<Begin Segment 6>

MN: I'm gonna go back to where you landed in Yokohama. Now, from Yokohama, did you go straight to Hiroshima?

JD: We were there for a few nights. I remember it was a summer, it was, as I mentioned, August, so very hot. And we were very anxious to leave there, so we just get, stayed there a day or so to recuperate and then got a fare to, on a train ticket to go to Hiroshima, so just stayed there just a couple days.

MN: What was your first impression of Japan?

JD: Well, coming from the United States, we, I felt everything was really tight. You know, tight, tightly spaced, the room small. Of course, you have to take your shoes off to walk on the floor and that was very interesting experience for me. All the doors were not swinging doors but sliding doors and the shoji. Ice cream was different, kind of a, more like a flaky ice than ice cream that we, I remember. There's no hot dog or hamburger type thing that I recall in all the, I remember flavor in Japan from United States. People wore kimono mostly. People worked in the inns or hotel. People in the street wore, men wore suits and Western clothing. People wore shoes like, almost like a tennis shoe, but one thing I noticed was they had the shoe that was divided by the big toe, and that was quite unusual for me to watch and see. Canvas top rather than leather top footwear. Geta was a very unusual thing to see, zori was another thing. And always on, the bathroom was different. A furo in the inn was different; you'd soak in the tub. You wash yourself outside and then soak in a hot tub. So all these cultural differences were quite interesting. The train, the automobile or trucks that were running outside, a lot smaller in scale, not miniature, but just smaller in scale. Even the train, they said the track was a little smaller, so the train tends to get smaller and everything compact feeling from United States. Not that I traveled much on the train United States, but observing it from the outside it looked much, much smaller in feeling. The headgears, hats and so forth, more structured, I guess, but little different. The students wore a uniform. The hat of the university student was a square black hat that they wore. That was quite different that you'd never see in United States. And, again, you were familiar with some of the sights from the movie I've seen in the United States, so just to see it in reality was different. The clothing had a lot of buttons on the front, for the college students. Yeah, they hung their towel on the belt, that you don't see in the United States. The attire, style of eating, you know, chopsticks the usual equipment to use, so that was very, eye opener for me.

MN: Now, yourself, from Yokohama to Hiroshima you took a train. What was the train ride like?

JD: Well, we had no sleeping unit, of course, just the upright chair, cushioned chair, not wood. It was comfortable in that respect. And I remember my father used to take his shoes off and I thought that was kind of uncouth to do that, but he said that's okay in Japan because... so I, seemed like I kept my shoes on, but my father was more comfortable, being born and grew up there, that he knew the Japan style more than I do. And you'd buy lunch a certain station or people would bring a box lunch, crude type box lunch. Used to buy those and that was a sort of treat for me, to see something like that. You'd buy fruits on each different station, mikan, or apple, peach, or those like. No bananas were seen. But so that was the experience. Looking out the window, everything was very plush green in Japan. You never saw anything like, in California it was dry, dry grass. Always green, and it rained in the morning, and then dry in the afternoon but very humid. And it was in August, so it passed the so called tsuyu season, so there was occasional rain but not, not every daily rain.

MN: So once you got to Hiroshima, how was your grandfather's condition?

JD: He, fortunately, very improved, so we had a very happy reunion, meeting my relatives. Wasn't there to greet me, but we made a point to visit each of our relatives living there. We figured we're gonna only be there for few weeks, so we, my father made a point to make a trip to all his relatives that we could travel. We had a lot of relatives in Kure, which is about an hour train ride and then you take a bus to get to their place. Bus was another mode of transportation that is quite different from United States. It was not a gasoline operated because they cooked coal in the back of the bus, and it smoked a great deal. A very windy and very narrow road that they traveled, so it was quite different in that feeling. Bicycle was abundant. Bicycle all over the place, people rode bike. And a lot of people walked, too. There was, walking was a really healthy mode of transportation for them, especially in the country.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.