The Japanese ran Truk when I was growing up. I took three years of Japanese in school, and worked for them. I spoke Japanese, and many people my age who grew up during that time—the “Japan Time”—speak better Japanese than English. With the Japanese administration, everything was under control. We islanders were ordered to keep everything clean and neat, and the island has never looked so good again. Today we don’t have that kind of discipline, and you can see that things are not so neat now.
I was seventeen years old in 1944 and was working for the Japanese navy at the Dublon base. I drove a small boat back and forth from a dock in Dublon Town to the Japanese cargo ships. It was a good job, and I was well treated. Things were still good on Truk for us then.
One day in 1944 the American planes came and bombed the Japanese ships and sank many of them. I was scared, but I stood on shore and watched it all, and I saw where the ships sank. This is when things started to go bad on Truk. After this the Japanese were very angry, and their treatment of us changed. What was the worst for us was not the American raids where they sank ships, but the later bombing raids by the big bombers way up high. They dropped bombs right across the island. The bomb explosions covered the island of Dublon, and almost everything was destroyed. A lot of the Japanese supplies were destroyed, and many of our gardens were ruined. Pretty soon the Japanese started running out of food, and they asked us islanders to give them more food from our gardens. But our gardens were ruined, so we didn’t have much food to give. This started the really bad times, when food was very scarce and the Japanese were more and more desperate to have food and they took it from us. They were going hungry and we islanders were going hungry.
I heard things about the Japanese. There was a Japanese surgeon, a captain. After American pilots were captured in the raids, they were taken to the Japanese hospital to recover. But this captain did things to them, medical experiments. A couple were bayoneted to death, and others were beheaded. I heard about this during the war from Japanese friends of mine who didn’t approve of these things. The Japanese captain was arrested by the Americans after the war and was hanged after a war crimes trial. I heard he denied his guilt right up to the end.
After the surrender, the Americans came to Truk and told the Japanese military and civilians they had to be shipped home to Japan. Many didn’t want to go. They had lived for many years on Truk, and had friends there. Some Japanese men had married Trukese women. They were given a choice—either leave by themselves or take any children they had, but the Trukese wives must stay on Truk. After they left most were never heard from again. But every now and then, in just these recent years, some older Japanese tourists come back and start asking questions. They want to see the old Japanese town on Dublon. I take them and they can’t believe their eyes. There used to be a nice little town over there, neat and clean. Now nothing’s there but jungle and a fewroads. The ruins of the old hospital are still above the town, and one of the old fuel tanks by the docks is still there. It’s rusted now and empty, and it is still there only because it was empty when the Americans bombed and it didn’t explode like the rest. There are also a couple of the old piers, and I can still see the pier where I docked my boat when I was driving it back and forth out to the Japanese ships. Some of these Japanese weep when they see that almost nothing is left of their little town. Some of these Japanese men will ask questions about certain Trukese families, and Trukese women, and what happened to them. Most are dead now, but some of the kids are still around. It’s all very sad.
I saw where a lot of the Japanese ships went down during the raids. When we started scuba diving at Truk, I went out and found where the ships were. We started to get more and more sport scuba divers coming to Truk, and they all wanted to see the sunken ships. I took tourists out to the ships for years, and made more dives and located more of the Japanese ships. Many are getting covered with coral now, but the tourists still come. They say Truk is one of the most famous scuba diving locations in the world. I’m glad I didn’t go to the bomb shelters during the raids. If I had, I would have never seen where the ships sank, and I wouldn’t have known where to look for them for the scuba divers.