<Begin Segment 17>

TI: So I'm gonna now catch up. You mentioned how, so your unit went off, you never heard from them again.

JM: Never heard from them again.

TI: But you were held back as a translator.

JM: Yeah.

TI: So let's talk about that. Let's begin it back there, so what kind of translation did you do?

JM: All the message that was comin' in in English I had to translate. And let's see, how long did I translate? Maybe two weeks or something like, and that's all, but I didn't have to do it every day, just when they start flying over, 'cause where our air base was and there was another Japanese air base close to where we were, so the Americans would try and go over there, too, and drop bombs over there. And that's where my wife and them were staying, in the country part.

TI: And when, so it wasn't that long, a couple weeks, who else was doing translation with you?

JM: I was the only one in that unit.

TI: Okay.

JM: I was the only one.

TI: So you were kind of a unique, rare person.

JM: Yeah, so I started gettin' pretty popular there.

TI: How so? Why were you popular?

JM: Well, 'cause all the officers and high ranking people, they'd call me and I'd go out there, and even though the war was over, a lot of people disobeyed these officers, but I just did my duties, whatever I could. And because when the war was over lot of people start goin' home theirselves. There's no more military there, so they went home and everything, but I stayed until they told me, "You can go home," and I got, before I went home I had a three month paycheck, anyway, to get, but only sixty dollars for three months. [Laughs]

SF: So before the war ended, what kind of documents did you translate?

JM: Just where they were gonna fly and "we're gonna go there." I don't know how the military army, they had some kind of a code, too, so it's that, the one will come in separate and then later on they'll come from behind and thing like that.

TI: So these were, they're intercepting American codes and then you were translating the messages?

JM: The message, yeah. It's more like the pilots talkin' to them thing and thing like that, because when the Americans broke the, what do you call that now, the Japanese code, that's when Japan, they start, the kamikaze pilots start gettin' shot down before they even reach the destination. Yeah, because they got that code. But before that, when they seen the Zeros come, they said they used to run away, 'cause the Zeros, the maneuver was real good.

TI: But, but by breaking the codes they were more prepared for when they were coming.

JM: Yeah. So before they, before they even came to the target, they were shot down from the MiGs.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.