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MN: Your father went into Hiroshima city that day.

JD: Right.

MN: Did he get radiation poisoning?

JD: He lived to age ninety, and that was amazing for, for me to encounter that. No, so he must never have got that rain on him. He was just downwind, I mean he was upwind and the wind went in the opposite direction, and somehow in the search he never got doused by the rain. I never really talked to him about which area he was in, if he got doused by the rain, never mentioned that. He probably didn't know anyway if he did. He probably could get up to only a certain point because tremendous fire was going in the city, and he could just travel where he was safe to travel and tried to look for me and just guessed which direction I was. But he came home about nine p.m., as I mentioned.

MN: What did Hiroshima city look like in the weeks after the bombing?

JD: Well, see, the war ended, let's see, April 15th and then surrendered beginning of September. My school started in the first week of September, so we got a notice that school opened so you could go back to class, so I took the train, went to, back to Hiroshima, and it just, it was still smoldering and it, of course, burned for two weeks and started to dissipate, so... people were dying constantly, so they were always having funeral pyre, you know being, people being burned in the city, so you'd smell the stench of the body. It smelled like, when you eat or heat up a dry squid, had that kind of smell in the air. It was a fish smell. And so we're, from the Hiroshima station we had to walk about five miles, and away going south, northeasterly, and just near, almost the direction of the factory was, across the river, they called it Shinonomecho, was the area where our school located. There was the Hijiyama Mountain not too far from the campus. Our school was still standing, but no windows. The ceiling was blown up and on the wall all the glass that broke was standing against the wall, like a thrown knife against the wall, and that was the situation. So we had class there September, October, and then winter came. We had snow drifting into the classroom and you had, our lifestyle there's no shoes, so barefoot in classroom. We'd make sure that we don't, we cleaned the floors so we don't, there'll be no glass to step on, and no window, no glass was available at that time yet. It didn't get repaired 'til maybe a year later. No books, no pencils, it was just a lecture class we had, just assemble, took roll call. And then only class held for maybe half a day. We got there about eight-thirty, nine o'clock in the morning and then left there about one o'clock. So afternoon was free to what you want to do, but it was just a flat, flat area, nothing standing 'cause the fire just cleaned the city up. They said it looked like atomic desert is one of the comments they made 'cause to stand on one edge of the city, you could see twenty miles across the city without any, it was a flat city. So that's how it was, just a rubbles. It just, burned items just accumulated, street was cleared by the, for traffic purpose, and they slowly start to clean up the city for, to building. They were warning the people that you couldn't, shouldn't live there for a hundred years because of radiation, but people who lived there had nowhere else to go, so they started coming back and found their location where they used to be and started making shacks, whatever they gathered to make shack to live under. Probably the water they drank was contaminated, but they were no wiser, so probably a lot of people died because of that contamination and illness. So when I went back to Japan about twenty years after the bombing, I started looking for my classmates and every time I'd knock on a door said, "Oh, he passed away long time ago," so students who went to school and lived in the area, some had contaminated by that, by the surrounding atmosphere, and died. So I think of, so if I tried to have a class reunion now nobody would show. It was a very sad situation. Yeah.

MN: When you talk about school, you, they started school the month after the bombing and you said you have, there's no school supplies.

JD: That's right.

MN: You had lectures. What did you guys, what kind of lectures were these?

JD: Well, whatever the teacher could assemble. And for our class grade any kind of news, I remember start to mention about the atomic bomb and the theory of atomic bomb principle that, and we're in the age group by then, seventeen, sixteen, seventeen years old, so start to understand what it entailed and the situation of the world. And anything we could do to hold a class, and we had books that were able to obtain somehow. The teacher had it somewhere and they used to distribute books to read. That's one of the, first time I think, came across reading a book on Faust, you know, German story, and so a lot of books was somehow available, started to come out on the market, you could buy on the black market or so forth, and started reading those, reading assignment. And then within about a, as the school got cleared and building structure get cleaned up more we start to have more classes pertaining to engineering, we start to have drafting class, pen and ink, and in those days we had ink drawing, so we used to do that. And I still have some, we have books at home that I had that I never took to class because we were, we didn't go to class 'cause we went to factory to work, so our books were intact at home, so we used to bring those to class and review them. So that was available. Yeah, there was a black market throughout the city. You were amazed at the black market started to come out in the city and people trying to make, make a living again. And there was condition like people wanted to buy sugar but there's no sugar, but people does it as, they grind glass, mix it with sugar and people eat, eat this sugar and use it and die, and there was that type of situation, so you had to be very careful with the black market situation. But people just doing anything they can to make, make money.

MN: Now, at that time, were you aware that Nagasaki been bombed?

JD: Yes.

MN: When did you get that news?

JD: Matter of fact, it was three days later, so we didn't, we didn't know too much about Nagasaki. It was too distant away. Communication was poor to us, and we were just trying to establish ourselves in our own way. Probably, probably the politicians, city officials were interested to help each other out any way, and of course there's many, many victims were being treated in the Hiroshima hospital that was created. I think people were being transferred from Nagasaki to Hiroshima because they, they were very behind in their creation of the hospital. And we had more help from the United States for the people of, hibakusha to be helped, Red Cross and so forth. And I know my aunt was transported back and forth to hospital to get plastic surgery done on the injured part, and there's also a Hiroshima maiden who was transported to the United States to be helped by the people, to see what they could do to the injured people, so that type of thing was going on as well. So as each day went by we tried to improve the situation. People tried to get back to, back on their foot. Soldiers were returning from the war zone area, train was always packed, and even as a student traveling you could hardly get onto the train because the train was so full, so we're just hanging onto the doorway to try and commute.

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