<Begin Segment 22>

HH: Then eventually we went up to Sendai, and then I had to seek out the mayor to help us get the information we needed. The mission that we had to do was to get kind of like a population, like a census, some kind of document that we could take, like the head of our department was Elmo Roper, who is like a public opinion type thing, to get the people to get the... they relied on census.

TI: So these are like a public opinion poll, similar to what we call like Gallup polls, things like that.

HH: Gallup polls, yes, Elmo Roper. And so I had to ask him, we want some documentation, but he said these were all destroyed in even Sendai.

TI: I'm sorry, what was destroyed?

HH: The records of whatever...

TI: Oh, the records. Got it.

HH: Yes. But the Japanese, Japan did not have a census, so I had to improvise and find out what kind of things that you have to have. He said the best one is a rice ration list, which was a list, but it was all handwritten. And so my officer that I was... he said, "Well, okay, we'll use that," and he says, "I expect them to have this ready by tomorrow." Well, it was a case where it was a situation where the mayor said that he has only -- to me, in Japanese -- he said there was only two secretaries. And to hand-write all the names that we could use now to select every seventeenth name or something like that, each family, he says, it's very hard to do all this. So I relayed to the officer, and what got me was that he said, "You tell them this: you are a defeated country. Japan is a defeated country," and he says, "I'm ordering you to produce it. You tell them that, by tomorrow." So I had a difficult time explaining it to him, but I did say to him, I didn't tell him about the fact that, about "you're a conquered nation," I didn't have the heart to. Anyway, so I said, "Just do all you can, he will know. He wants it by tomorrow." I think that's what it was, I don't know how much of it was done, but pages and pages of it that we were able to get, and my officer was very happy.

TI: Oh, so that's interesting. So to do this study, what they wanted to do was kind of like what we call random sampling, but they needed to start with a list.

HH: Yes.

TI: And what you found out, the best list was the rice ration list.

HH: Yes, because that's very --

TI: Because everyone was going to be on that to get food.

HH: Yes, yes. Better than a census, really.

TI: And so they had it at the mayor's office, the city office, but then your, the captain wanted a copy of it.

HH: Yes.

TI: And he demanded it right away.

HH: There were no copy machine or anything like that. [Laughs]

TI: So the two secretaries had to hand-write as many as they could. You're not even sure how many they did.

HH: I think probably the mayor stayed also to help them, and so three... I think.

TI: But the thing that bothered you was the attitude of the captain who just kind of demanded this and wasn't sensitive to how hard this was.

HH: And how hard it was for me to tell him that.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.