<Begin Segment 49>

AI: Well, so, I wanted to then take you back into Chicago, that your mother was there at the Indian Boarding School with your sisters --

EH: (Yes), I'll, let me tell you. When I was taking my finals on that June... what was that? Let's see, I lived there in '43, so it must have been '44, VE Day, or, that was taking place in Europe. And my sister Jean called from the bus depot, right in the middle of my finals. And I had to go down to the office and answer the telephone, and she says, "I'm at the bus depot, I'm on my way to Rockford." I said, "What? Who's with you?" She says, "Oh, I'm (going to) get there." And so after my exams, I called my mother and said, "Why would you let a fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old be riding around a city like Milwaukee all by herself?" And my mother said, there's, there was no way she could stop Jean. Jean had to work for her own room and board at this Indian Boarding School, and shared the dormitory with a Nisei who I think was from Tanforan. And she was, she'd been hired as a teacher. And so Jean said she had to scrub a hundred and fifty bread pans every day, because they, they made all the food for probably a hundred and fifty people or so, a hundred and twenty-five people. And because she had gone through that, she felt very independent in that she worked, worked for her own room and board. And she had somehow kept in touch with a friend that she knew from camp, and they decided that they would take a domestic job, share a domestic job in Rockford, Illinois. And I think Rose's parents must have been in Rockford at the same time.

So here was Jean at fifteen, footloose and fancy-free, doing a domestic job. And she did that twice. She shared that domestic job, then when she got to, when she got to Chicago, I think an older brother... I think (Ben) Yoshioka, who I think came from Manzanar or somewhere, was also in that relocation office. And helped Jean and his sister, Julia, land a job sharing domestic work, or in this case schoolgirl. They had registered for Evanston, Illinois. Jean, by the time she was in Chicago, or leaving the Indian Boarding School, knew that the school system in Chicago was so corrupt that she was not going to be a part of it. And Evanston had one of the best school systems. So she chose, she chooses to go Evanston, and she and Julia become household help for the Curtis Candy Company daughter, I forgot the name of the family. But anyway, they did that all the way though high school, and in their senior year they could come back and live wherever they wanted. Otherwise you had to be, to go to Evanston High School, you had to be within the city limits. But I remember Jean calling my mother once and saying, "How do you fix nasubi?" Eggplants. And, because a young, young Curtis Company daughter didn't know how to, how to fix eggplant, and probably never used them much. But that kind of thing was always happening in the Ishikawa family. So I, my sisters in New York would call and say, "What do you do with gobo?" What's gobo? Not bracken, but... well anyway, you know, what the long root, vegetable. I remember explaining to her how to make kinpira gobo for New Year's.

But she, my mother stayed at that school, and the work was pretty tough. So, and she knew that the school system was not good, and she wasn't going to keep my younger sisters in that Indian boarding school, because you could imagine, it was lagging. And so then she drove out of Nielsville across the state of Wisconsin, and my, my sister said it was so embarrassing because she was complying (with) federal orders, that you had to report to the police station every time you came in, entered a new community, you reported to the police station as an "enemy alien," and you go on from there. And as she drove through these little Wisconsin towns, she would look for the policeman and, and say, "Where's the police station?" And the policeman would say, "Why? What do you want the police station for?" And my mother said, would say, "You don't know. I have to report to the police station." And they would willy-nilly take her there, and find out why she, this woman insists on going to the police station. But she was, she was just complying with the federal orders that as an "enemy alien," you had to register at the police station. Well, I'm sure that didn't go on and on forever, because she, on that trip, she drove out of Wisconsin, she went to visit friends in Cleveland, and she visited a couple friends in Chicago. She wanted to see what everybody was doing, and she was probably going to try to get a job wherever the best job was. But she talked about Washington, D.C., and I can't imagine that she drove all the way to Washington, D.C. But she was never afraid of driving anywhere, and she eventually came back to Chicago.

In fact, there was a woman on Drexel who, I don't know where, whether she saw an opportunity, but she was, she was friendly, I think she really sincerely was trying to be friendly, but she was also needing to make her own living. She bought this huge house, or she had this huge house, so she decided that it was just right for a hostel for Japanese coming out of evacuation camps. I don't know how much she knew about evacuation, but my mother rented a sizeable room for all, just my two youngest sisters (and) my mother. And I visited them a couple of times. There, they weren't that far from, from the apartment that Mabel and I had rented.

And then, before I knew it, she had landed a job -- she'd gone to the relocation office and gotten a job in, in several women's garment workers factory. One time she got a job in a glove-making factory. And she always believed in unions, for some reason. I don't think she had any occasion in Sacramento to know about union, but she was a very devout follower of Kagawa. Toyohiko Kagawa was a, kind of a radical socialist kind of minister, and (with) his diligence, (he was) able to, somehow, he was able to get a scholarship to probably Princeton. And (so he had) kind of (a) Presbyterian background, I think. We used to hear him as a speaker in Sacramento. And my, my mother just worshipped the guy. In, at one point, when we were talking about college, she says, "Well, I don't have any more money, you have to earn your own money 'cause I sent my money to Kagawa-sensei." [Laughs] And that's what she (did). She also had a, she sponsored a girl in, was it CARE? There was a program where you paid fifteen dollars a month or something, and that was, that was the total funds needed for keeping a child in, taking care of a child in the nursery. And she did, she did that kind of thing. She went to, when she went to Japan on one of her first trips, by golly, she had one of (her) nephews in Japan drive her to that school and met the girl that she'd been sponsoring for, I don't know, ten years or so.

But she drove all over Ohio and Chicago, I forgot where else. But these were good friends that were there, and sometimes she would say, "I have to check up on my friends." But when she came to Chicago, she... my thing about Toyohiko Kagawa-sensei is because he was a strong union person. He worked in the slums of Kobe, and was always trying to improve social situations. But... she would even bring sewing home. Like belts and pockets that had to have stitching around it. My sisters would have to do a little bit of... what did they call it? In the early immigration history, the kids, families did that in their home, and it was part of a family system.

And my sisters got acclimated. Fortunately, my mother, some -- I don't, I guess now I have to assume that she managed to have that sewing machine shipped to her. Somehow, for some reason, we had an electric sewing machine before she got, she had another... well, maybe she did get some, because I guess the sofa -- she didn't have the piano. At a separate time we had a piano sent out. And I guess I have to believe that maybe she was able to do that two or three times if the government had to comply. But I, that sewing, that electric sewing machine really had a work-over. And we were living in temporary, she had managed to rent a, a second-floor flat, a raggedy second-floor flat owned by a South American guy, Ecuadorian or somebody, who used to boast to me that, "I just put in an all-American hot water heater for you." What he meant was an automatic hot water heater. But they managed to communicate.

AI: And this was also in Chicago?

EH: Chicago, this was a block away from Cubs field. So my mother, my sisters became avid Cubs field, Cubs fans. They could, in fact, a block away was the Addison Station, and from that Addision Station platform, elevated station, you could watch the Cubs games, 'cause you looked down into the Cubs field. But eventually, I guess I was, my father had died...

AI: Well, let's --

EH: Oh, no, my father hadn't died. Eventually we bought a two-story brick house, she did. I had, I just had to sign the papers because Asians weren't allowed to be citizens, and therefore you couldn't buy property. So property purchases in those days, the American citizen kids did it. And she found this very solid two-story brick house, had a full basement, and we had friends who needed, they were either going to school or, they needed a place to stay, so my mother let them build a couple of rooms in the basement, and they become, they became, I don't know that they were boarders. My mother hated to cook, so I, I'd hate to think that they had to eat my mother's food. One of them was May Omura's brother, Paul, was going to University of Chicago then, and I think that must have been in '50s. Even, (yes), just about '50 or early...

<End Segment 49> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.