<Begin Segment 21>

TI: Now as you're going around to these different cities, do you see American soldiers around?

RY: No, I didn't see any there. That was... Hiroshima was the British sector and so I didn't see any British soldiers until I got into Kure, which a town next to where we went with my mother. And that was the British sector so they had Indians and British troops.

TI: Now I'm curious because you speak English, did you ever use your English, did you ever go up there and just start talking?

RY: Yeah.

TI: And what was the reaction when they heard you?

RY: Well, they were, they liked to talk to me and so as a matter of fact when I was there, see when I was... going back, once I got there I had words with my dad. And my generation, you never talked back to your dad. Well, here I am sixteen years old and we get there and the Japanese government says, "You were born in America, you're not Japanese." And then we got word that the Americans said, "You repatriated to Japan, you lost your citizenship." And so here I am, sixteen, I have no country that I can claim as my own and so I had words with my dad and I said, "I told you I didn't want to come and look what you brought me into, this is a defeated country. It's not my country." The people didn't like us either because we talked different, we spoke English, we dressed different. And I don't know if you're familiar with the Japanese but they say we're namaiki, that's means we're like cocky. But I personally I felt that way because I thought I was still an American and I figured we won the war, but it was funny. And so at sixteen, after I had words with my dad --

TI: And when you stood up to your to father like this, what was his reaction?

RY: He didn't say anything. It's the first time he didn't, he didn't really get mad at me because he knew I was right. And I said, "The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my own country as soon as I can." And he didn't say anything because he knew how bad it was there. There wasn't any food you know, it was bad. And I left home, I went over to the Australian camp and got a job as an interpreter and they fed us and they put us up and they gave us a place to sleep.

TI: Now why the Australian camp?

RY: Because that was --

TI: That's the sector you were in.

RY: Yeah.

TI: It was the British sector.

RY: Yeah. And I stayed there for almost a year and I started getting a yearning to go back and work with the Americans which were up north. They were in Osaka and I was down in Hiroshima. So me and a friend went up to Osaka and it was easy to get a job because they were looking for people that spoke Japanese and English. And my friend went to Kyoto and I got a job in Osaka working for the Civil Censorship Detachment at the post office and as a telephone operator.

TI: Now were there very many others like you who had come, that were Nisei that had come to Japan and were working for occupation forces?

RY: When I worked in Hiroshima there was a friend of mine that was working there with me and there was another guy, he was one of those people that got stuck in Japan during the war and there was like three or four of us there. And when I went up to Osaka they treated us different. They called us foreign nationals and they had a billet strictly for foreign nationals and I met a lot of my friends over there from camp, they were working there. And I met a lot of people from all over the country. There was people from South America, people from Canada that that repatriated to Japan.

TI: They were all classified as foreign nationals?

RY: Yeah, and they were really good to us. They gave us billeting and food, they fed us, they had a mess hall there. And they would take us to work every morning and I had fun there, actually, because it's all the American kids and played football and all that stuff.

TI: Now I'm curious of the people there, the foreign nationals that were American, how many of them came back to the United States and how many stayed in Japan?

RY: Well, all the ones I knew came back but I don't know what happened to the Canadians and the other people. But I met some people from Hawaii there too that got stuck there during the war. And I know they went back, but, see when... you had to have your passport which I didn't have. You couldn't do nothing without a passport 'cause I had no country so to speak. And in the meantime they had these trials here in San Francisco. I don't know if you ever hear of Wayne Collins. He had some cases where I guess some minors went to court because they said they lost their citizenship because of the questionnaire, and he won the case and they said it was not legal because we were minors, anybody under eighteen.

TI: I think they even established that if they were under twenty-one...

RY: Under twenty-one, yeah. So anyway, the word came out that if you wanted to get your passport, get reinstated, you'd have to go to American consulate, make an appointment, get all the documents they wanted you to get and have a hearing. And so that's what I did.

TI: And what documents did you have to get?

RY: It was pretty stupid because I had to get documents from the Japanese government. I had to get the family history and the military history. I said, "I don't have no military history. I wasn't even here," you know. But I got all the documents they asked for -- this is the American consulate -- and you have a hearing and they tell you whether it's approved or not. And that was one of the happiest moments of my life time is when I got my passport and I knew I was an American and I had someplace to go to you know.

TI: You now had a country.

RY: Yeah, I had my country, I had an American passport.

TI: So you said, one of the happiest times of your life. I mean, tell me a little bit more about that, so what it felt like not having that.

RY: It was kind of weird because I couldn't say... I knew I was an American, but I couldn't do anything, I couldn't go back to the States. And that kind of got to me because I wanted to go home. And so when I got that I said, "I can finally do it. I can go back to the States and I have a place where I belong." 'Cause we had fun in Japan, but it wasn't my place.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.