<Begin Segment 31>

MN: Now your parents are from Hiroshima? Did you lose family members in the atomic bombing?

HY: Lost one whole family, they're gone.

MN: How did you hear about that? Were you still at the prison camp when you heard about the atomic bombing?

HY: No. The relatives wrote a letter to Mom, then they were gone. Whole family just wiped out forever.

MN: And how did you feel about that?

HY: Those, they were civilians, innocent, you know, civilians. See, like this terrorist Osama Bin Laden, he even said that, "Well, you guys dropped the bomb on Hiroshima." Then he killed a lot of these innocent people, not the soldiers, you know. Why couldn't they drop it in some ocean or someplace and demonstrate it, how devastating this bomb is, instead of killing the innocent people?

MN: Were you still in prison camp when the war was over?

HY: No, I don't think... I was out. I was out.

MN: When you heard that Japan surrendered, how did you feel?

HY: I felt they was gonna lose anyway, yeah. But I didn't like the attitude of them, you know, Japanese people there. They were too arrogant. I was there, like I say, I lived in Japan one year, and I saw these, how they treat their soldiers. Beat 'em up and they, I don't know, they cuss at 'em, really treated 'em like dirt. Over here, they don't do that, see. I'm not used to that kind... I'm not used to that kind of treatment. I saw all that, see. Yeah, one time a soldier, they come by our house. And one soldier said he lost one those screws in a rifle he had. And this sergeant, without saying anything, bam, he just let him have it. It wasn't his fault, you know, he just lost it. Something like that, that really bothered me. So I didn't want to, I didn't want to join the Japanese army, no way. Treat you like a dirt.

MN: Now, had you stayed in Japan, would you have been drafted?

HY: Oh, yeah.

MN: You have dual citizenship?

HY: Uh-huh, yes.

MN: I want to go --

HY: They would have taken me, all right.

<End Segment 31> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.