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MN: And then, you know, I forgot to ask you, you know, when VE Day came, Victory in Europe Day came, how did you feel?

KM: You know, for us up there, it was just another day. There was no joyous celebration. But the only thing is that thereafter, we would go and see movies in Augsburg, I remember. One of the, not a joke, but before the end of the war when we were riding the trucks, the driver just drove the way it was, reckless or whatever. But as soon as the war was over, everything was caution, caution, you know, "Hey, take it easy. Drive slowly, don't drive too fast." We want to go home. That's the kind of reaction we had. Everything was caution now, before, we, devil may care, we were carefree and happy go lucky. But a great many of us took extra precautions in whatever we did.

MN: When the war was going on, did you think you were not going to return? What did you think?

KM: I don't think we gave much thought about that. When we left Hawaii, it was a total unknown. We didn't know where we were going to go, we didn't know what we were going to do, whether we're going to be really in the army or what. So it was... what shall I say? Accepting things as it happened day by day. You live day by day. You didn't think of the future. You had a learning experience every day and you live for the moment. Remember, in my case, like before we, before we joined the army, before 1941, our experience basically was with Japan. We were very close to our family in Japan. We had, I had family still in Hiroshima. And so I was still going to Japanese school, and within the Japanese community, we did a lot of support for the war effort in Japan. Because at that point it was not because we were dual citizens or anything like that, but because our parents were Japanese, and it was their obligation to support their family members. And so old clothes and things like that were being sent out there to Japan. The one thing I remember was that, as I said once before, I think the cigarettes in those days had aluminum covering. And there was a big fad of collecting this aluminum into balls, and the bigger the balls, the better it was for shipping back to Japan. Aluminum or lead, I think it was lead. I think the cigarettes were packed in lead. Yeah, because it was... so the fad was to... And then in Japanese school, we would sing Japanese war songs and things like that. And we would hear stories of Japanese heroes. One outstanding story that I remember is this incident in Manchuria where the three Bakudan Sanyushi, they used to call it, and this was duplicated in the Normandy landing, where to break through the barbed wire encroachment, these three Japanese soldiers had to sneak up to the obstacle with the bandoliers. And I think they lost their lives in putting through the bandoliers through this barbed wire object and then blew it up. And the same thing that happened in  one of the movies. But this was one of the favorite stories in Japan, of heroism of the Japanese soldiers, you know, things like that. And so the Japanese community was involved in that respect. Although, as individuals, we did not think of us as being, you know, possibly involved with them, it was a matter of the community getting involved in something that their relatives and the sons and whatnot in Japan was involved with. But this was our exposure, and the Japanese stories were all, well, guy going off to war, and then he doesn't expect to come back. So there was a certain amount of that mentality when we volunteered. Then Oriental background, our mentality was that we are going out, don't expect to come back. I think all of ninety-nine percent of the boys that left Hawaii, left with the idea that, worse comes to worst, we're not coming back. We didn't burn our bridges, but still yet, the unknown factor was the greatest thing. And as I said, I think all of us lived for the moment, and day by day, accepting what new experience was coming as being something that there's very little we could do about it. We do the best we can under the circumstances.

WN: So on VE Day, nobody said, "Whew, we made it"?

KM: Oh, yeah. Well, except we were proud of the fact that we had the [inaudible] being published at that point, and Tanaka made a special edition. And I guess we were, as far as we were concerned, for us, that was the first news of any kind of publication about the end of the war, our own publication. But there was no joyous celebration or anything like that. It was very subdued, subdued to the effect, oh, well, it's finally over and we get a chance to go home.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.