Densho Digital Archive - Minoru Yamaguchi Interview (denshovh-yminoru

<Begin Segment 6>

KL: What was medical care? Did you just get, did your mom just care for you at home?

MY: Yes. It's very limited medical supply. Mostly I think the medicine was used was, what do you call, the herbal medications that local people always know, okay, this herb works for this or mix this with that one, and then we used to have all kinds of things all over my body. [Laughs]

KL: It'd be hard to watch your kids have to deal with, I think.

MY: Yeah. It was tough going there, but then after my dad got there and he decided to start building our own, his own house for the family, and luckily my mom had the family forest where they had the redwood trees growing, so he was able to cut down some of those redwood trees and then take it into the mill, saw 'em.

KL: Had her family managed that forest for...

MY: Yes.

KL: ..a long time?

MY: They always, the family have, it's such a mountainous area that different families, each family have their own forest that's been passed on to generation after generation, and then they've been taking care of it. When they cut down the tree, they make sure they plant young trees again, and after thirty or forty years then we have nice harvestable trees. Then they use that to build the house, so that's what my dad did. But after the war, all the materials, building materials, well, he had the lumber alright, but other materials like nails and the tiles, to put the tiles on the roof, and all different materials was short because the Japanese Imperial Army was using up most of whatever's available at the time to support the war. So it took him a long time to get the house building completed.

KL: Where did he, how did he get the materials? He was just patient and he found what...

MY: Yeah, he just went all over, I guess. He looked high and low to try to get the material. And that was completely tiled with no thatched roof, just completely tiled roof with nice individual black wavy tiles. And that was a villager's dream home, type of home. That was pretty modern at the time. And then not only that, he was able to buy radios. Nobody had radios. Course, no televisions at the time, but the radio is one of the best communication tools. So listening tools, so he had that, and then that radio came in pretty handy during the war because he was able to, he was able to catch news and what's going on about the progression of the war, and all the villagers come and listen to the radio. And when we have the air raid, we'll get an emergency broadcast from capital city of Kagoshima that there is an air raid southern Kyushu, or whatever, and then him and I -- I was probably about four years old, five years old -- him and I would go to the community center where it had the hand-cranking siren and then cranked the siren. He would let me crank the siren, and I used to have a lot of fun. [Mimics cranking motion and siren sound] So let the villagers to know to evacuate because the air raid is coming.

KL: I wonder if that's why your dad took you, 'cause he knew it was exciting and something kind of fun for you in the middle of this...

MY: Yeah, it was a lot of fun, and that's what I remember. I didn't know what was going on, actually, and then just to go to the community center and then crank the siren and all the villagers start getting ready for evacuation.

KL: Would they leave the village, go into the --

MY: No, they always went into the mountainous area, and then they have the manmade cave. It's about, say, six feet or, six feet wide and five, six feet high and maybe about ten feet deep, so some of the villagers would just go in there and stay there until...

KL: How many people would crowd in there?

MY: Sometimes it's very crowded, and then it's very stuffy and dark. And we used to carry, we used to carry a little emergency, what they call emergency bag, with roasted soybeans and... the reason why they used the soybeans is that gave you enough protein, and that's why all, everybody carried a handful of soybeans in there, so when we're hungry, just get that and then munch on that.

KL How long would you stay in there, during a raid?

MY: I don't... well, maybe, sometimes we'd stay overnight there. It depends on how close the airplanes, the warplanes are approaching, 'cause I imagine it's coming from Okinawa or that way. Once the airplane, the warplane got there, it didn't stay around too long. But sometimes we'd just stay overnight. But during the day, when we get into the, actually toward the end of the war, the warplanes, I guess it's the B-29 warplanes, bombers, fly over the mountain range, the kids, as kids we wanted to see that. I mean, it's so curious and we wanted to see how the airplanes come and dive down, and we wanted to see what's happening. But Dad and other adult people just start screaming at us to, "Get back in! Get back in! It's dangerous, get back in!" So we couldn't see much of it. But the airplane, the warplanes, I don't remember how many, but some group of airplanes, about, maybe three to five B-29s come over the mountain range, and then all of a sudden the one start diving. It'd go [gestures a plane diving]. The sounds, the change from diving from high altitude to low altitude, it'd go high to low [imitates sound]. You know that, and then one dives and then the next one do the same thing, then pretty soon the black smoke's rising from the, beyond the hills on the other side. So you know that something's being hit, right? So as soon as you start seeing that smoke, the black smoke rising up from the other side of the hills, you realize that it's actually that, really taking place, that it's something hit. So we immediately felt the real danger. "Oh, that really is dangerous." So we used to get really scared. To this day, sometimes the local, from the local airport, that stunt biplane that, just the singles, biplanes, I don't know, they're practicing diving or whatever, from high pitch sounds to the lower pitch sounds, go [imitates sound] when you go down, that sound is something very similar to what I heard at that time, so I don't really care for that sound. I don't want to hear that, because I just remember those days because of that. So I don't even, I didn't, I don't even care to hear that noise. Or sometimes the local airport here, they have an airshow; I never want to go to an airshow, because of that, because of the experience that I had as a child, the memories that really bring out when you're seeing those things. So I don't want to see that.

KL: Sounds like a strong memory.

MY: Yeah, it is. It is. Everybody was just traumatized with that. Yeah.

KL: You'd feel pretty defenseless, I think.

MY: But as far as our small village is concerned, we never, we never had the problem, never, no bombs would drop in our area. Because our, it's a sleepy farming community, just a small, small house scattered here and there, so... but on the other side of the hills, there used to be wine, not wine, whiskey distillery companies. You know those, they make the whiskey from the sweet potatoes.

KL: I've heard of that in Ireland too, from regular potatoes, white potatoes.

MY: Yeah, so I guess that company was attacked. I mean, that actually, that black smoke was coming from, actually, that was that distillery that got hit. That's the only commercial, industrial establishment in our whole area.