Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Katsumi Okamoto
Narrator: Katsumi Okamoto
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Date: November 7, 2007
Densho ID: denshovh-okatsumi-01-0023

<Begin Segment 23>

RP: Right, can you describe to us...

KO: Japan?

RP: Japan, postwar Japan.

KO: Oh, I was shocked when I got there. Because we got to the repot depot in Yokohama, and my first experience going through the chow line, gonna empty what I had left over. And there are some Caucasian guys in front of me, and the kids are begging. They would scrape the food, okay, one guy spit on his food, and we all yelled at him, but he spit on the food and then he gave it to them. He was a recruit like me. I thought, gee, that kind of make an impression that people can be nasty.

Then I was assigned to ATIS in Tokyo, just to stay there 'til I was assigned. And I volunteered, I was there a month before I was assigned to something special. They needed telephone operators, so they trained me to man a switchboard at night. They got rid of me because I cut a colonel off twice. [Laughs] It was one of those you pulled the plugs. Then I wanted to keep busy. Well, they needed people, translators to work at night with the jeep drivers. We were hauling these linguists, there was Germans and stuff that were doing a lot of translation, and we would have to take them back to their rooms. But they needed somebody to ride with the Japanese. I did that for about two weeks.

Then they asked for, they assigned me to a team going to Maizuru Naval Base, one of the first boatloads of Japanese prisoners coming back from Russia, Russian prisoners. And they were setting up interview teams and stuff, and they needed people. I had, there were a lot more professional people than me, some of the Kibeis knew really -- you know what Kibeis are, yeah -- so I said, "Why don't you put me at the front desk, I'll talk to people as they come in and direct them." But I would hear some of the interview and it was very interesting. They were trying to sort out, really, the Communists. At that time they were very down on Communists. It was interesting because there'd be a busload would take off at dead of the night, you could see them. I saw them. And I think they took 'em for retraining, I think. Reindoctrination. But the most interesting one was this kind of tall, good-looking guy, beard, officer comes in, and he looks at me, "Hi there." I look at him, he says, "How did the Bruins do this year?" He says, "UCLA, how did they do in football?" [Laughs] Believe it or not. I said, "I'm a Washingtonian." I didn't know what happened to him, he went for the interview, but he was conscripted, I think, into the Japanese service. He was probably caught over there and he joined over there.

RP: So did you actually, you never got to actually interview any of these Japanese prisoners?

KO: Not really, I did not. I felt uncomfortable.

RP: So it was kind of an intelligence-gathering effort.

KO: Yes, but I still had to keep track of things.

RP: About the Russians...

KO: Yeah, uh-huh. But the CIC was really doing all the...

RP: What does that stand for?

KO: What?

RP: CIC?

KO: Oh, Counterintelligence. Yeah, they were the ones that would work with, they were kind of the secret service, you know what I mean, intelligence people.

KP: I have a quick question. Did you encounter any repatriated Americans over there that were returned from Tule Lake?

KO: I got to know one family, some reason. We used to go to the Red Cross and these young girls were working there, one was sixteen and one was about twenty-one. They had repatriated. They were on the fringes, kind of difficult for them, and we got to know them a little bit, not that much. And they were getting so friendly, I was concerned. One of my friends says, "Yeah, I think that's a family that they're trying to get their girls married to GIs to come back." I wasn't about to do that, college is my next step.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.