<Begin Segment 7>

RK: And about that little white sheet of paper, you want me to tell you about that?

gky: Sure, tell me about that.

RK: You're going to edit this anyway, right?

gky: It's going to be edited.

RK: Anyway, Sid and those three other fellows, friends, buddies of his, came in and brought a cardboard box with the flaps all torn off, you know, like Campbell's soup cardboard box, empty one full of documents; dropped it on the ground floor there in my tent and said, "Okay, Rusty, here's some work for you." And they walked off. So a white sheet of paper, you know, about half the size of that sheet there, white one, just like the ones we use here in the office, too. And as if it had floated to the floor right here in this room, just clean, clear, you know, it's not stained or anything. All the other documents were weathered, you know, they got little dabs of mud or blood or both on it. So I was curious. I picked it up. It's the first thing I picked up, and here is a bit of information that surprised me. It had a sketching done by, you know, these pencils -- half of it's red and half of it's blue, or whatever. It had those little red and blue marks on it and it showed sketches of a combat position and a few characters. The red indicates the enemy, the blue indicates the Japanese. And it shows the position and the kanji says that they're going to attack on a certain day, at a certain time. I looked at it. Well, this is tomorrow. So I took it to Captain Timson. I was excited, you know. I thought this was great, but I tried to act nonchalant, you know. I says, "Say, they're going to attack this position tomorrow at eight o'clock, I mean ten o'clock." And he looks at it and he knew immediately, right away, where that position was. He says, "We only got 160 men up there, but they can't attack us. How could they attack us?" He says, "The main force, you, yourself, Rusty, gave us the information that powerful, famous Japanese 17th Army is located down south. That's over 20 miles down south. How they going to attack us by ten in the morning?" And he had me stumped there for a second, for a moment. Then, I thought, "Yeah, but this is only two o'clock in the afternoon. Ten o'clock tomorrow morning, that's -- two to two is 12 and another eight hours, that's 20 hours. Not only that, they could already be half way up here, right? Or maybe they're already up here preparing to attack. They wouldn't arrive too early because they would be detected, you see." But, anyway, I told him, "You know, my job is to get you the information. What you do with it is up to you." You know, I was tempted to say, "You can stick it where the sun doesn't shine for all I care," you know. But in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't say that. That would have been a little bit too harsh. But the next morning at ten o'clock, they attacked right on the dot. And when I heard that, I had a grin from ear to ear. I thought, "Now he can't come to me and say, 'I told you so'."

[Interruption]

gky: How did Captain Timson prepare for the attack?

RK: Well, after I gave him the information, it was not for me to follow up on it or anything. That wasn't my duty, you know. They take care of everything. But I imagine that he had probably at least a battalion to reinforce that group of, that detachment of 160 men.

gky: So, a battalion is a thousand?

RK: Huh?

gky: A battalion is a thousand?

RK: It's about a thousand, yeah.

gky: Did you translate any diaries?

RK: No, I didn't. I looked at -- in fact, I didn't get many diaries, maybe only one or two. I got a lot of like pay, we found a lot of pay books and things like that because we had a lieutenant, a captured lieutenant, who was what the Japanese army call an intendants officer. That's a payroll, pay officer. You know, dollar, I mean yen coins and Japanese currency and pay books. And I used to give, I gave the pay books away to the Australian soldiers as souvenirs, you know.

gky: When you went to Bougainville, you told me the story about how you got off the ship, you know, those rope ladders, and how you couldn't reach from one rope to the place where your foot was supposed to go. Can you tell me about that?

RK: No, no. You know those -- when you're climbing that rope ladder, it's a long ways down to the pier. It's surprisingly a large ship, you know, and the square is only about say 18 inches. I'm just guessing, of course, about 18 inches. But when I step on the rung of the rope ladder, it sinks down like that, and my left foot, for example, is way up here, so I can't get my left foot off because it's on the rung of that ladder, that rope ladder, and I can't get it off. So I have to pull myself up so that I can release my left foot. And finally, I managed to do it in such a way that I wouldn't have that problem and I managed to get down. But it's kind of scary in a way, because the pack, the backpack is very heavy. It weighs, I would say, way over 40 pounds, and also have a rifle on the back too, you know, which makes everything very clumsy. And I realized that time is when I heard sometime in the past that when you're way up high and you're climbing down, don't look down. And when I looked down and saw that, I recall that warning, you know, that admonition. So after that, I just slowly managed to get down to the pier.

gky: Was not being able to get, you know, not being able to reach from one to another, was that a common, common or was it just 'cause you're...

RK: No, because I'm short.

gky: Were Japanese POWs easy to interrogate?

RK: Huh?

gky: Were Japanese POWs easy to interrogate?

RK: Oh, yeah. Very simple. They would, it was, they would tell everything.

gky: Why?

RK: Well, the Japanese are not supposed to be captured, so they're not, what would you say -- they're not taught to withhold information because they're not supposed to become prisoners in the first place. They're supposed to die for their country. So, but, I feel that despite that, even if they were taught to withhold information, there would have been at least a few who would have given information anyway because they were prisoners of war and they probably felt that they would never get back to Japan, and, or if they had a chance they would kill themselves anyway, or whatever, you know. But, we, the treatment they received was so, what would you say, so compassionate, you know. We gave them these Red Cross, what the term is, I can't recall the term now. But the Japanese would call them comfort bags. The box has got a piece of fruitcake, cigarettes, candy, a little hand towel, toothpaste, and whatever, toothbrush, things like that. And I'd give one -- I only got one or two prisoners at a time, so even if those comfort boxes were meant for Australian soldiers, I'd give one to the prisoners, you know. One Australian sergeant did tell me, "Say that's for us." I said, "Well, it doesn't matter if it's for you." I said, "We got extras anyway." So I'd give it to them. They wouldn't say anything to me. I was a Japanese American from the U.S. forces, and they, I guess they regarded me with a little more -- what's the word -- tolerance, or whatever, you know.

gky: Were they were ever suspicious of you because you were Japanese American?

RK: No. I didn't feel that at all.

gky: Did they treat you as an American or as a Japanese? I mean, where...

RK: No, they treated me as an American.

gky: So, you were attached to the Australians for a long time.

RK: Seven months.

gky: Did your opinion of the Australians, or did your desire to be, did you still want to be attached to an American unit?

RK: Oh, yeah.

gky: Why would you normally be -- interrogate only one prisoner rather than two?

RK: What was that again?

gky: Why would you normally interrogate only one prisoner at a time?

RK: Well...

gky: And why were you interrogating these two prisoners together?

RK: Well, actually, see, they were both in the same outfit, both artillerymen. So when I asked one question, I would like the other fellow to corroborate that, or, or if I were to ask a question and this fellow was rather vague about his answer, I would like the other one, ask the other one if he knew. I guess I was a little, too, in a way, you know, because I like to get everything done real quickly and get the information as quickly as possible, because after that I would type it all out, you know.

gky: That's right. You had a beat-up typewriter that you carried around with you.

RK: Yeah, Grant Ichikawa gave it to me. He said, "Take this typewriter." I'm glad he did.

gky: Yeah, but it was extra weight. I mean, you talk about that two pounds for the artillery, this was...

RK: Yeah, except I didn't have to carry that around because I just set it in my tent.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.