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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Maynard Horiuchi Interview
Narrator: Maynard Horiuchi
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Sonoma, California
Date: November 20-21, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-hmaynard-01-0016
   
Japanese translation of this segment Japanese translation of complete interview

<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Okay, so we're going to start the second hour, Maynard. And in the first hour, we got you up to, I think you had just finished the Santa Rosa junior college, and we're about to go to China. But before that, during this time period, so we're about 1944, it's during World War II, and we touched upon your father's role as a strategic war planner. And even before the war, I've read some things, and he was noted for almost like... and I actually remember reading this, like almost foretelling the future. That he could anticipate things that would happen.

MH: Yes.

TI: And I wanted you to sort of share, were there other examples? We talked about Guantanamo Bay and how he worked on those amphibious sort of operations. Were there some other things that he did that indicated that he could sort of almost anticipate world events?

MH: Well, I was thinking of the fact that right after World War I, when there were, when they were assigning the tonnage to the different navies of the world, the prominent navies of the world, which they considered at that time as the British, the American, and the Japanese. And they set up a quota of tonnage for those different fleets, it was called the (5:5:3). I can't tell you how much tonnage that was, but...

TI: But it sort of gave you a ratio...

MH: It gave you a ratio for...

TI: The Japanese had the 3, the British and the Americans supposedly had the higher.

MH: Five, five. And of course, the Japanese soon paid no attention to that. But the whole strategic war planning goes into very much nuts and bolts. It's not only looking at the prospect of who was going to attack, but what they are attacking with and where they are going to attack, and what forces they will bring to bear on you, and therefore you must plan for the material and personnel and positions that you need in order to return that attack or... well, I don't think initiate -- we're not supposed to initiate attacks -- but to return the attacks that you're expecting. And this means not on a limited basis, this means on a worldwide basis. Anyone that might be conceived of going to be an enemy for us, and therefore it requires an extreme width of knowledge and, and of intelligence to be able to take this whole picture and break it down into the details that you need to follow in order to get yourself in a position to be able to defend yourself against these forces.

TI: So it's similar, I went to business school, and one of the things that we did as an exercise was called scenario planning. That we would oftentimes do a case study, and in that, we'd say, okay, so based on that, what are the most likely scenarios? And then based on the most likely scenario, we would then go into a detailed kind of planning in terms of, okay, so if this happened, how do we react? It sounds like a very similar thing, that --

MH: No, it goes further than that, because it goes down into looking at all the supplies that you have on hand, the supplies that can be brought to bear if such a thing happened. But what basically do you have in the first place that can get you up to where you need to be if this attack is going to be held? And that is the most practical kind of planning about what do you do, what are your resources, how are you going to, how are you going to handle those resources? What are you going to do to start them up and so forth.

TI: Good. So this is, this is what your father was good at.

MH: Yes.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.