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gky: What was the most difficult thing for you being in the MIS?

RT: What was the question?

gky: What was the hardest thing for you being in the MIS?

RT: Hardest thing for me in MIS?

gky: Uh-huh.

RT: Well, I think the hardest moment in the MIS was when I visited, with my stepsister, a relative of hers in Hiroshima Prefecture. The stepsister's aunt asked me where I had served during the war. This is during the Occupation of Japan. And I told her I was in China, Burma, India. Specifically, I spent more time in Burma, and my aunt said to me, she said, "Our second son" -- they only had two sons -- she says, "Our second son was killed at Burma." And that was an awful time for me.

gky: That must have been one of the hardest things about...

RT: When you're confronted with something like that, it really gets to you, but when you're in the combat zone, you don't know. You don't have any knowledge that your relatives might be in the area, and even if they were in the area, you didn't know them, you know, personally know them. So the feelings are different when my stepsister's aunt told me that. I felt very bad for her because, you know, it sounded like we had been responsible for her son's death, which we probably had nothing to do with as far as we individually. Collectively, maybe so.

gky: Did you ever have any sense that you were, what you were doing was helping the United States win the war?

RT: Do I have any sense that...

gky: When you went back, back then, you were sitting at a desk translating things, or you were out in the field interrogating a prisoner, did you have a sense of what you were lending to the war effort for the United States?

RT: I hope so. I volunteered to fight for my country. I hope that I felt that we were accomplishing something, when we interrogated prisoners when we were translating documents and so forth. We were helping to defeat the enemy and helping our country.

gky: Was there ever any one point where it felt like America was going to win, where there was not a question that Japan would lose?

RT: Well, in Burma, it was pretty obvious that we were winning the war because the Japanese forces that attacked Burma and was ultimately trying to invade India -- they misjudged the monsoon season. A monsoon is the rainy season, and when it rains in Burma, in that part of the country, nothing moves. It's very difficult to transport food, ammunition, or anything. So what you must to do is to live on the land, and the Japanese misjudged the monsoon season, and they tried to surround the Imphal supply area of the British, but the monsoon season actually caused them to retreat. They could no longer sustain their combat operations and they started to retreat. So we knew that we had beaten the Japanese there and we actually followed the Japanese until they moved out of Burma into Thailand and into Indochina, French Indochina at that time.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.