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AI: And then I think it was also a little bit later that same year, 1934, that your youngest sister was born.

EH: (Yes). (Sara)... (Sara) was born in June, so my dad must have gone into the sanitarium early in the year.

AI: Oh, I see.

EH: It wasn't that long. And... but for us it was a trying bit because my father -- my mother had started --

AI: Or, I'm sorry. Did you mean Sara?

EH: Sara, (yes). My mother had started taking care of some business, and she was gone a lot. And to, to have to care for this two- or three-month-old baby who was, I mean, if she started crying, she was crying for long hours. And the poor, poor kid. We never had any instructions or what to be sensitive about, and... but it was awfully trying to have a crying baby. And I wish, I wish we had known some of the things to do. Eventually my mother did -- not eventually, almost within a month or two, when she realized she was going to be gone a lot, she hired a housekeeper. First it was a friend of ours who also went to the same church, and I remember her quoting Sara at one, one-and-a-half, saying, "You Mama?" Meaning she didn't know who her mother was. I mean, whether obasan was there all the time caring for her, so Sara was asking, "Are you my mother? Or is my mother..." my mother. But she took good care of -- and then another trying bit was when, when she was about two, maybe three, my mother decided to send her to a nursery, a Catholic-run nursery, and a car would come after her. And it was very hard to cope with it. She, she, Sara would go off just crying and crying. And then I was responsible for going to pick her up from the nursery. And that was about a two or three block walk.

And, and that Catholic church had Catholic missionaries, apparently, who had been to Japan, and they wanted dearly to establish a Japanese school, probably an educational school. But at first they gathered, oh, probably twenty, twenty-five of us in, in a portable, and we all sat around the edge of the room and that's... that I guess was my first inception of education in Sacramento. But I had been to first grade in Chico, and I knew this was not a classroom, and it was not a right classroom. And I kept complaining about it and saying to, to my father, "I want to go to a real school. We're not reading and learning anything." Because there was this whole age range. My younger... I think Anna must have been in that group at first. She got her leg amputated when she was six, so maybe it was her kindergarten years. But anyway I convinced my father that that was not a real school. I wanted to go to a real school, so he enrolled us in Lincoln School. But I think my parents were not wanting us to... they, they wanted us to be kind of purely American, and they didn't want us to grow up with accents, they didn't want us to... with maybe some kind of complex if we went to a, a racially entrenched school. So I remember visiting the principal at this apartment on a Sunday afternoon. And apparently they went to visit, both my parents, and I think at least three of us, maybe, maybe all four of us, trying to convince this principal to let us go to the next school, to William Land School. And William Land wouldn't have been that far, probably five or six blocks the other way. But she wouldn't do it.

And Mrs. Hopley dearly loved her school, particularly because it was a majority Asian almost, Chinese and Japanese. Scholastically they did well, though I, I remember hearing all through my life in Sacramento my older friends remembering what happened to them when their friends did not understand an English word or they would say, "I have a stomach," meaning, "I have a stomachache." And the teacher would return with some crack, but... that kind of thing. But you certainly adapted to it and grew.

My, my sister Anna, who had the leg amputation at, at six, eventually when she got her peg leg she went to Lincoln School, and she would not let anybody stop at anything. But when she got... at some point she got instead of a peg leg, a leg that looked like, prosthesis that looked like, but that would break every once in a while. And I didn't know until, oh, late, late, maybe twenty, thirty years ago that... how trying it was, because the teachers were not really sensitive to that kind of situation. And she said, "When the leg broke, the teachers would make me stand out in the hall." And it must have... I mean, if they could have at least provided a chair, it would have been easier. And Anna was telling me at that, at that point, kind of criti-, being critical of me because as the older sister I should have been sensitive to it. And my mother never pushed that on me. I was never called Nesan, and she never said as the older sister I had to do this or that, though I did have to go pick up Sara, and I did have to... I did learn to cook early and that kind of thing. But I was kind of horrified when I... when Anna told me that. And, but she, she was a stalwart kid. Even from... even before the accident, I remember her having really angry crying spells, and she would knock her head on the floor repeatedly. And eventually she did develop what's called... it's, it's kind of a rupture of the organs. And it, it doesn't rupture, but it, it collects a mass in a certain place and it creates a swelling. And if you exert yourself too much, it could be dangerous. So in those days they provided a, a very hard strap with kind of a bulbous formation that, that pressed in to hold that rupture in place. There's a --

AI: Oh, hernia?

EH: -- there's a medical term.

AI: Is it a hernia?

EH: Hernia. Hernia, of course. They didn't call it hernia in Anna's days. But she coped with that all the time. So then when she, when we got into camp the doc-, or the leg broke, and my mother was always afraid that that was going to happen. We were in the assembly center from March... I say March -- most people are saying April or May -- 'til August before we went to Tule Lake. The assembly center was maybe fifty or twenty or so miles outside of... maybe not. Thirty miles outside of Sacramento. But when she, we got into (Tule Lake) camp on the first year, let's see... fourth grade. [Pauses] Let's see. Jean... '41. I think (Sara) was in second grade and Anna was in third or fourth grade. And just before school started -- see, I'm trying to remember whether that's the first year. I think that must be the first year we were there -- she, when the prosthesis broke, some nuns took it to San Francisco for repair. And it didn't come back for months and months. And when school started -- and I think school started late that year because we didn't move into, we didn't get to Tule Lake until August. Must, school must have started like October, and Anna wouldn't go to school because all she had was... she wasn't willing to face this sea of strange faces. And my mother was not angry at Anna, angry at the situation. But she would not permit any of us to miss any school, so she told me I had to carry her. And she was a big kid, but anyway, we struggled and got to the door, to the barrack door. And a Nisei, young Nisei teacher, on her first day of teaching, opened the door and greeted us. And to that day, Anna was never... you know, she would, she would go to the teacher's barrack and wait for her and walk to school with her. But that was such a saving grace that... I think her name was Grace Sakata. She was an optometrist's wife. But she was so good. Anna had a loyalty and an attitude towards her, so wherever -- and she was in Chicago for a while, and eventually my... the rest of the family, Ishikawas moved to Sac-, to Chicago, so she saw her quite often. But that was hair-raising, but on the other hand a real gratitude that she could do this. And then poor Mrs. Sakata, I mean, Anna was at her doorstep, walk home with her, and early in the morning. And, and she managed.

And when she... when my mother drove out of camp and, and they had to go to, Winnebago boarding school in Wisconsin, by that time, Anna was a gutsy kid and she wasn't going to let anything stop her. She, in fact, when... even after relocation in Chicago she, she was at Lakeview High School and joined the basketball team. And with her amputated leg, she could, she could just about do anything. And it was... she would be hilariously laughing on the telephone, because they would be going over the games, after each game, and she could shoot the basket all right, but the thing that often made them win was the opposition would bump into her and get so distracted by that hard surface that they would drop the ball or, and, but she made it. She's an art prof. at a fashion institute now in New York City.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.