<Begin Segment 14>

RP: You said you were shipped to Japan at some point?

SS: Yes. I didn't really want to go to Japan except my mother wanted to me to go to Japan because my maternal grandparents had never seen me. And so she wanted me to go to Japan so I could meet my mother's family. And so I figured, well, if I ask to be sent to the language school, Japanese language school, then that would get me to Japan. So after I finished my... got my commission (and) I finished my basic infantry officer's training, I wrote to the Pentagon asking to be assigned to the Japanese language school. And then before they responded to that, I received orders to go to Alaska. And then I got the response to my request to go to language school. They said, "Well, you're eligible for overseas assignment so we can't send you to the language school, we noticed you're on orders to Alaska, so what we'll do is we'll cancel your Alaska orders and send you to Japan." Well, okay fine, and then when I got my orders to go to Japan, I found they had listed me as a translator without any training. [Laughs] But that's how I got to Japan and, see, what is it, '48, let's see, 1948, '48, '49, '50, '51, '52. So fifty-four months later I returned.

RP: So what was that like? What did you do there?

SS: Well, in Japan, when I got to Japan they... well, because my orders read as a MOS translator 9330, they sent me to Toyko from the replacement depot in Zama, I was sent to Tokyo, at that time they called it the Translator Interpreter Service for interview and determining my qualification level. So they interviewed me and checked me and said, "Well, you're not a linguist or a qualified linguist, but you're a potential linguist, so we're going to assign you to the Maizuru POW interrogation center," they were interrogating Japanese POWs that had been captured by the Soviets and sent to Soviet POW camps. And as they returned, they were being screened, and the Army or the G2 of Far East command realized that we knew nothing about the Soviet Far East, and so here the only sources we have no way reaching, and to collect intelligence on the Soviet Far East and started interrogating. So I was sent to that center and I said, well, if you're going send me to Maizuru, I knew that this was in January and operations wouldn't start until May, that's when the Siberian ports opened, they were frozen until then. So I said, "Well, you got time before (they) start operating, so why don't you send me to the language school here in Tokyo?" I knew they had a six week course. I'd spent the night there at the night before with another officer that had been sent up for an interview. And so we were getting all the low downs on what were the good assignments and what were the bad assignments and so forth.

[Interruption]

SS: So I told them, well, why don't you send me to the language school before I go down there because I haven't had any training, you said I'm only a potential linguist. They said, "No, no we can't do that, you're going to learn on the job." [Laughs] So I learned on the job.

RP: What type of information were you looking for from these POWs?

SS: Well, any... what might be considered strategic information, we knew nothing about Siberia or the Soviet forces, what units were, or what type of forces were in there. And of course, the POWs were, worked in coal mines and logging and so forth and in remote areas so they really didn't know much of, shall we say, military value but still, one of the things that we did have an interest in was what is now called the BAM Railroad. And so the POWs that worked on that, we were very interested, the town or the city of what is now the city of Komsomol was built from scratch and trying to find out, you know, what city was like, different ports. Of course this was back in immediate postwar era and there wasn't much (information). Give you an example of how little we knew about the Soviet far east, we didn't have any maps, we used the National Geographic map. [Laughs]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.