Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Akira Otani Interview
Narrator: Akira Otani
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: March 3, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-oakira-01-0023

<Begin Segment 23>

TI: Any other experiences, I was going to ask you about Tsukiji, if you had --

AO: Oh, yeah, well, yes, in fact that's one of the first thing I did because my dad had contact with... I don't know if I'd mentioned earlier, with the people from Taiyo Gyogyo. Taiyo Gyogyo was the world's largest fishing company and the main office was in Tokyo but some reason along the way my dad had got to know those people. But actually he didn't know the high ups, he knew the in between or lower echelon people who were in the business section. And somebody in the lower echelon that my dad told me, "If you go to Tokyo will you look up this person? I'll give you two names, look up this person or this person and see if they're alive," number one, and number two, if they are alive just to tell them that he's okay and that he's hoping that they are okay too. So I inquired, first of all I went to their head office of Taiyo Gyogyo in Tokyo and I inquired and I asked for a certain person's name and many people didn't know but I finally somebody who said, "Oh yeah, he's at the cold storage section," some few blocks away in the industrial district. So I don't know, I think I had a jeep driver and I had him take me to that cold storage area and I found this person, he was in charge of the cold storage but he all by himself. And he remembered my father very well and paid his respects and he said, oh, he apologized greatly that he couldn't do very much for me because there were nothing, all he could offer was some tea and some frozen oranges that he had in the cold storage. I said, oh, I didn't expect... I just wanted to see his face and see that he was well so that, "I could report back to my dad that I had seen you and that you're fine and your family is okay." So I made that contact and it was from that contact on that my father started rebuilding the relationship with this company again. To a point that someday many, well, a few years after that, that was still '45, '46, I don't know, in the middle '50s I think, got to a point where the president of that company wanted to send his son to school in the United States and needed a sponsor but they didn't know who to... they didn't know anybody who could sponsor the son. And then they found out that this man that I had looked up, that we were doing business through that company, knew my dad. So they asked him to contact my father and see if he would sponsor their son. So to make a long story short, my father got to sponsor this boy and he went to the school in California, I forgot what. And eventually he got so that my father had to sponsor his cousin whose father became the next president. But eventually this guy that my... the second boy that my father sponsored became the president of Taiyo in later years. But they never forgot that my father sponsored them. And the thing is at that time they could not export any dollars. So in other words, my father had to sponsor them by spending U.S. dollars without any assurance of being repaid in U.S. dollars. Eventually he was repaid, yes, you know, but at that time it was just a matter of doing a favor and hopefully... but it helped his business. I guess my father's own mind that, you know, he wanted to do business with this company, eventually, hopefully that they could help him too you know.

TI: So you helped reestablish that connection?

AO: Yes, we established it, yes.

TI: Good, and then you know, back to the fish market, Tsukiji, yeah, I mean, did you visit the fish market when you were in Tokyo?

AO: Now when was this again now?

TI: This was when you were still... during the occupation.

AO: No, no, I never did, that was the end because after that I went to Osaka, so I never did spend any time in Tokyo after that.

TI: So why don't we... are there any other stories Japan or should we go to Hawaii now?

AO: Well, I don't know but I probably think about it later but no, I can't think of anything here.

TI: Okay, so let's... so you finally after being in the service --

AO: Well, one thing, yes, one thing was when I was in Osaka, one of my fellow officers, officer from Hawaii he wanted to go to Hiroshima so we passed through Hiroshima very fast because he was looking for his relative. And he was able to find the relative quite a bit outside of the city so he was not killed by the atomic bomb. But from there, what we did was we went together by jeep, we went to Sasebo which was a big naval base for the Japanese Navy and there we visited the naval base and we saw several large battleships and other ships all sunk, they had been sunk by the Japanese themselves, you know, to prevent the American Navy from taking it over. But they were all in the water and I took pictures of all the ships. That was another interesting, you know, short trip.

TI: And why did they... they sunk 'em so that the Americans couldn't use them even though the war was --

AO: Well, before the war ended they sunk it you see?

TI: Oh, before the war ended. Okay, interesting, did you visit in Hiroshima the blast area?

AO: I just passed through when we went through by train, you know.

TI: Okay, so you didn't get a good view.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.