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AT: As soon as the war was over, we were given notice that we could all go back home if we chose to and we did. We chose to go back to Hawaii and lived in Hawaii for about a year. My father, as soon as he started looking for a job happened to run into a friend of his who eventually became a federal judge there, and he had taught him at one time. And so he had said that, "If you need a job, take this test, and you could get a job as a Japanese interpreter," so he did and he passed quickly and he was immediately sent to Japan after the war. And there he interrogated, I thought he was, worked in the post office. I thought that was what he, that was his job because no one ever told us what his job was. We just assumed he worked at the Tokyo post office, downtown Tokyo, and I thought he just shuffled papers. But he was a Japanese interpreter, and he interrogated all the Japanese men who came back, prisoner of war soldiers who came back from Manchuria. He worked there for many, we were there for almost I'd say thirteen years. He worked for the navy. He worked for the army. He worked for, I think that was where he stopped when he worked for the air force. No, I don't think so. No. I think he worked for the army then. But we lived in Tokyo. We finally went over, we were shipped to Japan after the war to be with my father, and we went over on a troop ship, and it was a very small troop ship and very, very unstable. We were very ill all the way over. We finally got to Yokohama, and of course my dad wasn't there to pick us up right away, and we had to discard all of our goods, everything that wasn't absolutely necessary, and comic books was the first thing to go. We had to throw them overboard because we couldn't take them with us if Dad wasn't there for take care of us. That was our biggest loss. We, he finally got to Yokohama to pick us up, and we drove to Tokyo where we had a home in a Quonset hut when we first got there. It was right downtown Tokyo next to the Imperial Palace, and we lived there for about, oh golly, a very short time, and then they moved us into housing right a block away from the Diet Building in downtown Tokyo.

[Interruption]

AT: I was about nine or ten when we moved to Japan, and we lived, the first house that we were given was a Quonset hut. The Quonset hut is a, my brother calls it the kamaboko house because it was shaped like kamaboko. It was, the roof is tin, and it goes all the way around the house, and it was very, very hot in the winter and very cold in the summer, very cold in the summer, very, excuse me. It was very hot in the summer and very, very cold in the winter. Fortunately, we didn't live there long. They found us other housing in a regular apartment, and we lived right next door to the Imperial Palace then, and we had the metropolitan police station in front of us, and in back of us, it was the, the military chapel was right next, right in front of us and the Diet Building was right next to that. So we were right, situated right downtown Tokyo. We could walk to the Ginza. We could walk to the Ernie Pile Theater. We could walk to the Imperial Hotel because it was so close. We went to school at Meguro. Meguro was a school that they had had in Japan before the war for children who were from other parts of the country, other parts of the world. They had missionaries there, but it was an English speaking school, so they had lots of missionaries there and lots of children from all over the world. Well, once the occupation moved into Tokyo, the occupation took it over. And so all the children who were in the occupational forces were sent to Meguro, and it was a long, long bus ride to the school because we went from all over Tokyo to that one school. It was a beautiful school. It was all brick and had a wonderful arbor, wisteria arbor. It had playfields. It had tennis courts. It was just a beautiful school. We went to school there until, oh golly, it was until my junior year, then we were sent to a military school outside of town. But while we were there, we lived in Lincoln Center which was in Tokyo right in the center of Tokyo.

But then my father, with a promotion, we then had to move out of there and move into quarters that were set up for the military officers. So we had nicer quarters by moving over to Yoyogi which was, it was called Washington Heights then. Then when they had, Japan had the Olympics many years ago, it became the Olympic Village, so we visited that area many years ago and found that everything, all of our houses of course were gone, and what was left was just a village from the Olympics. It was, we were self-contained, it was a self-contained living area. We had our grocery stores. We had our gas stations. We had the movie houses, officer's club, teenage club. Everything was there for us. We didn't have to move out of the center at all. But we had to be shipped to, sent to Naramas which was about, oh, about an hour away to go to school. You didn't dare miss the bus because if you did, it took you two hours to get back home again. But we still have, I still have people that I correspond with who went to school with me there. It was a very small school. There was all the different, all the grades were represented there. We had tennis courts, we had football games, we had football fields. We had football games against, our opponents were from Yokohama or from Tachikawa Air Base, so it was like living in the United States only as soon as we left the base, we were in Japan. On the base, it was as if we were living right here in the United States. We lived there for... oh gosh, we moved a lot while we were in Japan.

As soon as Dad, the military decides where you can stay and how long, and they decided that he was there, they needed his quarters for someone else, so they moved us out. So we had to move out to a home that Dad built outside in the Japanese community. So we lived, then we lived in our own home in Tokyo right in back of the American Embassy in Azabu. It was a very, very small home, but we had a little bit of grass because I insisted we had a little lawn, so we did. And we had all of our neighbors were from the embassies. All the different embassies were right around us. We had the Dominican Republic right across from us. We had the Chinese Embassy down the street from us, but all the different countries were, located their embassies right around that in Azabu. We then had to be bussed to school the same way only this time it took us two hours to get to school because we all had to be gathered from our different areas and then taken to Washington Square where we then had to be bussed to Naramas and that took forever. Then I never missed the bus because that, you'd never get home from that area. I didn't learn to speak Japanese only because my father said we didn't need to. There I needed to speak English because I was Japanese. If I didn't have the right ID, I couldn't get into certain areas. I couldn't get into our housing area if they thought I was a Japanese national. So Dad said just speak English, so we did. My brother, my little brother, however, was raised outside of the military compound, and he had Japanese friends, and so he learned to speak English very early, or speak Japanese very early. He was, oh, about eight when we moved out to our own home, and he had all these Japanese boys for friends, and he did pick it up right away. When I was, my brother was, my older brother Dennis was sent to, when he was old enough, he was sent to college, and he chose Hawaii. And because we were from Hawaii originally, he was able to go to school at the university without paying out-of-state tuition which was very nice. We had, all of our friends were from the mainland, so we had very few Japanese friends while we were going to school. Everyone was from the mainland, and they were all Caucasians, and there were, oh, about three or four of us who were Japanese but Japanese Americans.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.