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HM: I wanted to go back again. I'm sorry I'm digressing and everything. But remember I told you that my grandparents took the two younger ones to Wakayama and my father's side, they took the two younger ones back to Hiroshima. So when the war broke out, here you had these two families that are split. Here we have the Hayashida boys and their now newly formed families, and their parents and their younger brothers in Hiroshima. Then here you have the Nishinaka girls and their newly formed families here in the United States, and then their two younger siblings, a sister and brother, in Wakayama. Okay, the grandparents in, when Grandpa Nishinaka went back, he built this like a three story house in the middle of the rice field that looked like, that was partly western and partly Japanese. So toward the end of the war when the bombers were flying by, they saw this huge house in the middle of the rice field. They probably thought it was some dignitary or something and they bombed the place. Okay, so that got rid of his house. So they had to then live in corrugated, what do you call that? Corrugated thingys, tin things and pieces of boxing and things like that. So that's how their life was in Japan. They had it a lot worse than we did. And in Hiroshima, my grandfather and grandmother built this huge farmhouse. It was a typical Japanese huge farmhouse, and it's still standing today. My cousin has remodeled part of it and added on, and it overlooks, it's high on the mountain, and it overlooks Miyajima. On the other side of the hill is Hiroshima city. And so my uncle said he remembers seeing this big flash come when Hiroshima was bombed. Fortunately they were up on the other side of the hill, so they weren't affected by the blast. But again, you look there and you see we were so lucky to be here in America. Their families over there were just suffering and they had no food or anything like that. War is not good. And it pains me because you look at the people in England and France and Germany, all those, Italy... European cities that were bombed and destroyed all during that war. And the United States was not touched, thankfully. People in the United States do not realize, the general public, do not realize how devastating war can be. And it hits everyone. So I just cringe whenever I think there's war anywhere.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.