<Begin Segment 22>

TI: Alright, so Rose, we're gonna start our third segment, and so you're in Japan and you're working. At some point you decide to come back to the United States.

RT: Yes, I was, when I was going to college, right away I needed to get a job, so I was employed by the Japanese telephone and telegraph office and they were the ones that sent the operators to the U.S. occupation billets and other units to work on the switchboard. And so I worked for the officers' billets in Nagoya. And my husband Tats, he came back from the army, he volunteered for the Japanese army at age fifteen, which was, it was almost a peer pressure or school pressure whatever at that time, and so when he came back from the war, when the war ended at age seventeen, his home and business was all gone and his family was living with six other families in this dilapidated two story house with no running water, or no running, not the kind of bathrooms that we have. Anyway, they all, because of malnutrition and unsanitary conditions, one after another they became, got tuberculosis, and Tats did, too.

TI: Now, this was all before you were married, though?

RT: Oh, yes. This was, yeah, before we were married, right after the war. But we met in college. He was two years older. There was a lot of young men that had gone to the military academies that, when the war ended the U.S. occupation only limited ten percent of those boys to go to the regular four year universities, so a lot of these people, they wanted to go to the four year universities, but since they had military experience they were limited and so --

TI: That's interesting. I've never heard that rule, so ten percent of the men who served in the military, only ten percent could go to a university. And was that because there was a shortage of, of space?

RT: No, I guess because the U.S. didn't want any military, militaristic philosophy or whatever.

TI: So they wanted to limit that, that military influence at the universities. I see.

RT: That's right, into the universities, is what I heard, that they only permitted ten percent to go. And so, like Tats, he, so they had no choice but to go to these private three year colleges like the foreign language class.

TI: And that's where you met him then, at the Nagoya College of Foreign Languages?

RT: Yes. It was the first coed school and our teacher, our president gathered the twenty or so girls at that time and said, "This is a test case of the first coed college and, or school, in Japan and so there will be no fraternization among the sexes." But then he worked, he got a job at a base and I was at a, at the officers' billets, and so at night we had to keep each other awake. And so we used to do our homework and we used to talk at work over the phone, but at school we, all we said to each other was "good morning" and "goodbye." [Laughs]

TI: So, but so there was interest back then between you?

RT: Yeah.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.