Rewarded With Food for Working Hard

We were, I was doing stevedoring. There again they had different groups. They had a group that was working in the steel mill. They were running the foundries. They would pour hot steel. They were making train rails. Then we had, there was a group they were working on a coal yard where the ships were bringing in the coal, and they would throw it on, they would dump it on the dock, and then they would put it on an escalator or on a belt and they would make real high piles out of it, you know, just mountains of coal, and then it would be shipped all over Japan. And the boys had to fill the cars, the freight cars with coal to be shipped all over Japan. And we were doing stevedoring. We were unloading. We were the lucky ones and this is why I, to this very day feel myself very lucky, the good health I’m in. We were stevedoring and I was a good guy, I was a good stevedore. Me and this Joe Squark and a few other guys. I won’t mention their names. We worked hard for them, and when we worked hard we got paid for it. We’d get slipped an extra bowl of rice or we’d get slipped an extra can of beans. We worked a lot of soyabean. Ships were bringing in soybeans from Manchuria, from China. The Japanese still had control over that part of China and that’s where the soybeans were grown, bring them in, steal them from the Chinese. And they would bring it to our dock and we would unload them. And you’d hold them over open fire, punch them like you would popcorn and they would bust open like a popcorn, but it wouldn’t be as big, be a nice white little puff out of the soyabean. And that’s what kept me going. The best food that you could get. We went, when we went to the camp, and in the morning our bowl of rice, we noticed it right off the bat, our bowl of rice was quite a bit bigger that we would get in the morning and we would get at noon hour. And we noticed that right away that if you worked hard they would give you more food. The one worked in a steel mill, that were working for a different company and what the company decided to give them as a bonus, that was their business, and that was very little. And we even went so far as to say to the guys that were working on the coal yard in the winter time, you bring us your pack sack, you steal coal and bring it in your pockets or the best way you know how, we will buy it off you with parched beans. And so the guys that brought coal in, we would give them beans and they would give us coal.

Mr. Friesen describes feeling fortunate to have been selected for stevedoring as compared to steel or coal work. He describes underground trade with the coal crew.

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.