<Begin Segment 19>

SY: So you ended up in the Philippines then, and then...

FO: Yeah, we ended up in the Philippines, we got on a little trolley train, and we went into Santa Rosa Racetrack outside of Manila. That's where ATIS, the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section is stationed. And the smart guys were doing a lot of translation work. And guys like me who were weak in Japanese, we went to interrogate the prisoners that they had. Because where we were stationed, where we were living, we lived in a twelve-man tent, and it was right next to the PW camp, and that thing was just full of Japanese. So I interviewed some of the... and most of these guys were interviewed already, but I interviewed the Japanese sub commander. He was a commander of a Japanese ship, submarine. And I asked the guy, "How come you didn't go down with the ship if you were the commander? If you're a captain of a ship, you go down with the ship." He says, "You know how hard it is to die?" [Laughs] I said, "Oh, god.

SY: Did they tell you what questions to ask them?

FO: No. No, they said, "Try to get some information on this and that." But all these other guys, the smart boys marched into the main area to do translation work, and there's a few of us that stayed behind to interrogate prisoners, just waste time.

SY: That... "just waste time." But that must have been, it was all Japanese soldiers that you were interviewing. And they had been prisoners for long, for a very long time?

FO: Well, some of them had been for a long time, and some of them were just recent.

SY: And were they mostly cooperative?

FO: Yeah, the regular soldiers were real cooperative. They wanted to go home. The officer class, they looked down on you, namaiki, too.

SY: So you had to interview some officers.

FO: Yeah, I talked to a few, but I didn't get any information out of them. So my duty, from the twelve-man tent, everybody marched into MIS ATIS. So I used to go out and haggle with the natives for rice.

SY: The Filipino natives.

FO: Yeah. So I used to spend most of my time digging out the worms out of these rice. [Laughs] So these guys, when they came back from the headquarters area, they all brought me some okazu, you know. So I made the rice for them, and any spare time, I went into the compound to talk to POWs. And I used to trade things, cigarettes for tsukemono and stuff that we never get.

SY: So you were kind in charge of getting food for the guys.

FO: Yeah, informally, informally.

SY: Yeah. So you were busy doing all of that plus doing a little bit of the translation. So did you ever feel like, was it a problem being Japanese, talking to other Japanese, I mean, being Japanese American?

FO: Well, you know, the only time I had trouble is when I went, when I joined the 77th Division in Leyte, my intelligence officer... in those days, officers couldn't drive the jeep, you had to take enlisted men to drive. So my officer told me to drive, and we went into some POW camps. And they, I ran into some of these guys that are real namaiki. You know, they're kempeitai... you know what the kempeitai is?

SY: No, what is that?

FO: They're the rough MPs in the Japanese army, and they're rough. So I went into camp, and I was gonna interrogate some of these guys, but they got real namaiki, so I said, "The heck with them."

SY: You could do that, that was okay?

FO: Yeah, 'cause the officer was with me and he says, "Let's get out of here."

SY: So you told the officer what they were saying, and they basically refused to talk?

FO: Yeah, they were saying, "Young kid, what do you know about the army, about Japanese army? You don't know nothing." I tried to talk to them... and they were big bruisers. They were like this, they're all six-foot tall.

SY: The Japanese army?

FO: Yeah.

SY: Wow.

FO: So, you know, they were spoiling for a fight. So we said, "Let's get out," and we got out.

SY: So... and this went on for a short time?

FO: Yeah, it's just a short time.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.