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Robert Nabuo Teragawa "Service in the MIS" My wife Chiyeko and I were married on February 2, 1942. By the end of that month we sold our thriving grocery business and home in East Los Angeles. We were one of 100,000 Japanese American citizens that were given notice to evacuate the West Coast. We were directed to report to the Santa Anita horseracing track where we lived in a stable for the next ten months. From there our group made a more permanent move to Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas. After approximately two years the government encouraged us to begin leaving the camps to renew life on the outside. I separated from my family and went with a number of other men to Chicago seeking employment. After a couple of weeks of hunting I found a job at International Harvester where tractors and treads for army tanks were manufactured. About a month after I was hired I received an induction notice and quickly returned to Rohwer to pack up my family and move to Minnesota where other family members had already taken up residence. Leaving my family again, I reported to Fort Sheridan in Illinois for an induction physical and then to Camp Shelby in Mississippi where we were trained as replacement infantry for the 171st battalion in Europe. Before I was able to finish the required training, the European Theater of Operation was beginning to come to an end. At this point the army located as many Japanese Americans that they could who were able to read, write, and speak Japanese to serve as translators and interpreters for the military effort. I, along with my younger brother Richard and Major John Aiso's brother Paul, were sent back to Minnesota where we were assigned to the MIS group at Fort Snelling. Within six months we graduated from the intense training at Fort Snelling and were sent by boat to a war zone under a cloak of secrecy so carefully guarded, no one knew where we were heading. Many men speculated that we were going to Hawaii, but I thought our course was taking us too far south to hit the Hawaiian Islands. It was on August 5, 1945 while still on the southern course that we received notice that Japan has surrendered and the war was over. I recall the overwhelming relief that this news brought. Men were running and jumping for joy all over the ship for days after the news came. Our ship never diverted from its course and we arrived in the Philippines where we stayed for four weeks. We were later sent to Japan where we were assigned as translators for General Douglas Macarthur's head quarters in Our office was located in a Japanese shipbuilding facility formerly known as Yusen. The building was located in front of the Tokyo train station about a block from General Macarthur's headquarters. Our office consisted of about forty translators most of which were Nisei and Kibeis. Amongst the staff were also two Japanese women who could read "Sosho", an advanced style of writing with which most of us were not familiar. These women were an enormous help to us in translating the mail, diaries, and documents of prisoners and civilians. The ranking officer in our office was a full colonel. A first and second lieutenant, and myself, the one non-commissioned personnel (T3) assisted the colonel in the translation room. The works I translated, and things I saw have remained etched in my memory as if they happened yesterday. The saddest diary I translated was a record of a mother of four small children that had hidden underground around the time the war ended. They would come out at night to seek food to secure their survival. A victim of the anti-American propaganda, she so feared that her children would be harmed if they were caught, she eventually took their lives and her own in desperation. All accounts concurred that the food supply, scarce during the war, got progressively worse near the end. One diary I translated told of a soldier that caught a large butterfly that enabled him to nourish himself for several days. More grizzly records included a group of soldiers that resorted to cannibalism in order to survive when food ran out near the end of the war. A common thread in all the works I translated was that the Japanese Nationals in the Pacific were tired of the war, the morale was low, the food was scarce, and everyone was praying for the war to end. Even after the occupation we received hundreds of letters every day from people all over Japan, requesting aid form the US government. The food supply slow to improve, led starving children to scavenge through piles of empty soda cans outside our PX, hoping to find a few drops left behind. It was painful to watch the suffering people, especially the children. One Thanksgiving we were allowed to invite a guest to a traditional dinner. My guest was a little nine-year old girl whose brother did our laundry to raise money to sustain their family. The girl could not believe the abundance of the meal that evening, and was able to take home a lot of donated leftovers to her grateful family. After two years the Army informed me that if I were to stay in the service for an additional year I would be promoted to the rank of Master Sergeant. If I were single I would have accepted the offer but I gratefully declined because my wife and two sons in Minnesota were much more important to me. I would have had enough points to be discharged in a short period of time, and it was clear that this was the path I would choose. On one of my remaining days in Tokyo I was working at my desk when two Military Police, one armed with a sub-machine gun and another with a sidearm entered the office. The two MPs carried a roll of paper that they protected carefully. They went directly to the Colonel in charge and received permission to enlist my expertise in processing their document. They approached me and instructed me to insert specific characters in specific places on the documents. In my work I did a lot more reading than writing so I was a little hesitant to jump right in. I needed to practice on several pieces of scrap paper before I was able to complete the scripting, on each of three documents. My practice papers were then crumpled up and tossed onto the wastebasket. Although I was curious about the documents I was not able to read them as the MPs immediately rolled them up and exited with them as soon as the ink was dry. Because I was not familiar with the characters I scripted onto the documents, I removed my practice scrap papers from the basket and took them to the "Sosho" women to get their opinion. One of the women looked carefully at the scrap and identified it as the emperor's signature. I was stunned and didn't know what to think. I knew that the original surrender documents were signed on the USS Missouri in Yokohama Bay but I never knew how these documents fit into the process. For a while I wondered if I had done something wrong, but nothing ever came of it. I often wonder if it is in fact my signature on those documents that commemorate such a significant event in history. I am enclosing pictures of Tokyo and Hiroshima after the occupation. This war caught my immediate family half in the US and half in Japan. Two of my brothers Hideo and Jiro, and one sister Chidori , lived just 15 miles from ground zero in Hiroshima, and all miraculously survived the devastation. On my first trip to Hiroshima the sight of the destruction stunned me. Less than six months later, houses, shops and other buildings began showing up, seeming to rise on their own from the rubble. I said my farewells to my brothers and sister in Japan in 1947 and did not visit again for 43 years. My other two brothers in America, Richard and Edward returned to raise their families in Los Angeles. When I tell my stories about the war, many listeners are shocked and saddened by the treatment of loyal Japanese American citizens. I am not. Although I am saddened by the fatalities and destruction of this war, I am grateful for the opportunities that the MIS provided, and for the life that my family cultivated on new land in Minnesota. About the Author: Robert Nabuo Teragawa
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