Decision to go to Hong Kong or Japan

The way we had it figured out, a few guys and myself, a buddy of mine, he was from Dauphin, Manitoba. Joe Squark was his name. And we had it figured out. He says, “If we stay here, we know what we’re going to do here. We go to Hong Kong, if we go to Japan voluntarily, you never know what you’re going to run into there. Might be worse.” In Hong Kong we had the weather in our favour, in Japan we hadn’t. It does get cold there. But then, come one draft, Japanese, they named the amount of people they wanted on that draft and our Canadian superiors, especially the doctors, they made a list who they figured would be the best guys to go. The most healthy, the most capable, and strongest, mentally and otherwise. And they went and three months later they came back with another list. They wanted another group. I was on the third one, I think. And by this time we kind of decided well we have to go in the end anyway. So we didn’t try any funny stuff. If our name was called to go, we’d go. No problem. And then when they did call us and put us on a boat in Hong Kong, it was one of the boats that they had raised up from the bottom of the bay that the British had scuttled and sunk when the war broke out with Japan. And Japan they came in there and raised it, and refitted it, and now it was ready to take the prisoners of war back to Japan. It was a coal boat. We slept on top of a pile of coal in the hole of the ship. That was our living quarters. We landed in Yokohama, and from Yokohama we went on a train and we went. The train stopped on the outskirts of Yokohama and it already had isolated the people that they were going to take off the train in Yokohama to go and work on the shipyards. But they had already put them all in one car. When the train stopped, it was the last car on the train and they just disconnected the car and we kept on going. We went to a city called Niigata, the most northern seaport in the main island of Japan.

Mr. Friesen discusses the choice of either staying in Sham Shui Po or joining the labour draft to Japan. He describes his voyage to Niigata.

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen

Isaac ‘Ike’ Friesen was born on a farm in the Russian Ukraine on October 19, 1920. His father died while Ike was an infant, leaving his mother to run the farm. At the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mrs. Friesen sold the family farm and emigrated to Winkler, Manitoba, later moving to and buying a house in nearby Pomcooley. Mr. Friesen attended the four room school across the street, completing grade eight before becoming a farm laborer to help support his mother. He eventually tried working on a sugarbeet farm in Carmen, Manitoba, but quickly decided joining the armed forces was a better option. He tried to join the Royal Canadian Navy, but was deferred to the Army. He took basic training as a member of the Eighteenth Manitoba Reconnaissance Regiment at Shilo. He was designated as “D” - unfit for overseas service, until being recruited by the badly depleted Winnipeg Grenadiers where his status suddenly became “A1.” Once the conflict in Hong Kong ended with the Allied surrender, Mr. Friesen worked as a laborer at Kai Tek airport. He was eventually shipped to the camp in Niigata, Japan, where he labored as a stevedore. After being liberated and returning to Canada, Mr. Friesen, as the result of a chance meeting while hitchhiking, was offered and accepted employment with what is now Shell Oil.