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MN: And then changing the subject, but you mentioned how the kibei soldier reacted to bombing in Japan. When the United States bombed Hiroshima and you eventually heard about it, what were your thoughts then? Because you had family in Japan at that time.

KM: I didn't know anything about where my sisters were. All what I knew was that my sisters were in Tokyo, although I had distant relatives in Hiroshima. My eldest sister had not come back from Manchuria yet. See, my eldest sister and her family had been missing in action, so to speak, in Manchuria. It was the last ship that came back from Manchuria that my sister and her four daughters were on, and they were lucky enough to come back, and the whole family in Hiroshima had lost contact with them. So it was after the war, when my sister, my eldest sister and her children came back to Hiroshima. So my two sisters, Tsukie and Fumie, were supposed to be in Tokyo as far as I was concerned. And only years later did I find out that Fumie and Tsukie were both in Hiroshima when the atom bomb was dropped. But during the war, my sister Tsukie tried to contact me. And I have the Red Cross letter that she wrote to the Red Cross inquiring about my two brothers, and she had heard that we were in the army. And so I don't know how she heard, but she had heard that we were in the army. And so she wanted to locate and get in touch with us, a copy of this Red Cross letter of inquiry that she had sent to the Red Cross. I don't know how I kept it, my mother probably kept it.

MN: You know, since you were thinking that your sisters were in the Tokyo vicinity, and you knew that the U.S. was bombing the Tokyo area, did you have any thoughts or feelings about that?

KM: Well, of course, we had no idea. The war started, we were not in communication during the war, so from 1941 on we had very, we couldn't worry about them because we had other things to worry about ourselves in Hawaii. So we had very little time to reflect on what was happening in Japan. We had more of our own worries every day.

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