<Begin Segment 23>

TI: So you got the list, and then you chose every seventeenth person to go...

HH: I guessed. That was the list, and we didn't do that. After we went back, we turned it into the headquarters. We were housed, our headquarters were just outside of the moat of the Imperial Palace, and then we were only about two long blocks away from MacArthur's headquarters in the Daiichi.

TI: But later on, I wanted to ask in terms of... so the survey was created and administered, what role did you have at that point?

HH: I think at that time, I was sent to Sendai to see... I was one of the early ones that went. And then they had teams of the, crew scattered over Japan, and one of the, group that I had to go after I went back to Tokyo, I was sent down with a crew of about four others. And went down to Okayama first, and then eventually down to Hiroshima. By that time, they had a questionnaire in Japanese that the crew was supposed to interview the ones that were selected. But it was only until I got to Hiroshima that we started interviewing, and sent the report back. And by that time, because we stopped at Okayama area first, there was some kind of indication that something isn't right about the survey, that they weren't getting proper or whatever answers to the questions.

TI: Hmm. So the answers they were getting wasn't what they were expecting, so they thought there was a problem.

HH: Yes, because it was geared to public opinion poll, I guess they word it a certain way. So I had to ask a chief of police who was in Hiroshima that was with us when they had the people come in, I think it was a police station, that we were interviewing. And so I asked him, I said, you know, something about certain kind of questions, there was one question about how do you feel about this atomic bomb, which is, in Japanese, genshibakudan. Bakudan is a bomb, genshi is, must be atomic or something. But he said that people, Japanese citizens, only that term, "I don't think they understand what it is." They know it's a bomb, some kind of bomb, so the answers that they were getting and compiling did not agree with the result of the headquarters back in Washington, D.C.

TI: And didn't agree because the people didn't understand what the term, they didn't know what the term...

HH: Oh, the answers were such, "not terrible" and all that, see. So I asked him, he said, "We use," in Japan, not only Hiroshima, I found out later, but even Tokyo or anywhere away from Tokyo, he said, "They only understand it as pikadon." Pika is like a flash, and don is like kind of a... there's a word that, like a sound, flash and sound. Pikadon. And that's the only word that they know. And then they found out that the answers were "terrible," one bomb.

TI: Okay. So as soon as they, so what you were able to do by talking to this police chief was to get the term that people understood.

HH: Yes.

[Interruption]

TI: Okay, so we just were talking about how by asking this police chief, you got the term that people knew, pikadon, and so people, and so you then submitted that to headquarters...

HH: Headquarters in Tokyo.

TI: And they changed, so they changed the survey.

HH: They did make changes at the Washington, D.C. headquarters, and eventually I think it changed. By the time I was in the Hiroshima area it was changed. So I think the results of what they thought that they should be getting on that particular question about the atomic bomb.

TI: So do you remember how many people were interviewed for this survey?

HH: Oh, I have no idea, because the picture I have about the public opinion is to stack up a paper, how many, if it's real high on certain questions, yes or no, whatever, then unanimously this. So I think it was, it wasn't quite what they thought that question, especially on the atomic bomb.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.