<Begin Segment 20>

TI: Well, before we go there, I think this was in the office when this happened, you tell a good story about your first Christmas after the war ends, and so can you tell that story?

RT: Oh yes, in those days the GIs, the occupation forces were, they had PX rations and they were given one candy bar a day and a lot of 'em sold it on the black market, but when I went to work on day before Christmas or something there was a cardboard box just, not wrapped or nothing, just a big cardboard box when I opened my desk drawer. And I opened it up and it was just filled with Hershey bars and Babe Ruth and Butterfinger, and had some gum and had one toothpaste, Colgate toothpaste in there, but I, these people in the office had saved it for weeks and weeks, their rations, instead of eating it themselves or selling it on the black market, and it was the most, it was the most wonderful Christmas. And I took it home and every night my brother and my little sister, we'd sit around in the dimly lit tatami and we'd choose, I let them choose a candy bar that they would eat that night, and we'd cut it in three pieces. And that lasted for about three, three months. And candy bars in those days were a little bigger than they are now. Yeah. It was, it was the nicest, I mean, they were so wonderful and I'll never forget that Christmas.

My son, when he was fifteen I used to think, oh gosh, what a wonderful Christmas they're having, when, they... a candy bar to them was nothing, but for me, candy bars, and I could never for a long time throw away the end of a bread loaf, so these things, we lived very frugally and I was able to appreciate a lot of the things. Even now I think of those people in the office and how they made me and my siblings so happy that Christmas. It was so nice. But they were mostly from the battlefields and they had families and they wanted to go home, back to the States. They, they protected me, made sure that the other GIs wouldn't, not, you know, do anything to me or, and I know in the office one day one of the officers got a letter from a Japanese girl, and they were, in those days they were only limited to go to certain occupation forces authorized dance halls or places. They couldn't just go to any place they wanted. And he had met some Japanese dancer, I think, at one of the dance halls, and she had written a letter in Japanese and he asked me to translate it. Well, my English vocabulary being very poor, I mean, I did not know what she was talking about when she says platonic love, or platonic, or physical love. I didn't know how to translate. [Laughs] But it was very interesting.

TI: So essentially kind of a love letter, you had to translate.

RT: I did a lot of translating love letters. [Laughs]

TI: So they all liked to have you around. And they probably, did they tease you and treat you almost like a little sister, it sounds like?

RT: That's what it was. They protected me. Yeah.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.