.

TI: So who, who put the cloth up, the Japanese, or...

BB: I think our own navy did.

TI: How about sort of remnants of people who had burns and things, like from the, from the bomb?

BB: Didn't see any. Now, when I, we came in on the train, I, I was so excited about being free again that I forgot my canteen and mess kit and everything on the train. In fact, I, I walked out of that train with Barracks Bag that had a couple things in it; I had a deck of cards in it and a lot of yen. See, when the, when the war ended, our, Captain Saito decided we should be paid for all the labor we had done, so they paid us with Japanese yen, and we had about, we had earned in Japanese monetary system, a thousand yen apiece. So here was all this yen going around, nobody wanted it. So I decided, "Gee whiz, that'll make good souvenirs," so I gathered a whole bunch of it. And I had in the back of a musette bag, I had it lined with these yen. So when I came into Nagasaki, all these guys want souvenirs, so I handed 'em all these bundles of yen; I kept one bundle. When I went back to war crimes, I, we had a monetary exchange. I took this bundle of yen, and it was gold yen. I still have one hundred-yen piece at home. I got five thousand some-odd dollars for this little bundle that I had.

TI: Wow. So, the yen was, was metal, not paper.

BB: No, no, it was paper.

TI: It was paper?

BB: Gold yen.

TI: And you got that, that kind of exchange?

BB: It's like our, like our money. You have American money that has silver reserve on it?

TI: Right.

BB: Well, you don't see it anymore. This is the old-time gold yen that the Japanese had.

TI: So that could be reimbursed for actual gold?

BB: Actual gold. The full value of the yen. If you had a hundred-yen note, an ordinary --

TI: Too bad you didn't, too bad you didn't keep all those packages. [Laughs]

BB: If you had a wartime yen note, it was worthless.

TI: Right.

BB: Probably worth, a hundred-yen note might be worth a, ten cents at most. But if you had gold yen, full value. I didn't know that.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.