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gky: When you went to Burma, one of the main things you did was interrogation. What was an interrogation like? For example, do you remember your first interrogation?

RT: Yes. Our first interrogation was conducted on a army private, a Japanese army private, who was wounded and captured by the British and we interrogated him. My partner and I interrogated him. He had very little information. He was a private. He didn't have a diary, he apparently was not too educated. He knew very, very little. We interrogated him for hours, but since he was the first prisoner captured by the British in Imphal, and we got very little out of that individual. We had him in a barbed wire enclosure and in a small hut there, and we wired the hut and when we captured the next prisoner, we put the two together and we listened to their conversations, and even then, he had very, very little information of any military value. The only thing they talked about was the loss of morale. The morale was not high at that time in the Japanese army.

Another prisoner, I had only one Japanese prisoner who asked me whether I was a Nisei, second-generation Japanese, and I was curious as to why he was asking. No other Japanese ever asked me that question. He said that his name was Nakata, and we had a roster and we looked at the roster and there was no Nakata. However, there was a Tanaka, and this guy Tanaka was a higher-ranked individual than Nakata. And what the individual did was Nakata, when turned upside down, when you put the Ta on top it becomes Tanaka. So what he did, he reversed his name and reversed the Japanese characters and was passing, trying to pass himself off as Nakata. Also, we had some prisoners who tried to conceal their identity by giving you a famous Japanese actor's name, for example, Takata Kokiji. Takata Kokiji in those days was a well-known Japanese actor, movie actor, and when you first ask this individual, "What is your name?" He says, "Takata Kokiji." And so I said to him, I said, "How is your Shochiku movie company doing these days?" And that took him by surprise because I knew who Takata Kokiji was, and...

gky: Can you think of any other anecdotes that you might have about an interrogation? Anyone that was particularly difficult or particularly memorable, where the prisoner was particularly memorable or told you something interesting?

RT: Yeah. We had one prisoner during the siege of Imphal, there was a question of whether or not the Japanese were going to overwhelm us. All they took, the British intelligence told us that if the Japanese brought in another battalion of troops, it might turn the balance of the battle there, and we had just captured a prisoner who was wounded, and was in pretty bad shape, and the major in charge, the British major in charge, asked me to interrogate the prisoners to determine whether or not there were any new units coming, had come into the area. I told the major that the guy was in such poor shape that if I questioned it, he would probably die, and the major said to me, "Well, that may be so, but our need for the information is greater than the life of one Japanese soldier, so interrogate him." So I interrogated the individual and couldn't get any information on any new troops in the area, and he died the next day. But in time of war, you have to do what must be done.

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