<Begin Segment 38>

AI: Well, I wanted to ask, also, I think you got ill at some point, didn't you?

MK: Yes.

AI: And what, so tell me what happened there.

MK: Well, of course, the Japanese life was so different. The weather was so different. And I came down with a -- it was, I think, within a year -- I came down with pleurisy and it's called the wet serous, I mean, I had a lot of water collect in my pleura. And the doctors were scarce but anyway, I was hardly able to breathe. And I remember I totally lost, lost my appetite. I wasn't eating. My mother was really concerned. And the doctor did come to draw some serous fluid from my pleura and it kinda helped me breathe. But everything was black market. You couldn't buy aid, you couldn't buy food, even if you had the money. We didn't have the money, but even if you had the money you couldn't buy. So, I remember my mother came back and with her hachimaki she had this one egg cradled in her hachimaki and she says, "Marion, Marion, look what I found, look what I got you." (When I was well), I could eat, sit down and eat three eggs at one sitting, but here she, (with) this precious egg. She was so proud, she was, she got this egg for me. She said, "How do you want me to prepare it for you? Boiled egg, soft boiled egg, fried egg?" And I didn't even want that. So I thought, you know, I mean, these are the loving thoughts that you just... I haven't forgotten. Well I, I'm, I don't know how it ended up being, but anyway, I remember that that's how scarce food items were.

AI: Well, you were so ill that you had to stop going to school. Is that right?

MK: Pardon?

AI: Were you so ill that you had to stop going to school?

MK: Right. I stopped going. (...) I stopped going to school. And by the time I got better all the classmates were in the factories, working in the war effort. I don't know really what type of work. I guess they were sent to different, different areas. But then when I was well enough to go to school, just to get my attendance checked off, I went there and they called it the taiki group. I don't know what you call it, infirmary kind of a situation. And there were just a handful, maybe half a dozen girls in the same situation who couldn't do strenuous work. So the school, (Ibara), that town had a lot of, what do you call, they (mills) manufactured yardage, and so they brought uniforms, army uniforms to the school, and our job was to sew buttons on them. And when I felt that, (...) Japanese soldiers' uniforms felt like gunnysack. And I thought, oh my -- I mean, I could just feel around my neck, even as young as I was I just sensed, how sad. And you can just measure how poorly off the country is becoming. So I sat and sewed my buttons. We weren't pressured to... demanded how many we had to do, but that was the thing I did for, for awhile. That was my job, and attendance in school. But I ended up getting a diploma, but so long as I attended. So I really can't say I really learned an awful lot during (my junior year).

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.