<Begin Segment 27>

BH: So in 1946, that's when you had Gerrie, and you moved to Japan ten months later, you said. So tell me about that. How was, how was that move for you?

KH: Well, it was a trip by boat, and we weren't being flied at all. I think it took about ten days.

BH: Were you nervous about going to Japan, the war just having ended?

KH: No. No, I wasn't, but then I was shocked when I got there to see the devastation, you know. Everything was flattened, and then after we got our housing, didn't have, we moved in with Pete and Joy Yamazaki for a while until we got permanent housing at Washington Heights. But the Japanese were really struggling. Fellows who were working in the grounds, they would go through our garbage, and I remember one fellow picking up an old olive and that was food.

BH: So did you, in your time in Japan with Joe, ever go back to visit the places that you had been before? Did you see any places that you had been in previous visits?

KH: Oh, I saw Kamakura.

BH: Did you note any differences? Were there any significant changes?

KH: No, at the time, because it's a seashore. But the villages, you could tell that they were all having a hard time. The devastation from the bombing was something.

BH: Did you reunite with any family members in Japan during your stay?

KH: Yeah, I ran into my aunt, the one that lived in Tokyo, Aritomi Michiko, and her daughter Mariko. And you know, we had maids, they assigned two maids to each unit, and I had two maids do the housework, and they would come in in the morning and go home in the afternoon. They were having a hard time, too.

BH: How was it seeing your family, your cousins?

KH: Well...

BH: How did the war affect them?

KH: The first thing my aunt said to me was, "Your mother must have been awfully fat." 'Cause you know, the Japanese were all, they're not overweight like we are. And she said she took my mother's clothes and took it apart and was able to make a complete outfit for herself with what material she got out of my mother's dresses.

BH: So they were really having trouble.

KH: Yeah, and I remember helping them a little bit, bars of soap and cooking oil and sugar sometimes. Then later on, before I left Japan, I went to work for Antitrust & Cartels, and I was supposed to be a typist. But they would run short of interrogators, when the people from the different companies came in, so since I spoke Japanese, they asked me to interrogate some of them, and I did. And I remember going in to interrogate one time, and one fellow was from a sugar company, and sugar was very hard to get. And he thought it was, you know how the Japanese want to give you something as sort of a thank you? So he gave me this package of sugar, white sugar, and I tried to refuse it. But he insisted I take it so I took it, but this sugar that I could buy, go to the commissary and buy with no problem.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.