<Begin Segment 21>

DM: So you had started to mention that you signed up to work for the army. So I was wondering if you would follow up with that.

AM: Well, when I quit school, I couldn't tell my dad and my mom, because they were paying our tuition, although I worked two part-time jobs to help pay for some of it. I'll explain that later, I guess. But it just seemed to me that, that it was not what I really wanted to do, but I didn't know how to get out of it. So one of the, the Jewish girl that I was telling you about said she had decided she was gonna go to Germany. This was after the Holocaust, and she knew something about what had happened to the Jews in Germany, so for some reason she wanted to go to Germany. So she signed up to go to Department of Army job in Germany, and so I thought, "Well, I don't want to go to Germany, I want to go to Japan if I go anywhere," so that's what I did, signed up to... we had to pass a civil service examination. And I did not know what that meant, but it was a rigorous examination. The criteria was that you had to be able to type sixty words a minute without mistakes. I flunked the first time, and having been a good student my whole life, I couldn't imagine flunking anything, let alone typing, but I flunked typing.

So I was working at that time at Mount Sinai Hospital in the cancer, the first cancer detection clinic that existed in the world. This was in 1947, mind you. And so in 1947, then I started working for Mount Sinai Hospital, and that's where I learned medical terminology. Because I took dictation on one of those wax cylinder dictaphones that doctors would dictated into, and then my job was to transcribe it. And I think that the fact that I studied Latin in parochial school helped because I had no problems with spelling, learning the terminology, and it was really a good thing for me to have a skill that I didn't know that I was getting and later on I did find useful. But that's what I did, and took my second or -- I guess it was my second typing test, and I passed. I made eighty words without making a mistake, and that's pretty fast.

DM: So you did end up being able to go to work for the Army.

AM: Yeah.

DM: And did they...

AM: Army of the Occupation.

DM: So you ended up in Japan.

AM: Yeah.

DM: And what did you do there?

AM: Well, I worked for the General MacArthur's headquarters office. And most of it was, most of the work that was done -- and the guy who was the head of the department was a Navy captain, retired Navy captain. And he apparently knew a lot about Japan and was a Navy captain during the war, I think. But his job was, in particular, interested in the Zaibatsu, so most of the work was working with the conglomerates and things like that. So that was an interesting time in Japan, when the conglomerates were being dismantled. And I was thinking about this this morning because I was, I put this on this morning, [Ed. note: referring to necklace] and I thought about the woman who gave it to me. And, and because of the Zaibatsu connection, some of the people we worked with were pretty poor, but they were, had had, at one time, a lot of money and a lot of property. So this woman gave this to me, and she told me what this was was one of those things that you put, women in a formal dress, it's a decoration for it. It's platinum and gold, and she gave it to me as a gift. And I made it into a lavalier, to wear on my neck, 'cause I don't wear, obviously, elaborate hairdos. And so I put this on this morning, and I wasn't putting it on for any reason other than the fact that it was what I was putting on. And I thought about the woman who gave it to me, and so I just wanted to mention that. I often wish that I had delved more deeply with their lives, and I didn't. I just was, just secretarial, administrative assistant.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.