Densho Digital Archive - Richard E. Yamashiro Interview (denshovh-yrichard

<Begin Segment 22>

TI: I just wanted to touch upon this a little bit, but so after the war, Japan was a devastated country, I mean do you have any memories or stories about some of the devastation in terms of what you saw in terms of what the Japanese had to live in during this time?

RY: You mean in Japan?

TI: Yeah, in Japan.

RY: I know that the town next to where my mom lived, they were totally wiped out too from the incendiary raid. It was a town called Kure which used to be the Japanese naval academy town. And they just made an incendiary raid and they ripped the town down all the way up to the hills.

TI: So how did families come back from this? I mean, especially if they didn't have food or like farmland? How did people survive?

RY: Well, a lot of people had farmlands up in the hills, these little plots.

TI: Yeah, but the ones that didn't, the ones who lived in the city?

RY: Oh, they were begging. There were a lot of beggars, a lot of thieves, and that was kind of hard to see.

TI: So you were one of the fortunate ones because you could get work, first the Australians and then the Americans because of your language ability.

RY: Yeah, we got a ration from the Japanese government because we were living there, but it was like one cup of rice per person a day. And we ate a lot of... I don't know what you call mugimeshi but it's wheat, I think it's wheat and it's horrible. And like in order to let the rice last through the day you had to have like okai, you know what okai is? The rice soup in the morning with vegetables and stuff in there.

TI: And here you were a young man, you probably, it was hard for you because you probably wanted to eat a lot more food.

RY: Yeah, it wasn't my cup of tea. So when I started working for the Australians, we used to go to the mess hall after they all ate, then we got leftover food.

TI: When you were working for the Americans, was there ever a situation where because you were at Tule and then came across with the other renunciants, that working for the Americans was hard to do? I guess what I'm going after, I've heard a story where at some point there was an order from headquarters that said, "Don't hire Japanese Americans who came from the United States because they renounced their citizenship and they shouldn't be working for the government."

RY: I never heard that because they hired us pretty quickly, you know. It was like they wanted people that spoke English and Japanese to do these jobs like the switchboard. Either the Japanese would call or the Americans would call in so I had no problem finding a job.

TI: Okay, yeah, I mean, I heard that story so I was just curious if you --

RY: I never heard that story.

TI: -- if you heard that, okay.

RY: The only thing I know is that after I got my passport, I thought since I have my passport, since I'm an American, I think I'll join the American army here. And I tried to join the American army and I filled in all the paperwork at Osaka and I almost made it but it got up to General McArthur's headquarters and they disapproved it.

TI: And did they give you a reason why?

RY: No, they just said the induction is unfavorably... you know.

TI: So they just said "no" essentially.

RY: No.

TI: Interesting.

RY: But they were ready to let me enlist and I didn't know where I was going to do basic training. But maybe it's a good thing I didn't because I would have been in the 25th Infantry Division, they were the first ones to go to Korea. So it's a lot of things, so I decided then that I was going to go back to Hawaii and join the army and come back as a occupation force.