<Begin Segment 20>

MM: It sounds like you really got to see the effects of war on civilians in a way that we don't normally think about, the effect of the postwar experience on people who weren't combatants, who weren't soldiers.

RK: Yeah, the thing that I appreciate, too, is I went in and the people in the, on occupation duty, in the early days, were mostly combat veterans. And they were the most -- they were the most well-behaved. The Japanese -- I said to my mother, I haven't seen a female, let alone a ojosan, the first month I was in Japan. They were all hiding. The story was that the American soldiers would plunder and rape. And so we couldn't find them. But the American soldiers who went in originally, the battle-tested veterans, were very professional and they behaved well. And, of course, Japan, being poor, and we having so much. We got a monthly allotment -- I mean, we got a weekly allotment, whether you smoked or not, of a carton of cigarettes. The Japanese were dying for it. For a carton of cigarettes you could get a, like a camera and so forth, so the later troops did it much more so in terms of the black market and so on, the ones who, like me, no combat experience and so forth, were sort of spoiled. But the original veterans, original... the soldiers who went in, in the early part of the occupation, I think, behaved very well. And I guess this really helped in calming the Japanese. It certainly wasn't Iraq. And so, and it was a pleasant experience, those of us who were lucky enough and knew enough Japanese to communicate, so we made many friends. They'd invite us to their homes and so forth, which is unusual for a Japanese. And so we had some very nice, cordial relations, but when I look back, I think we could have done, we could have done a lot more to help them out. I remember going to Hiroshima, oh, I don't know when it was, early spring of '46, and of course, there was still hardly anything there. The place was just leveled. But as we got off the train, some buddies, and we were gonna, were curious to see how bad it was. Immediately, we were surrounded by kids, maybe average age of ten, twelve, who wanted to escort us around, and they did. Of course, in exchange, they wanted candy and so forth, but I, I suspect a lot of them, they may have been orphans. It was a pitiful sight. Of course, war is not pretty, but of course I wasn't in combat, so I don't know the real horrors, but the aftermath is terrible.

MM: During this time, you come from a part of that generation where a lot of your friends and relatives may have served in the 442nd, 100th battalion, in the MIS. Did you lose many friends?

RK: I lost a few, but not anyone very close. Fortunately, the ones that were close to me, like my, the one who served and who lived in our neighborhood and was sort of my older brother was in the 100th, but he came home intact. And like so many of us, he couldn't afford to go to college, but with the GI Bill, he did go to the university.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.