Densho Digital Archive
Friends of Manzanar Collection
Title: Kenji Suematsu Interview
Narrator: Kenji Suematsu
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: April 19, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-skenji-01-0018

<Begin Segment 18>

SY: So when you went, okay, so from the, that little incident you had, he sent you to New Jersey and so you got more training.

KS: I got my photo training there, and I was there, the photo training classes lasted, I think, about two months, and then I, when I came back they immediately reassigned me from Fort Hunter Liggett to Fort Ord to photo lab. They says Hunter Liggett doesn't have a photo lab, so they says, "You go to the Fort Ord official photo lab there." So I went there, I sat at the desk doing all this other stuff, going out on assignments, taking pictures during, they had a case called equipment testing off the shore of, what is that, Fort Ord and, it's not Oceanside. What's that... anyway, this community, the shoreline there, they have a tremendous water break and they were testing this piece of equipment called super duck, and the cutter was to go out on the, beyond the break, and for me to take pictures of super duck going out into the ocean and then take the same pictures coming, for the duck to come in. I said okay, that's, that'll be good. And we had a motion picture camera up on the bank, capturing the same test from the motion picture standpoint. And so my assignment was to go and stand there with a camera on the cutter's going like this [moves hand up and down]. I says, "What you guys eating all these saltine crackers for?" Said, "Well, that keeps their stomach settled." "Ah." Said, "Give me some." [Laughs] Anyway, we stand there, the ocean's going up and down, we're taking pictures as the ducks come, the duck is coming out, and back and forth, back and forth. About five o'clock in the evening when the sun is about going down they says, "This is gonna be the last one." And then from the shoreline I could see all these officers going, yeah, take the last trip out. I says, "This is gonna be fun on this one." So I'm taking pictures, the motion pictures also got their camera running, this thing is coming in and these waves are getting bigger. He hit the first wave coming in and hit it, starts to slide over, and the second wave hit him right broadside and that thing just rolled and rolled and rolled in the ocean. And we're getting pictures from the bank and he's getting pictures over there, and all we see is, and they're seeing the film and sees all these officers' heads bobbing out of the water. [Laughs] And that poor super duck sat out there for months and months and months, and they tried, the engineers tried to get it out and everybody else tried to get it out. They had the marines out there, the scuba crew out there with the cable and the tow trucks and everything, trying to get it out. I think about half a year or three quarters of a year later, there was a captain or some officer that says, "They're just not doing anything right." He went out there by himself. I don't know how he managed it, but he got the cable out there and got the thing anchored and hauled it out.

So that was an interesting thing, but from there, from the Fort Ord, that was about several months I used all my techniques of photo, photography, cargo planes and all that sort of thing. I used all the background I learned in school. And then about thirteen months before my discharge period they said, "We need a guy to go up to Alaska to replace a guy that's getting discharged. You're going." [Laughs] I said okay. I mean, I only had thirteen months to go. I went up there and no longer did I unpack my bag and I was in the first meeting in the session there, he says, "The person that's getting discharged is our camera repairman, so we actually need a camera repairman. We don't need another cameraman." Said, "You go." I went back to New Jersey. It was still summer out there, so it was okay. So I went back to New Jersey, took another two months of camera repair training, came back, and that's about the time when the weather starts to get cold. And I spent the whole winter up there taking pictures of army testing equipment, uniforms, guns, whatnot, and sixty below to seventy below zero. My job was to keep the cameras working and recording all the tests.

SY: So you really learned a lot there.

KS: I learned on the, on the...

SY: On the job.

KS: An actual, actual doing things. And I had fun. I mean, I looked at it as having fun and gaining knowledge and experimenting with things that I've already basically learned, to apply it to more advanced stuff. And when they were taking pictures of, I mean when they were testing the howitzer, it's a 105 howitzer, the bullet is about this big, and inside the barrel it has a landing groove to make it spin. Our picture, I had to take pictures of the landing groove to show that it doesn't crack when it's shooting at sixty below zero, that when they fire something that these landing grooves don't crack or chip or things like that, 'cause that can blow up the barrel. So he says, the sergeant says, "Well, how you gonna go about doing that?" I said, "Well, that's easy enough. Give me a piece of cardboard." [Laughs] So I made a little bracket, cut out a cardboard that holds a photo lamp, and put a disc on the front end with a very small slit so the light can leak off to the side, and says, "Now run this down to the breach end, and you stand up..." was it a breach end or the upper end? No, "You stand on the muzzle end, and you stand down at the breach and hold onto the cable and pull the lamp down at this pace, one, two, very slowly." It's what we call light paning. You leave the camera up there with the shutter open, and as it comes out the light that, a little bit of light leaking out lights up the edges and it keeps going down, down, down until you reach the end of the barrel, then you shut off the camera. It worked out beautifully. [Laughs]

SY: That's amazing.

KS: So these are, these are the things I was having fun with, enjoyed. And we had also radiation test scopes. All the other test organizations, they use to write a report for this scope had used their technical illustrator to illustrate the scope, the scale on it, and where the needle was. We did one better. We took the actual scope and the actual, and took a photograph of the actual retical and where the needle was, and that showed up in parenthesis and I got a report back later, somebody wrote a comment back later, says, "Your report," our report, "was the only report that was photographed." All the rest are done by the drafting department. [Laughs]

SY: Wow. That's great. So you had a, just a natural ability to do these things.

KS: That's, that's part of how we grew up. Use what you got, learn how to get the most out of it.

SY: Interesting. Yeah, because when you don't have a lot, right, you...

KS: When you don't have nothing, you learn to do something with nothing. I mean, going back, this is where my father's talent was too. We didn't have toys like everybody else when we were growing, when we were four years old, five years old, nothing to really play with. And we had these, he had these canned sardines -- you remember they'd come in an oval, sort of an oval shaped can? -- we'd get two of those, after you eat the sardines you get two of those, put a little block in the middle, and put a little cab on the back, and you got a tractor. That's what we played with. [Laughs]

SY: Wow. Creative, though. Very creative, your father was very creative too.

KS: But see, that's part of knowledge, that, what you observe and what you learn to do yourself.

SY: Right, right.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.