<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Well, and what, what you had that others didn't was your English abilities. You could speak English.

RT: Well, my English was eleventh grade, I mean, eleven year old English. It wasn't very good. My vocabulary was not very large, but, see, my brother was two years younger and so he almost lost most of his English, but I was eleven when I went to Japan, so I was more able to retain my English.

TI: Okay, so in my notes I have you later on working as a translator for...

RT: I think it's because when I was in, helping my relative, buying these things, somebody there had known that I was able to speak a little English and so when this court martial or whatever it was for the rape of a GI, of the Japanese girl, and they couldn't understand the college professor's English. They probably found where to find me, so in early December this lieutenant, or captain in a jeep with his GI driver stopped and came to my school, and this was a rural girls' school and they had never seen GIs, or Americans for that matter, and they were just very, very shocked and scared more than anything, and especially when they talked to me and they asked me to come and help them. And I said, "Well, I'm only fifteen and I'll have to talk to my father." And they said, "Well, where's your father working?" So I told them where my father was working, and he says, "Get in the jeep," and then they drove me to this place near Nagoya where my father was working and my father said, "Well, right now they're not doing much learning anyway, so I guess it's okay." So I started doing the interpreting for the court martial. And that was kind of fun. I didn't know what, sex and rape or anything like that was not in my vocabulary at that time, and so maybe that was why I was able to, all I had to do was listen intently to what the college professor was trying to say and trying to repeat it in, with a U.S. accent.

TI: And so you would listen to the professor who, which had a strong British accent?

RT: Uh-huh.

TI: Were you also listening to the Japanese also so you kind of knew what they were saying, so it was a combination of the two?

RT: I think so, yeah.

TI: That probably then allowed you to explain most of what was happening.

RT: Yeah, the college professor was, being a professor, he was looking for words, not simple words, so like when one, one of the witnesses said ketatamashii, which means noisy, he was looking for a bigger word to express it in English and he couldn't and he kind of hesitated and the judges or whatever looked at me and they says, "Okay, what did, what does it mean?" And my vocabulary was so small I said, "Well, it's a big word for noisy." [Laughs] And they all got a chuckle out of that. But that was the extent of my English.

TI: [Laughs] Okay. And you were, you were getting as much from the, just understanding the Japanese and just translating it in simple English. That's what it sounds like. Okay, that makes, that makes sense. So you're, you're all of a sudden working as an interpreter, and what happens after the, the...

RT: After that court martial ended, then it was, at least the offices were warm. And at home there was a fuel shortage. You hardly had enough fuel to, for cooking, so the houses at home were just cold in December, so at least, so I kind of liked staying there and they treated me really nice. And then the Red Cross ladies --

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.