Interviews
Overcoming trauma and speaking about his A-Bomb experience
After I came back from Japan, this is back in 1948, my mother would tell me that I used to wake up in the middle of the night screaming—nightmares. And I had difficulty with some of the food items. Anything that had a tinge of red like spaghetti with marinara sauce, a pink orange or pink grapefruit, I had trouble with that, rare meat. Anything that reminded me of the carnage that I witnessed as a child. So I had trouble eating and swallowing those items.
But as time went by, by 1955, 10 years after the A Bomb, things seemed to have dissipated. Since then, I've been able to talk about it. Although some subjects I get into sometime gets me a little bit choked up. But I could discuss this things, perhaps with less emotion than some of the people in the audience because I've done it so often and maybe I’ve become hardened to it. So yes there’s some difficulty, but it’s not unbearable.
Date: September 3, 2019
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Masako Miki
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum
