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MN: And so from Yokohama, how did you get to Hiroshima?

MT: Train. They had trains once in a while, and they let us on there.

MN: What was your relatives' reaction when you showed up in Hiroshima?

MT: They were shocked. They didn't expect us, and all of a sudden my mother just opened the door and, hey, my brother's dead. So they didn't say much. I still remember that. They just looked at my mother and father and then they just looked down. "Why didn't you let us know?" That's the first thing my mother said. "If you'd let us know, I wouldn't come back." They didn't let us know, so they thought he was still alive, and they were counting on him.

MN: And then you shared earlier that your paternal grandfather wanted your father to take care of the entire family?

MT: Yeah, the brothers and sisters that's married with kids, take care of 'em all. And he told 'em no. They're a different family, they got to go on their own. It's going to be bad enough to just feed Grandmother and Grandfather and the one unmarried sister, and then there was four of us. And man, Grandfather wouldn't listen to that. He said, "You're the oldest son and you're going to have to take care of 'em." And my father kept saying, "No, no." So Grandfather told my dad, "Then you get out." Because he's going to let the others live there anyway. So one snowy day, we just packed up and left. I still remember that day. It was snowing. Over there, you don't have horses, the only thing that moves the cart is human manpower. You pulled it yourself. We had to move it about a mile where we rented a house. But that was one of the better things we did in Japan, when we moved out.

MN: At that time, what did Hiroshima look like?

MT: It was flat. Well, from Hiroshima station to you know where the atomic bomb was dropped? It was flat except for a few concrete -- not concrete, yeah, concrete buildings. If you go into Japan, there's a Solo Building. That's real close to the center, that was left. Then there was a fire station about, oh, gee, about a mile away. Those were the only two that I can remember that was there. All the rest of it was just flat because the way they built the thing was not steel reinforced. Only one that was left was the steel reinforced one, rest of 'em all went flat. So all the people that... well, to show you how bad it was, they called it bomb shelter. Only thing it was in Hiroshima is they dug a hole, they took pine trees and put it on top and put small branches on top and then put dirt on top of that. A bomb shelter like that? What can it stop? Nothing. That's why all those people inside, they burned to death. Those bodies were there for how many years before they dug it out and really got rid of it.

MN: So when you walked around, were there still a lot of bodies lying around?

MT: Oh, yes, at the beginning, yeah. And like I say, it took so many years before they really got it cleared up.

MN: Weren't you afraid of radiation sickness?

MT: What's that?

MN: Radiation sickness?

MT: Oh, so they said. They said for a hundred years you're not going to be able to walk around here because it's going to kill you. We were walking around there when? Well, like I said, in December, we got off in Tokyo, we went to Japan about a couple of weeks later, I mean, to Hiroshima. We were walking around in Hiroshima after that, "Hey, let's go take a look and see what's it's like." It didn't kill us, I guess, or we're too dumb to learn.

MN: What did you think when you saw what had happened to Hiroshima?

MT: Well, it was sickening. I thought, "What did we come back here for?" There was railroad tracks that come from trains, from the train station, and it comes around and it crosses over near where the bomb was dropped. There was a concrete bridge. They actually moved the tracks, instead of crossing over like that, it was apart, about eight, ten inches apart. The blast had actually moved the whole structure over. 'Cause one side was onto the bank of the river, so this other side was long 'cause it came from the bank all the way to the other side. So when the bomb hit, this side here moved. So it just moved about that much. So people came from the train station, got off, jumped off, and run across the bridge and get on the streetcar that came from the other way, those people got off, ran across the bridge, and then they went back. They just came up to there, back, back and back. That's how they could get to the train station to the Hiroshima station. If they wanted to go toward Tokyo like that, they had to come across that way. There was no other way they could get there.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.