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MA: I actually -- sorry, I wanted to go back a little bit and ask you a question about Nigeria.

JH: Oh, all right.

MA: And how you were treated there as a Japanese American, and what your experience was?

JH: Well, you know, I was, of course, a stranger by the Nigerians themselves. They thought I was Chinese. Because the Chinese have restaurants and laundries, it seems, all over the world, there's been movement. So that in any big city you go in, that's what I did, is I'd look up and find the Chinese restaurants and get food that way.

MA: Was there a Chinese community?

JH: There wasn't a community, but, well, not, not huge Chinatowns and things like that. They're just scattered around, a few in each of the urban areas. And when I'd go to the native markets, little kids would run after me and say, "Chinee, Chinee, Chinee," you know, things like that. So, and then there were hardly any Japanese around. I think in Eastern Nigeria, I heard that there were a couple in one of the southern cities, but I never ran into any. And when I was there in the capital city of Eastern Nigeria, Enugu, there was a Korean doctor, worked for the World Health Organization. And he grew up in Korea at the time of Japanese occupation, so he was fluent in Japanese. And then while I was there, the television people in Eastern Nigeria hired a young fellow from Japan to come and help set up their TV station. And so he arrived on the scene, and he was, oh, I would say he was still in his twenties. And hardly knew any English, but you know, technology, I guess, vocabulary is the same, so he was working there, and he used to meet with the Korean doctor and me, just so that we could speak Japanese and eat Japanese food, you know, we'd cook it ourselves. And when the war started, I was afraid to... the Korean doctor got shipped out right away by the World Health Organization, and then I got orders from the Ford Foundation I was working for, to go back to the capital city. And I was afraid to leave him there by himself, so that I went over to the TV station and I argued with them. I says, "Hey, his family is flying into the capital city, we have to go and pick up his family," and I just told them a line, you know, and got him to go with me. And we drove to the border where the separation from Eastern Nigeria and federal territory. There's a bridge going across the Niger River. It's like the Golden Gate Bridge, it's a suspension bridge. And they had federal troops on one side and Nigerian troops, I mean, East Nigerian troops on the other side, the Biafran troops, and they wouldn't let us cross. So I sent the car back with the, chauffeur back to the capital, and then the ferry was running underneath the bridge as if there were no war at all. And so we just jumped the ferry and went over to the other side, Ford Foundation met us, and we drove back to the capital city of Enugu, and I took him over to the embassy there. And they were really thankful, they were worried about him, didn't know what was happening. So that's the last I saw of him, then I came back.

MA: What were people, especially in maybe Eastern Nigeria, what were people's views towards the United States?

JH: Well, you know, I don't think that they were very much aware of what -- you know, they knew that various forces were at it, and it was kind of a funny alignment. The British were the colonialists there for fifty years. And Nigeria got independence around 1950, so that it was independent only about half a dozen years before I got there. And the problem in Nigeria is there's something like 250 different tribes there. And colonialism in Europe, you know, the European powers would divide up according to their politics and whatever, you know. And so, as I say, there were 250 different tribes, and there are three big ones. And then during the Biafran war, the British were still, had a lot of power. And they were on one side, and then there were, I guess the Russians and even the Israeli had some. So that the fallout was sort of different. And the United States, although they were officially neutral, I saw a lot of surplus stuff, GI stuff there. And so they were much more on the Biafran side, I think. So anyway, the ordinary people, of course, they were, they didn't have power, you know. So they sort of treated us, put us on pedestals and that kind of stuff. And what I was trying to do was help in any way in the rural area. And I, the Minister of Rural Development, he just told me, "We've got all kinds of problems. Do what you think you need to do."

And so I joined up with a group of medical missionaries that were Lutheran, and I held seminars with them. We were in a minority group area and they, they were there to proselytize and that kind of stuff. You know, learning the language and translating the Bible and that sort of thing. And I thought, "Well, that's a way I could communicate with the people," and so I got them to start doing anthropological kind of work, sort of analyzing the societies and then finding out what kind of problems there were, and especially in the health area. And my notion was to do ethnographies in all these groups, find out about their, their medical practices, and then to try to get their medical practices merged with modern medicine. You have a combination where native beliefs and... they knew what modern medicine could do and that kind of stuff. And I was, my goal was to just sort of combine these to make a kind of an overall health program for the people. And that's what I was doing, I was hiring young people who spoke English to help me collect data on what kind of family structure and that kind of stuff. And medical beliefs and all that sort of thing. And in the middle of that, the war started, and so I had to sort of drop everything and come running out.

MA: So how long were you in Nigeria?

JH: Well, I was in there, oh, maybe about eight months or so.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.