<Begin Segment 14>

MR: At some point in your marriage, Homer went into the navy and you traveled with him to Japan, so probably not something you planned on. Can you talk about that?

MY: That was really a fun time for us. We were fortunate in that the children, that's Barbara and Meredith, and I were able to go along to join him in Japan. I believe he left on the 24th of December here. But in traveling to Japan, when he got there, it was already the 26th, so he missed Christmas that year. But the girls and I missed him, but we knew that we would be with him soon, and it was like a big vacation for us. We had we lived on the base, and I had a maid, and the children had a babysitter. It was great. And then our parents also were able to come and visit us at the time, so we went with my mother to her old hometown on the island of Shikoku. And being a small place, it was almost unchanged, and that was very nice. Then we went to Okayama to no. And then Homer's parents came to visit us too, and they have relatives in Okayama. We didn't go there with them, but we did visit the Yasuis later on, and it was oh, was very exciting and fun to see all the relatives.

MR: Where were you stationed?

MY: We were stationed in Iwakuni which is in Southern Honshu. That was right after the war, and there were still a lot of bombed out areas, and the scenery was all flat, and the cities were all flattened. And to drive down the highway, we would have to dodge all the nori and vegetables that were drying, that people had put out to dry on the highway. It was very primitive, but it was fun, and we enjoyed it very much.

MR: In your position as an officer's wife, how was it when you went out and about in the community off the base?

MY: Well, I don't know if word got around that we were, you know, Nikkei, but people treated us very nicely and in fact, I was asked to help out at one of the schools there. The kids had always taken English lessons, but they learned from a native Japanese whose accent was very bad, so they had me come out, not to try to teach them but just to talk to them, and that was a good experience. And the Japanese, you know, when they see you coming, they are very humble and very respectful. They would bow and be very polite. It was quite an experience.

MR: Did they make note of the fact that you really didn't look like a Japanese, Japanese as far as your bearing went, or could they tell that you were from America just by the way you moved?

MY: Probably because when Japanese come here, we could usually pick them out of a crowd of Nikkei. But there was a time when a man came to the door and I answered it, and he thought I was one of the Japanese maids. He says, "Is the lady of the house home?" and I had to tell him that I was the lady of the house, and I guess to them that was always a surprise.

MR: What was life on the base like?

MY: Well, life on the base was a bunch of coffees and sessions with the other women, but it was fun. We took, most of us had cars, so we took turns driving around the area and going shopping, and shopping in Japan is really lots of fun because things in those days were very reasonable, and everything was so different. We would go out and just have a good time and forget about coming home because the kids were being taken care of by their babysitters. It was very nice.

MR: What were conditions like for the people? Were they, had they recovered yet from the deprivation of the war?

MY: I think they were beginning to recover. In the Iwakuni area because there was the military base there, most people had jobs; whereas, maybe in other areas, jobs were very scarce. I believe the conditions in that one area was very good, and the cities were beginning to build up. I know from our first trip to Hiroshima and one of the later ones, there was quite a difference. Now when we visited Hiroshima on one of our vacations, we couldn't even recognize the city. It was so different.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.