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TI: Yeah, so let's talk about this. So you now go from Los Angeles and are now going to Santa Anita. You're in Santa Anita, and then tell me what happens then.

FC: Well, this is a camp situation in which the health facilities are very limited. It's clinic hours and you go and you sit in the clinic for hours and hours to be seen.

TI: And your sister's complaining of a stomachache?

FC: Stomachache, yeah. And my father was always kind of leery. He was real Japanese style, you could take care of it yourself, you don't have to go see a doctor, so he would try to find a way to get my sister's stomachache to go away. He did all the wrong things, and on top of it he didn't want to drag her over to sit for hours at the clinic, 'til finally she just, he could tell she was really sick. She got ashen, she couldn't move, and her temperature was up, so finally he does go down and insists that, to the staff -- and this is a Japanese American nurse -- that he needed some help. So she sends the ambulance, which is an army Jeep ambulance. They come after her and they take her to the hospital, and they converted the veterinary hospital for human surgeries.

TI: Right. Okay, so this was at Santa Anita, so this was for the horses.

FC: So the surgery was performed there, and fortunately the surgeon was a Nisei doctor, Dr. Norman Kobayashi, and he had the most recent medical experience, so he used sulfa drugs on her 'cause her appendix had burst and she was full of pus inside. And he cleaned her up with the sulfa drugs, which is why she's still alive today. She, but she was draining 'cause they were, she had all that in her system, so she was draining and she got down to be like seventy pounds. She lost weight and she couldn't eat, and so then the secondary tubercular infection came out and so she came down with tuberculosis. And so they didn't have any facilities at Santa Anita. For public health reasons she needed to be isolated, so she went to the county hospital and she remained there until -- they put all the Japanese tubercular patients in two sanitariums, one in San Francisco and one in southern California, and so she went to this, they took over a private TB sanitarium, put all these Japanese patients there, put on MP guard.

TI: Guarding the patients.

FC: And these patients were so sick, 'cause Japanese families kept them hidden away, so they were coughing up blood. If they tried to escape they would have hemorrhaged and died. They were very sick patients. But anyway, they got, she got sent there.

TI: And so she was sent alone? I mean, so the rest of the family went on to Arkansas?

FC: On to Arkansas.

TI: To Rohwer. But then she stayed.

FC: She was there the entire time.

TI: It must've been a frightening experience for her, 'cause she was about how old then?

FC: She was nineteen. She had just graduated high school in 1941. The summer of '41 she graduated high school.

TI: But she survived. And then she was able to join the family in Arkansas?

FC: No. We came back to California and then she was discharged.

TI: Oh, so she stayed there throughout the war.

FC: The whole war time.

TI: Now, does she have any interesting stories about being --

FC: I'm sure, but she never talks about it. I was thinking that there's, there's still survivors from that tuberculosis sanitarium. Their stories would be interesting.

TI: Now were, was the family able to communicate with her, did letters back and forth?

FC: Yeah, my mother wrote. I don't recall my writing her. At that point, see, she was always big sister and she always kind of treated my younger sister and I as the babies, so we were not close at all. And although the night that she had the surgery and one of the doctors said she wasn't gonna pull through, that's when I fell apart. I just couldn't imagine her not being a part of the family. But then she did survive. And then those three and a half, three years or so that we were in Arkansas I never saw her, and those were my teenage years, so I, in a sense I was happy she wasn't there to try to control me. [Laughs] So I had a chance to kind of find my own person and as a result of her not being around. But when we got back together it was really kind of rough because she could tell I changed, and we didn't have any, we weren't really close, so it was really tough. But in later life, after I got married and she was, and we both had children, she and I got to be real close.

TI: Interesting.

FC: So she looks to me for help, so our roles have kind of reversed and I'm, she looks at me as the one that helps her rather than the other way around. I still call her oneesan, big sister, but my kids call her Auntie Neesan. [Laughs]

TI: Interesting. Auntie Big Sister. That's good.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.