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gky: You went to New Delhi; what did you expect to do when you went there?

RT: We arrived in New Delhi, India, from Miami. And when we got to New Delhi, we expected to go to work in some kind of a unit but, to our surprise when we got there, there was no place for us to work. They had no office space, so we had to work at night after the daytime crew finished their work. So for the initial several months there, we worked always at night. One of the offices that we worked in belonged to Commodore Markey. Commodore is a one-star admiral during wartime, and he is a famous producer in Hollywood because he was married to Hedy LaMarr, and he was a very meticulous person, and if you even left a piece of scrap paper or anything after you used his desk at night, he would let you know about it the next day. He was very, very meticulous.

gky: How did that make you feel? Here you're working in the dead of night, and everybody else is doing their work during normal hours, did you realize what you were doing? Was that supposed to a secret?

RT: Oh, I knew that the work we were doing was secret. Actually, we were assigned to a unit called the "Joint Intelligence Collection Agency," and we were translating Japanese documents at night there, and the only apprehension that I had was that it was strange that they rushed us by air to get there, and when we got there, they have no real office space for us. It was hard to understand why all the rush to get there.

gky: This is the end of 1943?

RT: This is October 1943, right.

gky: What were the -- did you translate any diaries as well? I know there were a lot of diaries that came off of dead soldiers bodies.

RT: Yes. We translated diaries. However, the diaries we translated were mostly in the battlefield. The documents we translated at New Delhi were more of a strategic value, and the diaries are more value to the combat people in a tactical zone, because the Japanese soldiers were not given training in security, and they wrote down everything that they saw, their feelings, they even talked about where they were going to next, who their commanders were; they had no discipline as far as writing diaries. The U.S. Army would not permit their soldiers to take a diary into a combat zone. But the Japanese were different. We gained a great deal of information from these diaries.

gky: Would you explain a little bit about the difference between tactical and strategic information?

RT: Tactical information is that information which is required immediately in a combat zone to fulfill your mission. Strategic information is that information which relates to what the country may be planning, or more about the industrial powers, their military buildup and so forth. It's a long range information. It's not of immediate value. It's information that they used for bombing say a Japanese city where they know that there's an aircraft plant there, or an ammunition plant somewhere. There's a difference. Tactical is that information that's immediately required in combat, and strategic information is that information that would be of use at a later date.

[Interruption]

gky: Okay, this is tape two with Roy Takai on October 20, the year 2000. Roy, what do you mean when you say documents?

RT: Documents -- documents could be maps, it could be orders, military orders, it could be a roster of the unit including officers, and enlisted men. It could be diaries, it could mean that's about all, I guess.

gky: Do you remember anything in particular in translating a diary, what it said to you? Anything particularly touching, touching passages in any diaries?

RT: Well, there were many diaries where the Japanese soldier would be reflecting on his absence from home, and he's wondering what the family would be doing in Japan, and what the children, how the children are growing up, and so forth. It was kind of odd to us because, as I previously stated, the U.S. Army does not permit diaries to be taken in a combat zone, and there's a good reason it, because when you write things in the diary, especially about your fellow officers or the unit, you're giving away much information when those diaries are captured and translated. For example, when they talk about a certain officer, say, Captain Tanaka of such-and-such organization, that information is very valuable because gives us information which we can build to determine what kind of forces are opposing us, what size unit. The rank will tell us what size unit. The name of the individual will tell us exactly what company, so forth. It's strange to me why the Japanese would allow writing of diaries in a combat zone.

gky: Okay, Ken is going to adjust something. How did that make you feel reading someone's diary? I mean, that's very personal.

RT: Yeah. That's very personal, how reading somebody's diary is very personal, but you have to remember this is a combat zone, and you're not concerned about whether you're violating somebody's feelings. That person probably is no longer living in many cases. In many cases, diaries are picked up from dead soldiers. There, if you had such a concern, you would never be able to look at a diary, but this is in combat, so it's an exception.

gky: Did you feel that because they were Japanese people's diaries that you could get a sense of where they were at home, or get a feeling for them that made them closer to you?

RT: Well, I never got the feeling that these people were close to me. I knew that they were Japanese, that they were people from the country of my parents, but it never occurred to me that I should feel close to me. They were my enemy. They were shooting at us. They were killing Americans and they were killing our allies, and unless -- it might be different because I had no brothers or close relatives who were in the Japanese military fighting against us as far as I knew.

gky: So it really didn't make any difference to you that you and the Japanese had the same face? It was not a matter of loyalty, does not have to do with a matter of race?

RT: Right.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.