Densho Digital Archive - Clyde Tichenor Interview (denshovh-tclyde

<Begin Segment 11>

KL: And then from Guam, how long were you in Guam, about a year?

CT: Almost a year.

KL: What happened next?

CT: Then I went to Iwo Jima. And I was there about forty days or something and then it was the end of the war. The war came to an end. But Iwo Jima is an island that has all the vegetation blown off it when I was there. There was so much shell fire into that island, nothing was left. Well, there was maybe a couple of big tree trunks where they had shrapnel in 'em and stuff, and I've been up where they show the guys raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi, I was up there before they did it. Because they did that as a, I guess it really happened and then they did it as a thing to take pictures of. And then between time I was...

KL: What do you remember about the end of the fighting in Europe?

CT: The fighting in Europe?

KL: About the end of fighting in Europe. Was there a Victory in Europe Day in the Pacific?

CT: Well, our concern was totally the Pacific. To any of us at least in the navy and where I was, Europe meant nothing to us, it was just items in the newspaper, or would be the local government paper that we got at the fleet hospital.

KL: So you were there on Iwo Jima during the fighting?

CT: No, after. Nobody was there during the fighting, they were blowing everything off. The Japs were underneath the ground, and they'd been underground there, there was a Japanese dead soldier there.

KL: It seems like a hard environment.

CT: Yeah. So anyway... the thing about judo is you think about it as fighting, but judo as a philosophy, as a way of living, the Gentle Way is the meaning of judo, and that's the way it teaches you to live. You're not supposed to take... it imbues people with the knowledge you gain in learning the martial art side of judo. But the other side of it is the intellectual side, too, which is to treat everybody in a friendly manner if possible. It isn't always possible, but it can be.

KL: Did that fit in well with your time in the military or was that a problem, that philosophy?

CT: It wasn't for me, because that sort of fit my nature. For somebody who was an expert in fighting, my nature is quite the opposite. That's just the way it is. I happened to get in positions where I was exposed to that judo, and it was so fascinating that I gravitated to it. And out of all my friends who all joined the judo societies, I was the only one who really stuck it out and went up into the black belt ranks.

KL: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that. Let me ask you one more thing. You said when you were in the Pacific you were focused on the war in Pacific, and the end of that war. What do you remember about the atomic bombs and about the Japanese surrender?

CT: Well, the atomic bomb was, I guess I was on Guam at that point, because I went to Iwo Jima and then the war came to an end pretty quickly. It was a big thrill to think that they had made something so sophisticated technically, and especially to me because my background otherwise was always scientific.

KL: In physics.

CT: In physics, yeah. And so this was all. But it's, also it's a big danger. Nuclear power is such a big power. Luckily the world has been afraid of it enough to pretty much keep a lid on it. I wonder if it'll always stay that way though.

KL: Did you have that worry right away when you learned of the atomic bombs?

CT: Not right away because were interested in putting an end to the war, and that put an end to the war in a hurry.

KL: And then you went -- oh, go ahead.

CT: Well, anyway, as I said, the main thing to me in judo being gentle, ju is "gentle," do is "way," is a way of life. And that's the way the people who started it meant for it to be. And there's a way of life that you do this wonderful art of self-defense, and it is self-defense because you want them to initiate the first action since you don't have an, you could use it, but you don't normally start an aggression. But you want to be able to respond to it, so therefore you have to be very knowledgeable about following through with somebody else's action.