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AU: But things were pretty rough then, and we, even the food was getting scarce, but we had one place that we could go and that was Chinatown in Nagasaki. And the Chinese people, you know, got all their food from China, so they bought all these things and shipped it there. And we knew that when we go there, we can have all the Chinese food. So that's where we used to go all the time, every day. And Nagasaki is, as you know, a village where there had been a lot of western influence. And when I first went to school even at that, I used to see a lot of Caucasians, and so, you know, it was different. If you see the houses are mostly built western style. And because the teachers were from the States, a lot of the teachers were from the United States or they had studied in the United States, so my education there was very good. We had, another reason that it was nice for the school was that in the earlier days, if you graduated at the top of your class, that they, they were sending the students to the United States to study for their advanced degree. And of course, under one condition, after you obtain your degree then you were to go back and teach in that college for a couple years, that was the payback, you know. So that's another reason that kind of attracted me to that college too. But, and then you did get the teacher's teaching certificate when you got out of college provided that you maintained certain grade. Every three years, there would be a representative from the Ministry of Education that came and gave the whole graduating, that graduating class a national examination. And if that class, graduating class passed, then for the next two years, the graduates that with a certain degree, I think it was eighty or more, would automatically get the teaching certificate to be able to teach English in the Japanese high school. But then when I was going, about the first year, after the first year, then the war got worse and worse. And because we were English majors that we were drafted to work in factories. We were not allowed to study. The only students that were allowed to study were the medical students because they could not give up their study and, you know, because we needed doctors. So because we were English majors and all the other colleges all were sent, all were drafted, and we had to go to work and --

SG: Was this just the women or men also?

AU: Men also, everybody, all the students, they had to go to work and go through your college students. We were, I was sent, we were sent to a Mitsubishi, it's one of those where you make all those torpedoes. And when we got... well, because it was in Nagasaki that we could commute every day to go to work. And when I, when we got there to work and we saw all these college students from all over from all of other prefectures that were there, there were people, Kagoshima, from Kumamoto, and even from Osaka, the college and university students were there, and we've never operated these things. We don't know any, those things have to be so precise, so I don't know if there were any torpedoes that went off. I mean, because it had to be so precise, and we could never do that because we never had any experience running those machines, and they were, it was not an automatic deal where, they didn't have all this computers and things like that that you can make it precise. It was all done by hand. But anyway, we were there until, of course, the war ended.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.