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SG: What was your experience of the day the fire bombs came?

MK: Yes.

SG: What happened that day?

MK: Well, I think it was early in the morning, I was sound asleep, my mother woke me up and then said, "Michiko, get up." Then when I woke up, it was, everything was red, and I've never, it was a beautiful red, orange-ish red. Then I heard airplanes. Then I heard the fire bombs dropping all over the place, and I didn't know what to do. And my mother said that the two younger ones, three and one, were too small to run, but then, "You are eight years old now, and then your brother is seven, the other is four, they can run, so you're going to take them with you and then get out of the place and get out of the city and then to a safety and make sure that they would not die." That's what my mother said. And then that was the best thing she told me because I was so frightened, was about to become hysterical when my mother said that. Suddenly the fact that she had confidence in me, to trust my ability to keep my brothers alive, the fear was gone. And then she said, "Okay." And then I was just about to get out of the house and my mother said, "Make sure you don't jump into the middle of the street. You'll be trampled to death, so you walk like a crab. And the moment you go outside, make sure you look up into the sky and make sure that wherever you are running to has dark sky so that underneath wouldn't be burning." And I'm very grateful to my mother because the moment I went outside of the house, she was right. The people are running this way and that way. I could have, we could have been trampled to death because we are still children. And I followed my mother's order, and then eventually I was able to escape to the outside of the city. Because my mother is a survivor of the great earthquake of Tokyo in 1923. She knew what happened then and what had to be done to survive, and she was able to use that to us, and then I'm very grateful to that.

SG: So this is, your father had died already when the fire bombs had occurred?

MK: Yes. Yeah, missing in action at the time we are told. We had some hope that maybe he's alive. We don't know.

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