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gky: Let's see, after... you interviewed a lot of people. You've read an incredible amount on this. You read a lot of different kinds of stories of courage, of valor. How does that make you feel when you read about these, these people?

JM: I'm just amazed. For me, sitting in a quiet office surrounded by books and maps, I have the luxury of trying to imagine what it was like. And usually I can't imagine. Somebody like Hoichi Kubo who fought with the 27th Division on Macon in 1943 and then in '44 participated in the invasion of Saipan, he was involved in the combat, and so he knew what was happening on the front lines. He was just as much at risk of getting killed -- [bugle sounds in background] That's our five o'clock bugle. Want to stop for that?

[Interruption]

JM: How do I feel? Sort of a Barbara Walters question. Hoichi Kubo was attached to the 27th Infantry Division. He fought with the same division in three campaigns. On Saipan in the summer of '44 he happened to interrogate a prisoner in the middle of the battle and the prisoner told him that there was going to be a gyokusai in the next couple days. Well, literally translated that means to "smash the jewel." A Caucasian linguist would've probably labored over that for weeks and never really figured it out, or would've looked it up in the dictionary and said, "Huh, what is this?" But Kubo, with his knowledge of Japanese psychology, said, gyokusai, that means they're going to, they're going to put everything in one attack. They're going to throw away everything, their lives, and try to destroy the Americans and drive them back into the sea in one bitter battle. So he interrogated that prisoner and took that information up to the regiment and to division and explained to them that there's an attack coming a day or two from now, and this prisoner had given him the exact time, so the Americans were ready. And it was a fierce battle, but the Americans knew it was coming. They had some warning. If they had not been warned it would've cost hundreds of American lives and turned the tide of that particular battle.

Several weeks later, after the battle, they were in the mop up phase, which could be just as dangerous as the main battle phase as well. They found in many places soldiers and some civilians who were hiding in caves, hiding in bunkers. They had no idea what the Americans were going to do. In fact, well, they knew what the Americans were gonna do, they knew the Americans were gonna torture them and kill them and rape them and mutilate them. They had this whole mindset that the Americans were monsters, so they couldn't surrender. They would rather die than surrender, based on what they'd heard about the American soldiers. So in one particular cave, the Americans found out that there were some Japanese soldiers in that cave who were holding hostage a large number of civilians, so what do you do? They tried calling with loudspeakers. They wouldn't answer. So Kubo volunteered to go in. He took his helmet off because he had been told, he knew that if he poked his head into the cave entrance and they saw a helmet they'd shoot at it right away. An American helmet was different from the Japanese helmet. So he hoped that if he poked his head into the entrance to that cave and they saw a Japanese face they wouldn't shoot, and he was right, so he went down into that cave alone. He had a pistol tucked into the waistband of his uniform. He brought in some food and sat down, introduced himself to the Japanese soldiers, and was quite honest with 'em. He said, "I'm an American soldier." He shared his food with them. He put his pistol out where they could see it and began talking with them, and several hours passed by and his buddies up on the surface had no idea what had happened. All they knew, it was awful quiet and he didn't come back out of that hole again. They didn't hear any shooting. They didn't know what was going on. And after a few hours he crawled back out of the hole again and said, "Hold your fire, they're gonna let 'em go." And the Japanese soldiers let over a hundred civilians go.

Afterwards, the division G2 asked Kubo, "How did you do it?" He said, "Well, I told 'em an old tale that I had learned in Japanese language school, and that was if I'm loyal to the emperor I can't be loyal to my kin. If I'm loyal to my kin I can't be loyal to the emperor." So the Japanese soldiers instantly understood where he was coming from, that he was an American. He might look Japanese, but he was born in America, he was loyal to the American flag, and they respected him. They saw that he respected them, and he explained, "These civilians, there's no reason for them to die. The emperor doesn't want them to die. Let them go." And so they did, and for that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, for that act of bravery. That makes me feel amazed that he would have that kind of courage that he would be able to confront and have a conversation with several Japanese soldiers in this desperate situation and be able to, not just talk himself out of it to protect his own skin, but to protect and save all those civilians and convince the Japanese soldiers that, that civilians didn't have to die for the emperor. So that's a humanitarian act and a great, act of great bravery.

gky: What it sounds like to me is that, you're a historian, you look at things of times past, times that have gone by, and yet what you're describing are very, the very human part of war and very, a very human act that saves lives.

JM: I think you're exactly right. There's almost an intimacy of the battlefield that these Nisei experienced. They didn't have the luxury of treating the Japanese soldiers that they were fighting against as nonhuman creatures. They knew they were human. They knew they had feelings. They read their diaries and letters. Even after the Japanese soldiers had died they could read the soldiers letters and diaries. They cried over some of this stuff. They, if a Japanese soldier wrote a letter to his wife back in a certain prefecture in Japan, why, that Nisei may have relatives in the same village or the same prefecture. It was very, almost intimate. It was personal too, because for the Kibei, they'd been to Japan and they could imagine the suffering that the Japanese people were undergoing, and they didn't like the militarism. Hell, the Japanese people didn't like the militarism. So it was, it was very personal, yeah.

gky: I guess that's where, you don't lose objectivity, but you see things from a different point of view as a historian.

JM: It's hard to be objective about this because the Nisei were not objective when they were fighting. The Nisei put their hearts into this, and they were fighting with their hearts and minds. It was a personal battle to prove their own loyalty, but it was a personal battle to win the war. They wanted it to end. They wanted the suffering to end on both sides. They wanted it to be as quick and as low in casualties as possible. It was really personal for them, more so, I would say, than for the Caucasians who fought.

gky: That's interesting.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.