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MN: Can I... I'd like to ask about your mother now. And this is after the war, after camp, and you're restarting your life. And after a few years after camp your mother passed away. Do you think the camp experience and the stress of having to start life over again contributed to her illness?

CO: Well, medically, I really can't speak to the cause and effect sort of thing. The fact that she died of bleeding ulcers would point to her being stressed. But I've been told by doctors even later that had they known what it was, they could have saved her. It's just a combination of circumstances that she bled to death. They didn't recognize what was going wrong with her. And other people have said, oh, well, they now know that ulcers are caused by some bacteria, so I don't really know except that she was a very hard-working, long-suffering kind of wife. [Laughs] Gee, when I think of other Issei mothers, women who've had ten and twelve kids and worked constantly, and they didn't get something like this. So it's hard to say. It's hard to say. But in my mind, it was all connected because it seemed so sudden and so traumatic to have somebody literally drop dead. That's the way it seemed.

MN: Were you there in the hospital when she passed away?

CO: No, I wasn't there. I wasn't there. In fact, I don't know if anybody was there. She was just bleeding to death, and we didn't know and the people in the hospital seemed not to know either. It just was unfortunate it happened over a weekend and they had no staff there or something, I don't know, but that's what I was told. So what can you say? It's just an unfortunate set of circumstances.

MN: Now, after your mother's death, your father had to raise three young girls and you were the oldest. Did you have to take the role of your mother?

CO: Yeah, more or less, yeah. I was, what, sixteen, seventeen. So I learned to cook and do all those things. So at that point, that was our family. Now, my father's brother, his brother had five sons and a daughter, so they had kind of joined up to try farming together. So it wasn't like my father was all alone, so the family kept going that way.

MN: Did your father ever think about remarrying or talking about going back to Japan?

CO: He never wanted to go back to Japan, I mean, not that I know of. In fact, he never did go back to Japan. Lot of people went back just on visits or something like that, he never wanted to do that even. And I never asked him about that, but I think he had felt great, being greatly disillusioned by Japan's, the whole war thing, I think. But he did remarry, so anyway. Yeah, my stepmother, well, I was pretty old at that point, so she really didn't feel like a stepmother to me, but she was to our youngest sister, Emiko.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.