<Begin Segment 19>

MM: What perspective did you take away from your time in Japan, vis-a-vis what war is all about?

RK: Well, the devastation, well, we both saw it -- we saw it both in Manila and in Japan, especially Tokyo, Yokohama, and Osaka, too. These are major cities that were devastated. And you see blocks and blocks of nothing but torn buildings, bricks, devastation very clearly. And I was amazed, we should have known better, but here, what was I, a twenty-year-old or whatever. We should have been more thoughtful, I guess. But I remember the first night we got into town, into Tokyo, my friend and I were, by the time the airplane found the airfield and we got into town, we were, one of the few buildings standing was the Morinaga Building, right next to Hibiya Park, Hibiya Koen, in the middle of Tokyo. So we go out in the streets, and we're hungry, so we see this policeman, and we says, "Hey, is there any restaurant open around here?" He just laughed at us. He said, "You bombed the heck out of us. We don't have food, let alone restaurants that are open." We should have known better. And it was really a sad situation for the Japanese.

We really, I was in Osaka, we were with counterintelligence, different phases, but at any rate, we were in closer contact with the people in the media, the newspapers, the magazines, the theaters, the show groups and so forth. In a sense, all of them were under surveillance. At any rate, we got to be friends with many of them, so for that first Christmas we said, "You know what we'll do? The troops are lonely; we're going to have a show, an all-Japanese revue for the troops stationed around Osaka." I remember we had two shows, one at six-thirty and one at eight-thirty or whatever. And we just commandeered the talent around, vaudeville acts, and singers and dancers, we had, the final was the, finale was the Takaruka, Takarazuka girl's troupe performing one of their plays or acts, musicals. And we thought we would say thank you to these people. I don't think we paid them anything. We may have paid for transportation to and from the theater, but we brought 'em to our headquarters building, which was the Mengyo Kaikan Building, one of the few nice, concrete structures still standing around the neighborhood. This was the cotton exchange of Osaka. It was a beautiful building. It's refurbished now and back to its original splendor. At any rate, we had this reception in our building, and I remember standing with the colonel, our boss, greeting these people coming to our building. They were very polite, most of them, the women in kimonos and so on, all in their best dresses on their good behavior, bowing to us as they came in. And we had prepared the usual small little sandwiches, and muffins, and little things, just refreshments for them, but before long we found what they were doing is they were grabbing the things. I even saw a lady, sugar bowl, she grabbed it and poured the sugar down her kimono sleeve. Of course, the colonel was alarmed, but then we said, "Oh, we made a mistake. These people have no food, they're hungry, but they also have families and friends. And they think, 'Look at all of this we can't buy, we can't...' So they'll take what they can." So eventually, we gave up the idea of having a cute little refreshment with all these little things, pupus, hors d'oeuvres, and just decided to give the prepared foods out. So they can just take 'em home or whatever they want to do with it. And we took out some canned goods and things, and I just remember, by the time the Takarazuka girls came -- they were the most disciplined, they came last on big trucks -- we had no prepared foods, so we had to let 'em sit in our dining room and wait while we prepared something for them. But that told, sort of taught you a lesson. Even, here we are in midst of all of this, and we don't appreciate, we don't really know how much these people are suffering, or how they lack food.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.