<Begin Segment 26>

EG: Then you came back to America again in 1950. Would that be right?

TM: Well, after that particular job was over, I was assigned to the Ninth Corps headquarters in the northern part of Japan. And I went there and in Sendai they said, "Well, we want to assign you to Eleventh Airborne in Sapporo, northern part of Japan." The Eleventh Airborne Headquarters says, "We're going to assign you to Hakodate, the southernmost port, part of Hokkaido," and there we were going to start processing repatriation or repatriates, the Japanese repatriates from the northern part of Japan. And so beginning about December, latter part of December, close to Christmastime, we had to screen returning Japanese, and we were mainly interested in the military personnel to find out something about the Russian armed forces. And so that was December of '46. And then pretty soon the port in (Okhotsk) Sakhalin froze and the ship couldn't go in there anymore so we were told to go down to southern part of Japan and do the same thing. Start, no, we had to actually start from nothing, repatriation center in Hakata, that's the same as Fukuoka, Japan.

EG: Repatriation, what does this involve? I'm not clear. Is this Japanese soldiers being...

TM: Civilians and soldiers coming back from first northern part of Japan, you know, the Sakhalin because at the end of the war the Russians said, "We want all of Sakhalin." So the Japanese had to go home, come home. And then when we went down to Kyushu about February of '47, the Japanese were still coming back from Dairen, Port Arthur and some other places in China. They were coming back from Manchuria, they were coming back from China, just by the thousands. And, of course, that wasn't the only place. There (in Intario) there was another repatriation center. In Japan seaside, there was another repatriation center, some of the friends of ours went there to do (the same kind of work).

EG: What did you do for them? In these repatriation --

TM: Well, of course, we were, our job was strictly military intelligence. And so we wanted to know what they found out, what they knew about mainly Russians. What kind of weapons they saw, unit, high-ranking officers, what they found out about Russian army. And my job was to make up the questionnaires and have my men do the interrogation. High-ranking officers I did, but they had to do the interrogation and then make a report and I read it and I revised, edited it and we submitted -- I forgot where the report went. But, that was our job.

EG: And then the people being repatriated needed to find a way to wherever in Japan they were wanting to go and get resettled and wish them well.

TM: The civilians, we didn't bother the civilians. Well, there were Japanese government people there where these returnees had to register. And they received a little bit of money, a little bit of food, and they got, I think, a free rail ticket so that they can go home. It was pretty sad.

EG: Uh-huh. I should think. Yeah, the rebuilding of the essentially destroyed country.

TM: Yeah, it was pretty sad. But, well, then my active duty was over.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.