<Begin Segment 18>

MA: And when, I'm just curious, so you were in Berkeley...

CY: And he came back to Berkeley.

MA: Okay, he came back. And what year was that? Was that, like, '45, right after the war, or was it a couple years after?

CY: No, it was '45. Then he, we went to Washington, D.C. for a few months, and he got a job they sent him back to Japan.

MA: And that's when you went with him?

CY: No, I didn't go with him right away. I was living with my parents and Joyce, and I went to work for the United States Treasury.

MA: In San Francisco?

CY: San Francisco. And I worked there until I left for Japan. Because it took a little while to negotiate the transfer. It wasn't, we had to wait our turn. We had, in fact, we had to wait for our living quarters in Washington Heights. It wasn't quite completed.

MA: So Washington Heights was a compound in Tokyo?

CY: In Tokyo, It was right next to the Meiji Park. Do you know, you heard of Meiji Park? And right now, that area is the NHK facilities.

MA: And what was your husband doing in Japan? What type of work?

CY: He was a translator, interpreter, they called it ATIS. You've heard of ATIS? That's where he was working, in the NYK building under General MacArthur's headquarters.

MA: So then you moved to Japan with Joyce to meet him, and he was already there. And you moved into this place called Washington Heights...

CY: Well, it wasn't quite ready. So for two weeks or one month, they sent us to Fujiya Hotel in Hakone until our quarters were completed, and then we moved back to Washington Heights.

MA: And what was the city of Tokyo like? I mean, I'm sure it must have been destroyed, parts of it, from the war.

CY: Destroyed. And I thought, well, when I went from Yokohama to Tokyo, I thought, "My goodness, this is a funny country," with all these open fields with a lot of telephone poles. And I said, "What, what is the reason for all these telephone poles?" And I told my husband, I said, "Japan has a lot of telephone poles. What was the purpose of all this?" And then he says, he says, "You're so ignorant of the things that took place." He says, "This place was Kawasaki," that place where they had a lot of war... not exactly -- they made war materials that they used for war. So the American soldiers had to bomb that place, and so they, they burned the whole thing. And the chimneys of these factories, they don't burn because that's the purpose of the chimney. So that's why you see just chimneys standing all over, it looks like telephone poles, but that was okay. I mean, I didn't know the difference.

MA: And what about the people in Japan? How were they doing?

CY: They were very... I would say, acceptive of the, what do you call the...

MA: Occupation?

CY: They were very acceptive, and they didn't... well, they had nothing to, they had nothing to eat, they had no roof over their head, but they were very innovative. They picked up scraps of metal or something and they made a little roof over their head and they put a, made a little stand of, with box or something they could find, they put a basin so they could wash their... and then they were very neat in spite of all of that. And, and Japan is very hot in summer, and so we used to take a walk outside of Washington Heights, in the back side, and we used to see these beautiful large estates that were burned down. You could see the entryway that had post, and you could tell that that was somebody's home. And then they would use that as a part of the wall or something, and they would make a little space to sleep in. They were so ingenious that I used to kind of walk down there and look at them. Yeah, they were so ingenious and they were so neat. Everything, and they had one flower. If a weed or something, if it was a flower, they'd have one flower with an empty vase or something with water in it. And I said, I just marveled at the ingenuity of those people. And I thought to myself as I -- in my later days, I thought, "My goodness, I was so ignorant. They must have really not appreciated me looking at them like that." [Laughs] You know, walking down the street. But here I was so, about twenty-six, and so to me, I was just amazed at the ingenuity of those people.

But, and then when I went to Japan I used to see great big mounds in the middle of the street, and I asked my husband, "My, Tokyo is a funny place. What are the great big mounds in the middle of the street?" And my husband said, "Those are all ashes and debris," that they had to clean up so that the jeeps and people, bicycles could pass through, and so then to make a little freeway-like. But they had to build them up so they cleaned around that place. And that's what the ashes were. And then the little children were naked with great big stomachs like that, and they'd run up this dirt and run down. And here we'd try to protect Joyce so much, we're boiling her cups and things, and I said, "And they look so healthy, look at them. They have great big stomachs, they look so healthy." And my husband says, "No, they're not healthy children, they're starving children. That's why their stomachs are so big."

<End Segment 18> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.