<Begin Segment 37>

AI: Well now, before we skip ahead to that, lots of things happened in 1945. Because, of course in August, Hiroshima was bombed.

KM: Yes.

AI: How did you hear about that?

KM: Well, it was word of mouth. We didn't have any radio or anything like that. And at that time my father, [Laughs] he says, "That's just an old rumor." He says, "That can't be." And then even when President Roosevelt died, he wouldn't believe it that he committed suicide because Japan was winning. You know this was generally, you know, the Isseis still hung on to. They were in America, and they were in camp and everything, but they still had way in the back of their mind they were pulling for Japan, that Japan has never lost a war.

AI: And so they had rumors that Japan was --

KM: Yeah rumors, and so that's the rumors that we picked up. But then we said that how could the little island, Japan fight against the great big America? But, well we never talked about who's gonna win, or who's gonna lose, [Laughs] 'cause that would become a kind of a controversy with each other and... some families even had an argument, too.

AI: Well, when you finally did hear about the bombing, the atom bomb, and both your family and Jack's family, being from the Hiroshima-ken, how did they take that news?

KM: Well, they didn't know who got killed or anything until after all this passed and the letters started coming. And then we found out that different ones of our relatives, how they had perished in that atom bomb. And 'course, when we went back in (1967) to visit them for the first time, then our uncle's only daughter, and then like my side, I had one uncle that was an artist, and he was teaching art in school, and they had all perished in this atom bomb. And how hard it was for... and then one of my friends said that they couldn't find her mother. And then this Otagawa, that's where the bomb was centered on, and she said she went there and picked up, and looked all over and tried to see what, which was the closest to her mother's remains and picked it up. And she herself had to bury her, and how hard it was. And so we heard all these stories and how -- and then my aunt was still living where she had a baby on her back. And her back was nice, but all the rest of the body were burned. Her skin was still in keloids, or whatever, and she was still going back and forth to the doctor. And so hearing all those stories, and then going to the museum and seeing it, it was awful. And we saw that museum in the last day in Japan in ('67). And on the way home we stopped in Hawaii and we saw Pearl Harbor. I tell you, war is just awful. I mean it just did something to us. And we saw all those names that perished. No matter which way you see it, Japan or America, it's just, it's just awful. I just said, "Oh, I don't know." We just kind of cried. What they had gone through, you know.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.