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Title: Floyd Schmoe Interview II
Narrator: Floyd Schmoe
Interviewer: Elmer Good
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 22, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-sfloyd-02-0004

<Begin Segment 4>

EG: Let's go on and talk about the end of the war with the dropping of the atomic bomb and then your work after that, about that.

FS: Well, after August 6th, 1945, [Coughs] my concern shifted entirely to Hiroshima. I was in Hiroshima three or four years ago with my daughter and with Jean Walkinshaw of public television. And I was the first American invited to take part in the August 6th memorial service. And when the mayor, Mayor Hamai of Hiroshima, introduced me, 60,000 people stood up. There was perhaps 10 acres, elbow to elbow, of people at the ceremony. After it was over the mayor took two or three of us who had come from foreign countries to them, to a luncheon at a hotel; and while I was there, I was handed a note saying, "The chief of police wants to see you." I think maybe I told you this before. Well, anyway, I couldn't imagine why the chief of police wanted to see me, but I went to his office. He met me with both hands, said, "Schmoe-san, thirty-five years ago you built a house for me and my family. We're still living in it, but this is the first chance I've had to tell you, 'thank you.'"

EG: Now, that's a terrific story, but tell us how come you built his house.

FS: What?

EG: How did, how you built his house? You didn't tell us about building houses.

FS: What?

EG: You didn't tell us about building houses in Hiroshima.

FS: Well, I thought... I was shocked at the bomb. I thought it was an atrocity, even in warfare. Mass destruction, 30,000 children with no guilt for the Pearl Harbor at all. But I thought if I went back to Hiroshima and said so sorry, so sorry, they would likely have, and rightly show and rightly mobbed me as we would've a Japanese apologizing for Pearl Harbor. But I thought if I went, and with my own money, and my own hands, and built a house for a surviving family, they would understand. And I sent a letter to a few of my friends, and immediately collected four or five thousand dollars and quite a few volunteer workers. On the first trip we had Reverend Emery Andrews, who was the Nisei pastor at the Japanese Baptist Church here, and Daisy Tibbs, a Afro-American woman who headed the Head Start movement in the Seattle public schools, and a college student from the University of Arizona who was about 6 feet tall and red hair -- we called her "Pinky" -- and we took a ship to Japan, the President Wilson. The mayor of Hiroshima was in Honolulu on his way somewhere, and he knew we were coming. And he came aboard the ship to meet us and welcome us, and he couldn't find us. We weren't first class nor second class, we were traveling steerage with mostly Chinese, some Indian people, returning to the Orient, so he didn't find us. But, we were given a very friendly welcome when we arrived by train from Tokyo, by the mayor and by the Methodist minister, Reverend Tanimoto, Tanimoto. Doesn't seem to be quite the right word. But, anyway, the pastor of a Methodist church in Hiroshima, Tanimoto, who was made quite famous by John Hersey, who wrote in the New Yorker magazine a story about Hiroshima bomb. And we were given bunk space in a shed, temporary shed, which was attached to the gutted ruins of Tanimoto's church. And I guess it was the first morning after we arrived, Mrs. Tanimoto came rushing upstairs, very excited, and said there was a delegation from the provincial office with a message from the emperor, and I said, "Send him up." And I had on only a yukata, a Japanese bathrobe, that came only about to my knees. My legs were bare. And here come three men in more formal morning dress, tails, with a tray on which there was a letter which was too important for them to handle. They brought it on a tray and presented it on a tray. It was a message from the Emperor Hirohito thanking us for coming. And he said -- I don't remember the exact words. I've lost the letter, I think. But, anyway, he said our gesture of offering help to survivors was a... something 'token of peace' to which I, to which... I wish I could remember the words.

EG: Well, the event is the important thing.

FS: -- to which he was in full sympathy of.

EG: Yup. But there aren't many people that get letters from the emperor like you did. The important thing is that you got such a notice from the Emperor.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.