<Begin Segment 20>

FO: And then I was assigned to the 77th Division, and the smart guys went to military government. And guys like me who were weak in Japanese, we went to the infantry when we got into Japan. So when we went to Japan, I was with the 77th Division and we went into Hokkaido, and we were the kingpins in Hokkaido.

SY: And Hokkaido, was there a reason that they sent people there?

FO: Well, that's a big island, and we occupied all the land in Japan, the army did. And our main duty, our main duty was to send back these forced laborers that the Japanese had brought over from Korea and China to do all the forced labor in the coal mines and stuff like that. And our duty was to send them back. Well, when we got there, I was assigned, I was assigned to the regiment, and I was assigned to the regimental headquarters, and the regimental headquarters assigned me on all these details to send these people back to China and Korea. And so we used to go with this company, we used to go to all these mining companies and oil companies and stuff, you know, where all these Koreans and Chinese laborers were working. Because before we got there, after the war, they rioted and they tore up the towns, their little towns, because there was no police force or anything.

SY: The local people rioted?

FO: No, these guys did.

SY: The ones that were...

FO: Forced laborers.

SY: ...released from forced laborer.

FO: Yeah.

SY: I see.

FO: So we had to go in there and calm them down and ship 'em home.

SY: Wow. They must have been very angry. I mean, when you interviewed them --

FO: Yeah, they were angry. They were happy to see us for a while, but afterwards, they found out that they're gonna be sent home, and they wanted to really tear up the town.

SY: They were angry at the Hokkaido people. And you interviewed them in Japanese?

FO: Yeah.

SY: And so a lot of them were Japanese-speaking.

FO: Yes. And then there was one Chinese guy in the company that I went out with, so he would try to speak Chinese to these Chinese guys. Well, he spoke Cantonese, and I think the prisoners spoke Mandarin, so they couldn't communicate. The only way they could communicate was in writing. So he's there writing Chinese, and me, I stood next to the company commander and he told me, "You tell these guys to do this, do that," so I told the Japanese guys.

SY: But it sounds as if you probably heard some pretty horrible stories if they were being forced...

FO: Well, the thing is, yeah, but you don't know what to believe. One guy will say something and everybody says, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But the thing is, we weren't prepared to go and talk the civilian language, because we learned nothing but military language and that's two separate languages in Japanese.

SY: I see.

FO: So the colonel and I went into a city jail, and the colonel tells me, "Find out if there are any political prisoners in here." What's a political prisoner? I didn't know the term, I pulled out a dictionary, I looked through, the colonel gave me a disgusted look. So he told them, "Write everything down, all the records, and send it to us," in Sapporo, so that's what they did. But the Japanese jails were real clean. They had big bars like this, wooden bars. And they were real clean, I was surprised.

SY: So did you feel like this was something that was just sort of a formality, to interview these prisoners and then make sure they got back?

FO: Yeah. But the funny thing about the whole thing is later on I found out, after I got home, my brother was in Kure, the town of Kure. He was in the China-India-Burma Theatre, and he went to Shanghai and then he went to Tokyo and then he ended up at Kure. He was accepting all these Chinese and Koreans from the train to put 'em on the boat, and I was putting these guys on the train in Hokkaido. So we compared notes later on, and we had a good laugh.

SY: You might have come across the same people.

FO: Yeah. And some of these gals that went with them were real pretty, real attractive women.

SY: That went with them? Where did they...

FO: Well, they were in Hokkaido, and they went to China and Korea with these guys.

SY: I see, so they left with them.

FO: Yeah.

SY: I see. 'Cause they were, they got to know them during the war somehow?

FO: I guess so. And then, you know, the Japanese, they kind of looked down on you if you associate with the Chinese or Koreans, evidently.

SY: Wow.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.