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LT: Well, you visited Japan again, and in learning more about your Japanese family and taking judo lessons...

GI: Well, when I went to Japan for the first time, I had no idea how long I was going to stay or anything like that. I don't think my cousin did or my uncles did, but I stayed there long enough for my uncle Toshimasa to take me touring around, my cousin Mayumi would take me riding in these old coal-fired trains and out into the wilderness and all that kind of stuff. And then after a month, my uncle Joe said, "Well, Nephew, it's time" -- and all the time, my cousin's translating -- "Well, Nephew, it's time for you to go back to America and make something of yourself." And I thought, well, you know, this living in the lap of luxury, is there any way I could kind of extend this a little bit? So I said, "Gee, can't I learn karate or something?" and they said, "Well, okay, we'll see about that." My thinking, I'm leaving on the plane tomorrow. And so in a couple days, they bring me down to the sitting room, and there's this guy, and they say, "This is Mr. Iwasa from Tokyo. He's going to teach you judo when you go back to Tokyo, he's going to take care of you in Tokyo." And I said okay, so a couple days later I found myself on the first class sleeper car to Tokyo. And Mr. Iwasa, he was my brother's best friend, my brother had studied judo and gotten his black belt and all that sort of thing years before, and they were partners. And so Iwasa-san put me in the same hostel that he lived in. It was in the old area of Tokyo that had not been bombed out, so it was spared from the firestorms, so it was one of these real old-style hotels. And he lived upstairs, and every morning he would take me out and do calisthenics, and he would take me running around the Imperial Palace, and that was a beautiful scene if you could imagine. It was winter and there's a moat that goes around the Imperial Palace, and he would take me to the bridge, and we would stand there and he would say, "Okay, stamp your feet on the bridge and then look down." And then under the ice that was on the moat, you would see hundreds of goldfish just swimming up towards you, and then there'd be this huge gate, maybe thirty feet high and the gate was about, almost two feet thick, and it was just open wide enough for a person to slip through. So we would slip through, and they would follow the path all the way around and come back, and then would deposit me back at home, and he would go to his job as a scheduler for All-Nippon Airways. And I would wait for the old man in the sweet potato cart to ring his bell, and I would go down and I would get my sweet potato for breakfast. Then I would pull out my bigger Pacari's English textbook and I would kind of try to teach myself more Japanese. And then I would just point myself in a different direction every day. Because I had learned that there's this train that goes around Tokyo, and if you know your local station, you only have a to buy a ticket that goes to the next station and you could ride it all day long. So wherever you ended up, you could just hop on and get off at your local station and you'd be home, so you'd never get lost. And that's how I learned most of my, whatever little Japanese I learned while I was in Japan, there, because the storekeepers and all that sort of thing in those days, didn't speak any English. And also when I was staying out in the countryside where nobody spoke English.

But in judo school was a completely different thing. There was a joke -- I was in the international section, and there was kind of a joke that I didn't know. There was this one judo guy from the Japan Times, and he liked to practice his English on the young, innocent international students. And the way he would do that, well, you went out on the dojo, and all the white belts were lined up, and then all the brown belts and the black belts, all in order. So everybody to your right had the right to challenge you to practice, and you could not refuse. Of course, everybody was to my right, so this guy comes up and says, "Would you please allow me to teach you judo?" And I would have to say yes. And then he would proceed to thrash you until you were like a wet dishtowel and you could barely stand up. He would stand you up, "Are you okay?" You would always have to say yes, and then he would thrash you again until you almost could not stand up. And then he would say, "Well, let's go over here and chat a bit," and you would sit down and you're just really compliant at that point, and he would just gab, gab, gab in English about every little thing. And then you'd go back to the showers and then everybody would be laughing, and they'd say, "Oh, I see Mr." -- whatever, "Sato, got you." "What do you mean?" "Oh, well, that was his MO." And so it was stuff like that.

LT: Eventually what did you earn?

GI: Well, on my last day, the clerk took my entry card with my picture on it and he wrote on it, "Ninth kyu," which is the level, and something dan which is the brown belt. And then he explained to me that because I had advanced in two tournaments near the end of my four months there, that they wanted to promote me to brown belt, but they couldn't promote me to eighth kyu because I wasn't quite good enough, so they created a whole kyu just for me. And now, having learned about my relationship to the Shimizu samurai and all that kind of stuff, who I'm sure sponsored my being there in the first place, I don't know if that had a little bit to do with it or if it was all what I had actually had accomplished, it was probably a mix of the two. But yeah, they created a whole ninth kyu for me.

[Interruption]

LT: Gary, in 1970, after spending six months in Japan, after learning about your father's experience during the war, after gaining the brown belt in Tokyo, your uncle gave you some advice. What was that advice?

GI: Uncle Joe? Well, "Go back to America and make something of yourself." And before they would let me leave, my cousin Mayumi came, and as I was having lunch with Uncle Joe, and she says, "There's one more story I have to tell you before you go back to America." And I said, "You know, Mayumi, I have enough story, I have a head full of stories. I don't think I can get another story from you, can't we just save it when I come back?" She says, "No, I have to tell you this story." So she says, "My uncle, the man sitting next to you, was at Hiroshima, a kilometer away from the hypocenter where the bomb exploded." And I looked and I said, "He doesn't look like anybody who was at Hiroshima," and I said, "No, Mayumi, that's not possible. Because on the boat over I read John Hershey's book that detailed everything that happened at Hiroshima, John Hershey's Hiroshima." And she said, "No, no, my father, your uncle, the man sitting next to you, was a high energy physicist during the war, and he was making a laser beam weapon to shoot down the B-29s that were firebombing all our cities for the emperor." And I knew that that part was true, because at New Year's time, my uncle pulled out this large gold leaf calligraphy and said, "This says 'Prosperity in the New Year,' to Uncle Joe from the emperor." So it was written in the hand of the emperor, and I didn't find out 'til maybe 2012 when my brother had gone back and asked our cousins about this Shimizu legacy, that the Shimizu Masamune from the late 16th century, he had committed one of these ritual suicides. And it turned out he didn't have to do it under the way things had worked out, but because he wanted to show his sincerity for having offered to do the seppuku in the first place, although everybody who he was doing it for no longer required it, he went ahead and did it himself anyway. And so that became regarded as one of Japan's history's preeminent acts of that nature. And so whenever, according to my brother, whenever the emperor is in the neighborhood, the emperor himself has to pay homage to my cousin Don, the eldest of the Shimizu clan. So I knew -- I didn't know that part -- but I knew the part about the emperor relationship when she was telling me the story. So it turns out that when the Americans leafletted all the target cities, which I had read about the book, that they had this single weapon that can destroy an entire city in one blast. The army told the people this was just American propaganda, but my uncle being in that community, concluded that, well, the Americans must have gotten the bomb. So at the designated 8:15 a.m. zero hour, he barricades himself in his underground Hiroshima University laboratory. Bomb detonates, he timed it well enough so that he can resurface and avoid the black rain and all that stuff that happens right after that sort of energy is released. And he had prepared instructions, "I'm a highly placed government official. If I'm found alive, you are instructed to provide me with seven full blood transfusions to flush the radiation out of my body," which they did, and that's why I was able to hear the story directly from him forty-five years later.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.