<Begin Segment 17>

NI: What were the conditions like towards the end of the war for you? What did you see around you in the navy, because it's well-known...

BH: Well, in the navy, we're, we were... it's just a training school, so we didn't see too much of things. Business as usual type of thing. Now, but you could sense the, sense the feeling, because they were digging bunker tunnels in the mountainside and this and that in preparation.

NI: The training school was in Okayama-ken?

BH: Okayama-ken.

NI: Okayama city?

BH: No, a city called Kurashiki.

NI: Oh, I know Kurashiki city.

BH: Kurashiki. You know, there's a big industrial complex by it? It's just, it's, I think the industrial complex absorbed this area that, where the naval school was.

NI: I see. So you didn't see any of the destruction?

BH: No, destruction, no, no bombing.

NI: You weren't bombed?

BH: No, no, no.

NI: Oh, okay. You were quite lucky.

BH: Quite lucky. Very fortunate.

NI: Your mother and family, where were they at the time?

BH: No, my family, my mother was in Shikoku. She was forced to evacuate from Osaka to a more safer place in inaka. And she went to her birthplace where her brother lived.

NI: And then your brother and your sisters, they were...

BH: My brother was in Tokyo, but my sister who was married, stayed in Osaka. I think my other sister stayed in Osaka, too, because she worked at the Royal Hotel. And then my two younger sisters -- my younger sister was in Osaka because she worked for Asahi Shinbun. And my youngest sister was in, was with my mother in Ehime-ken.

NI: I see, I see. What, what do you remember about the day of the bomb, the A-bomb?

BH: Well, I wasn't aware of any, I wasn't aware of any news, but one of the officers who went to Hiroshima to pick up supplies for the school, he was reported dead from atomic bomb. And probably a day or two after the bomb was dropped, we heard that the Americans had dropped a new type of military weapon.

NI: On Nagasaki?

BH: Uh-huh. And possibly it was, it was a nuclear bomb.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2005 Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and Densho. All Rights Reserved.