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gky: What do you think is the difference in the occupation of Japan by Japanese Americans and Caucasian or non-Nisei Americans compared to a country where it was an invading nation going in who did not have the ethnic, shared ethnicity?

Gordon Y: I think if the Japanese Americans had not participated in the capturing of Japan, fighting Japan and providing the intelligence to help win the war, shorten the war, then the aftermath, the occupation, and not having a Japanese language speaking capability, it would have been extremely difficult to bring the country around, the reconstruction of the country, which had to be done. Consider it did not take Nisei folks, even though they'd never been in Japan, it didn't take them that long to understand the culture because they had gotten the rudiments of it living in America with their first-generation parents. So when we went into, second generation, when we went into Japan and occupied it, then we were able to learn the culture much quicker because we just understood lot of things right away as soon as we saw it, that it simplified the process of the reconstruction. Without the Nisei there, I think the reconstruction would have been much more lengthy, difficult. We were able to provide the bridge that allowed this to happen quicker.

gky: What is the most memorable experience you had while in the MIS?

Gordon Y: I guess capturing the factories made me understand what the war was all about. Made me understand how extensive the war was with Japan. I remember going down to Hiroshima in the early part of 1946, it was totally leveled. The atom bomb ripped out twelve miles, twelve mile circle, it just leveled the city of Hiroshima. And I went down there to look at it because I had business down there, for this kind of business, and saw the epicenter of the bomb. It's still that way today, it's a shrine to peace. It was pretty awesome. You say what was the most memorable thing? I think having the opportunity -- "opportunity" is a bad word -- but having a chance to experience the aftermath of the war, help Japan reconstruct, that was pretty, probably... as I look back today, that was a very memorable time.

[Interruption]

gky: You were in Japan when the peace treaty was signed in San Francisco?

Gordon Y: No, it was after that.

gky: You weren't in the MIS, but you were in Japan.

Gordon Y: Oh, when the peace treaty was signed. I was thinking of the surrender. The peace treaty was signed in 1951, I was in Japan.

gky: What was your feeling? By then you were out of the army, but you still had associations --

Gordon Y: Yeah, essentially doing the same kind of work. I was involved in that work for five years in MacArthur's headquarters until the peace treaty, '46 to about '51, until the Korean War. That's when I switched out. After the peace treaty, I think that was a memorable occasion in the sense that we all felt that one part of what we'd been doing in Japan was over with. That was the, getting Japan, starting to get Japan back on its feet. That phase, the surrender of the country and foregoing the reparations program, that was a major event to many of us, that we had gotten over the defeat and the surrender of the country and now we're starting on something else, which was the reconstruction of Japan, which began in the late '40s and especially after the peace treaty in 1951. Then the Korean War broke out, and we had intended to be in Japan only maybe say five years, working there. And when the Korean War broke out, we got involved in the war, Korean War.

gky: Although that part would be really interesting to me, that's not the focus that I want.

Gordon Y: Yeah, I understand.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.