<Begin Segment 5>

SG: How did you feel about having to quit school and work in the factories?

AU: It was devastating, but everybody had no choice. Unlike this country, you couldn't protest. You just do as you're told, and especially English, it's a language of an enemy country. And by then, of course, all the American teachers came back to the States. They had, they couldn't stay there, so they all came back to the States. Of course, during that time when we were working then, of course, the bomb, the nuclear bomb was dropped in Nagasaki after Hiroshima, and I was there then. Fortunately, I was working on the night shift. And after my work when I had come back, can return back to the dormitories -- school dormitory, that's when the bomb fell. But because Nagasaki unlike Hiroshima is a very hilly city and from what I understand, it was not a complete successful explosion in Nagasaki. So because I was on the other, opposite side of the hill, that I was fortunate and that's because, and I was in a building, came back to the dorm and was in the building that I was not affected that much. But of course, you know, after I got home, after a few weeks when this train started moving again and I returned home, by then my family was in the country because our home in Fukuoka was also bombed, and we had lost our house. And so they had to move to the countryside where my parents had their friends, and so we stayed over at their place. So when I went, war was over, and then I was able to return home. And that's where my mother said that she was ready to come to Nagasaki to see if she could find my body. But then she was so surprised when she saw me get off the train and come home.

SG: Was the factory destroyed?

AU: Yes. And if, had I been at the factory at that time, I probably would not have survived either because I've lost half of my classmates at that time in that bomb. And even if they, you know, survived with just the, you know, the scars and the, they had the effect later on. And I have lost some friends that way too instead of directly at that time, months later.

SG: So these are classmates and coworkers?

AU: Yeah. But my classmates, when we first, when I first started college, our class was students of forty. They usually take forty, and no, it was forty-one because they take one extra person because they figure somebody is going to drop out during the, you know, year. So we started out forty-one. When we graduated, just half, only about twenty-five had graduated. The others were all gone.

SG: I was just going to ask about working in the factory and, can you describe what it was like to work there?

AU: It was terrible. It was terrible. It was hell.

SG: Why was that?

AU: Because, well, of course, working, I'm not doing something that you're not used to endure. You can't, you've never done something like that. And then, I have seen people being treated over there, somebody made a mistake, and they lined -- this was not the students but the regular factory workers -- and somehow the thing, the component that he had made was not quite right or something, and they lined him, all the workers up there, the others, and they put him, they brought him up front, and they hit him so hard time after time, and this is the first time I had seen a face swell so hard and change, you know. His face completely changed. It was because so swollen, everything. And I looked at this, and I just could not believe that somebody could do that to someone. This is how they treated these people, and I thought that was horrible. But things, yes, things that I could not even imagine.

SG: Were there other incidents in the factory or other conditions somewhere?

AU: There were other conditions. When you were, you know, we're college kids, and we do talk. We like to talk and be, you know. And as I guess a means of punishment, they separated you, and so they, instead of making you work at the same time whatever, they separated you in morning shift and the night shift or whatever so that you can't work together. And I guess that was fortunate for me because they put me to a night shift, and I worked until about midnight, then I kind of slept there. They make you sleep until morning until the streetcars started moving again, and then I got, and I used to get on the street car and come back to the dormitory. And because it was, you know, the bomb was dropped during the day, and I was back in dormitory then. And of course, I was safe, and that, maybe that was a blessing.

SG: So many of your classmates and friends were working in the factory during the day when the bomb was dropped?

AU: Yes.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.