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gky: So how did you feel about helping the country of your parents' birth in getting it back on its feet economically, socially?

[Interruption]

Gordon Y: I had mixed feelings about, about the different duties that had to be done over there. I think, I think the key word is compassion. You don't like to see people suffer. And when we went in there, we saw a lot of suffering, bad suffering. So we wanted to help out. It was real bad at the beginning. Then after we saw how they suffered during the war, I felt like I wanted to help out. And I saw the industrial wipeout of Japan, so you just... whether they were the same race or whatever, you just don't like to see things like that. So I was glad that I stayed there for several years to help them get back on their feet. And as they say, war is terrible to see it. 'Cause innocent people are suffering. So it worked out that even, I think even though we're the same ethnic heritage, it wasn't so much that, it was more that we just didn't want to see people suffer. Children, old women, really suffered. I used to see them picking up the garbage out of our military mess halls, reusing the coffee, picking up scraps of bread. We saw that for about two or three years until that period was over with and they were able to regrow their rice and get back on their feet, so it took about three years.

gky: It sounds like when you talk to me, it just seems like movies in your mind. You're seeing how terrible it was. Because when you took me to Japan it's always been...

Gordon Y: Real pretty. We have that memory of total deprivation, bad, bad, right after the war when we went in there. So you don't feel like making them pay for what they did. Those guys were all strung up, the Tojos and the war leaders were all killed by then, they were executed. So now you're looking at the populace of a country, and they weren't responsible for the war no more than we are over here. We're not responsible for the war, it's the leaders that cause those kind of conditions. And the leaders were all gone. Some of the Military Intelligence, too, we were talking about this is all military intelligence, many of my friends were interpreters and translators in the war crimes trial, which was another part of SCAP. And they were all at a place called... I think the name of it was Pershing Hall, where they did the war crimes, just like Nuremburg in Germany. And guys that I worked with were assigned over there during the war crimes trials. I was in another part of the headquarters doing the reparations part. And say what did it feel like? Well, it's that I guess you have a lot of compassion for defeated people. And maybe if you say, "Did you feel it more because you're the same race?" I don't know. I think it's a human, it's a person thing. My feeling was, help them get straight again, help them get their country back together.

gky: Did you at any time feel ashamed of being American?

Gordon Y: No. No, you think, "Who started this thing?" No, I never had that kind of feeling, never. Never was ashamed of being American. I think you could take the other attitude. "You lost the war, we're gonna get you now." You could take that kind of attitude, but I didn't feel like that. I saw some of that over there, where the soldiers were really cruel to some of the civilians. But generally speaking, everybody, I think the occupation was carried on with the proper dignity that we need to oversee a defeated nation.

gky: And would you credit that to General MacArthur?

[Interruption]

Gordon Y: I think that General MacArthur was responsible for setting the tone. He did not tolerate American soldiers, number one, or American civilians, number two, which were all in the same group over there, to do things which were bad to the populace. That wasn't why we were there. Our job there was help reconstruct after the war. So there was no feelings of making them pay for something. That was done to the leaders, making the leaders pay, but it wasn't done to the civilian population. And the tone of, all during the occupation, from the end of the war in 1945 to beginning of 1946 which began all of this, the occupation of Japan, there was not, there was not a bad environment. It was unfortunate, it's "we" and "they" in that sense. We had everything, Americans and other claimant nation people who were there, mostly Americans, had everything. We had the PXs, we had the nice housing, we had everything, cars and the gasoline and all of that, and the Japanese had nothing at that time, first couple of years during the occupation. And then it gradually started to change, and then it changed rapidly after the peace treaty.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.