<Begin Segment 8>

TI: Tell me a little bit about the family in Japan, I mean, the people that you connected with. Who was in Japan that you lived with?

JI: Okay, I had a cousin who, with whom I stayed until I got into the, the Masugatayama, which was a boarding school. And then I had another cousin who worked for a bindery, and he and I were quite close. And he was one of the few who agreed with me that Japan should get out of China -- [laughs] -- that they shouldn't be there. And unfortunately he, in spite of the fact being kind of a pacifist, he was drafted and killed on some island somewhere. But the other relatives were all in Japan, or -- I mean, in Hiroshima, and I would go and visit them on school holidays and went there for Christmas, over Christmas/New Year's. And they were all very nice to me, except for the guy whose place I was staying. He was, I like to say he was adopted into the family, one of the yoshi, and that he was not really a member of the family because he had a two-year-old kid, not quite two yet, and he would train this kid to come kick me in the head when I'd be lying on the tatami. And I would carry this kid all over and throw him up in the air and play with him. But one day I was lying there, and he came and kicked me in the head and said, "Amerikajin, inase." You know Hiroshima-ben?

TI: No, no.

JI: Inase means, "Get out of here," inase, or "throw him out, make him go away."

TI: So you think his father was telling his son to...

JI: Oh yeah, 'cause he and I would get into great, great arguments. He had a military, quasi-military uniform on, looked ridiculous. He had gum boots, you know, the high rubber boots, and he had affected a kind of Hitler mustache. [Laughs] And I said, "Where are you going?" and he says, "I'm going to the anti-British demonstration." And so, and I said, "Why are you going to the anti-British, why is there an anti-British demonstration?" "Oh, they want to stop us in China." And I said, "Well, they should." And he says, "You're not helping either." I says, "What do you mean, we're not helping? We're helping too much, we're selling you oil, we're sending scrap metal over here, we should not do that." And he says, "You don't understand," and I says, "What don't I understand?" "We're trying to save the Chinese." And in a way, they thought they were saving it from Western imperialism, but, "We're trying to save the Chinese." I said, "That's a hell of a way to save Chinese, by killing them off." And they had really bad massacres in China. When you see what's happening in China now, you kind of lose a little sympathy for that, but at that time, I thought that it was terrible what they were doing. And that's, that's the reason I was very uncomfortable.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.