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TI: And based on, and after you -- I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit, but then after you finished electronics school, you were assigned to Japan?

MF: Yeah, Fukuoka.

TI: But before you left, you had a brief conversation with your grandmother.

MF: Yeah. [Laughs]

TI: I just wanted to talk about that. So here you are, you're finished with basic training, your electronics school, and you're getting ready to go to Japan. And you're back home and you're talking to your grandma. What did she tell you?

MF: She basically told me not to bring back a Japanese wife. And I told her, "Don't worry, I'm never going to get married, I'm a bachelor." [Laughs]

TI: Why do you think she said that? Because at that point, there was someone else in the family that had a German war bride.

MF: Yeah, my uncle Martin had a German war bride. Well, there was my father and Uncle Jimmy had fought in the Pacific, and I think mainly that's most likely why.

TI: Now at this point, was it kind of common for there to be Japanese war brides? I mean, was that something in your grandmother's mind that, oh, a lot of GIs would come back...

MF: I don't think so. I don't think I've ever met anybody... I don't remember meeting any Japanese before I went to Japan.

TI: That's interesting. All right, and we'll come back to that later, because later on your grandmother meets Tsuchino. So this is about, what, 1955, '56?

MF: '56.

TI: So 1956, you go to post-occupation Japan. So the war ended about ten years earlier, the occupation period, the formal occupation period lasted until about 1952.

MF: '52 is when the peace treaty was signed.

TI: Peace treaty. So at this point, Japan is an independent country. So tell me your impressions of Japan when you got there.

MF: It was, well, when I found out I was going to Japan and stuff, thinking about it, it was kind of looking forward to it. It was mysterious and stuff. And I can remember... in fact, the trip over, I tell people this thing. (I'd say) I went to Japan by air, and (I'd say), "It took me longer to go to Japan than it took Neil Armstrong to go to the moon. And people look at me like I'm nuts, kind of thing. But it really did. We left Travis Air Force Base, and I don't remember the aircraft I was on the first trip over. It's one of those ones it looks like very small wings and a big body and stuff like that, and it was a strictly military plane. We left Travis Air Force Base and we flew to Honolulu. And the flight took about fourteen to fifteen hours, and it was made in maybe eighteen thousand foot, so you went (through) all the weather and stuff like that. Then when we got to Honolulu, it would take them five or six hours to go ahead and service the aircraft and do all the stuff, so they took us off and fed us and things like that. And then we'd go to Wake Island, another fourteen or fifteen hours. Then on the ground another six, seven eight hours or whatever, to service the airplane and stuff like that. Then another, to Haneda, another fourteen, fifteen hours. So it actually took three days to go to Japan. And when I got into Japan, we landed in Haneda, and they took us over to Tachikawa. I think it was Tachikawa at the time. An then basically I went down to Fukuoka.

TI: And when you got to Fukuoka, that was probably maybe, well, you tell me, when was the first chance you got to walk around the streets of Japan?

MF: I really don't remember. I remember when they were taking us to Tachikawa, first impression, and I was watching -- we were in a bus and I was watching outside -- and all of the buildings were wood. And they may be two story buildings and stuff like that. Now, this is Tokyo, streets of Tokyo, and we had just these wood buildings and stuff, and I was just watching. It was just like a small old town and stuff like that, and that was my first kind of impression of the thing, just small villages and stuff like this.

TI: But you came from New York, which was huge.

MF: Oh, yeah.

TI: But Tokyo even back then was still, millions of people lived in Tokyo.

MF: Oh, yeah, but remember what happened. A lot of Tokyo was bombed out and burned down. And when they first built it, they didn't build brick buildings, they built good houses two stories high, you can't build much more than two or three stories out of wood, see. And that's what you'd, so all the streets, there'd be shops and stuff like that.

TI: Well, you make it down to, I guess, the Itazuki...

MF: Itazuki, yeah.

TI: Near Fukuoka. So tell me a little bit about what you were doing down there. What was your role?

MF: Well, I was a radar tech, and I was assigned to an early warning site called Suburi Yama, and it's a site that's up on a mountain just west of Fukuoka. In fact, if you go down there, almost any place you can see the thing, the radar was there. And so what happened is we were maintaining search radars.

TI: And when you were down in Fukuoka, from your memoir you had time to visit the city there. So describe that, what was that like?

MF: Well, Fukuoka, at least the military base there, the military base was kind of a split base. The Itazaki air field, which was the air strip which is now Fukuoka International Airport. And then there was an administrative annex which was in Kasuga town... Kasugabaru, Shirakiba in that area there. And we spent most of our time down there because that was what serviced our detachment up on the hill, so when we came down from the hill, we'd go ahead and go there. And then there was a train that ran from there to downtown Fukuoka.

TI: And what kind of interactions did you have at this point with the Japanese?

MF: Well, there were some Japanese people that worked up at the site, and of course, we'd go out drinking and stuff like that, and we'd go to Fukuoka and stuff and you'd see all the Japanese people and stuff like that. And it was basically, my impression is they were very friendly. You'd go downtown, it's almost just like being in any city here. They'd just go about their business, kind of ignore you.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.