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SG: Do you think your experience during World War II like you were describing has affected you in other ways also?

HU: It made me strong.

SG: In what way?

HU: You know, not only during the war, I suffered quite a bit, I had to fight with the hunger. I almost died from hunger. During the war, we have a system working. But after the war, the food distribution system is totally collapsed and lack of government management and dishonest distributor, and we lived under the ration systems. But the system is poor, just completely broke down, and our rations for the food getting less and less and sometime just no rations for few days. And all of us have to live, I'm talking about the people in big cities, they're completely burned out, burned down to the ashes. And some people, housewives, married people, housewives go to countryside to buy a few vegetables and rice and that type of things although that, we call it black market and pay high prices. And of course, on the way back, the police raided trains and confiscated all the food. And some fortunate ones escaped by breaking the windows and jumping over the windows and escape. But most of them, a lot of them were actually caught, and the food they paid high price is confiscated. And by being young one, working for the factories, going school at night. At that time, I was finishing the school, I guess, in the technical school and didn't have a time to go to the countryside to buy things. Don't have a time, don't have a money, that's the two reason I couldn't go. And after the war, just the nature always comes back, just like a spring, and I don't have anything to eat. Those days, the rations is just either handful rice or handful wheat or soybeans or used to call animal food. In Manchuria, they produced a lot of, I guess for the soybeans, and they, what do you call that, crush to take oil out of it. The remaining is just like a wood chip, and so there's a part of ration too. We ate that, and no rice and no miso, no shoyu, no salt, just very simple life like nothing, no nothing is life. And I was losing weight considerably. And those days, I lost about twenty, twenty-five pounds and about hundred fifteen, hundred twenty body, and I could not walk up the steps with my own power. You have to pull that rails to pull myself up, and just walking the street become effort. You walk sidewalk and come to the end the curb, you have to stop and figure out how to get down, only about six inches. You have to balance, then take a time, get down, walk other side. You have to figure out how to get up the six inch of a curb. And then myself, I mentioned that the spring came back. It's nature, start producing wild weed on that, from ashes, so I went out there and pick those wild flower, I mean weed and cook and ate, and some of it was vile, you know. Well, weed is just terrible, just smells so bad. You cook twice and three times, still bad. But you know, for survival, you have to eat. Then I just pinch my nose and just swallow, and that's the only way I survive because ration's just handful, handful rice in one day. I cook the rice in the morning, and I just drink the soup portion of rice and went to work, and they provide the lunch which is two kind of mochi type made of the sweet potato powder. They just mix with the water and then make foam or the mochi type and then steam it, and that's provided by company because everybody's suffering from hunger. So then go to work, I mean, go to school. After work, then I come back, then I eat that rice left on the pot. It's kind of formed a little thick soup type of thing. So that was just a terrible until the situation start improving.

SG: Were you taking care of your mother at this time also?

HU: No. At that time, occasionally. And after the war, I start working two jobs. So in other words, I work one job, go to school, and then sometime in the middle of the night, I work for the factory, different factories, make extra money to send Mother little money. That's all I could, I could have done that. And the incident in Japan from that, hungry people, is just unthinkable. Husband and wife, the husband go to work. They put all the food, available food, in wooden bins and locked up. The husband take the key with him, so the wife will not eat while he's gone. Not, this is just a few incident that we hear about. And of course, the husband beat up the wife because suspecting the wife eating the food while he is gone. And this is funny. You know, people think Japanese is honest, but my personal incident was my mother worried about me, just urging me to come home, and come home, but I just determined to stay in the city. And my mother sent me dried fish, dried vegetables in the package. And when I received the package, it's only just paper and the string and the label is on the paper. Then I protest to the post office, and the post office worker say, "Oh, you're lucky you got the package." It's empty package. The postal workers steal the food because situation was just so bad. You know, people think I'm just making up these stories, but this is my experience. And on the street, you see the dead, the body just skin and the bones. You see the railroad stations, many, many dead bodies in underground stations. That was situations. So you know, the Nisei folks say they were incarcerated in the camp. They lost the freedom, all that type of things. But us in Japan, well, for me it was American boy, suffering to go through. Sometime those wondered, gee, we suffered more.

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