<Begin Segment 25>

SY: And in the meantime, actually I would love to talk a little bit about your husband. When did you meet him?

CI: Probably when I was seventeen. We got married in 1950 and I think I met him probably... yeah, I must have met him around '47, just about the time I went into nursing program.

SY: So you'd just come back from...

CI: Well, I graduated in '46, remember, from Roosevelt.

SY: So you'd been back a while. And then you met him...

CI: Yeah. And he was in a fishing club, and we were the Maharanis. Remember the Maharanis? And so...

SY: And that was a club that you were one of the first people in the Maharanis?

CI: Well, some of us started from camp, in the Luanas.

SY: Oh, so it was kind of the next...

CI: Yeah. And then we started the club in Boyle Heights, Maharanis.

SY: Where does that name come from?

CI: Well, you know, it's an offshoot of Maharajas, you know the Maharanis, the queens, I guess? I don't know. But anyway...

SY: So you were in that club and your husband was in a fishing club.

CI: He was in a fishing club.

SY: Was it the same idea, social club?

CI: Yeah, they were social. And so they had, they invited us to a beach party. They used to have beach parties in those days. And so that's how we -- except that he danced all night long with this other woman. [Laughs] She was older, but she was a friend of his from a long time ago. So anyway, he did spend a whole evening dancing with Sophie.

SY: And then what happened?

CI: Oh, then, later on, we went to other dances.

SY: That's how you met him, though?

CI: Yeah. And another thing is he was very tall. And I'm five-six, or I was five-six, and I had never seen anybody that tall before.

SY: So that impressed you.

CI: Oh, yes, yes. And I didn't realize that he was a soldier. He didn't say very much about being a soldier, but I didn't know he was in the 442.

SY: And what was his name?

CI: Robert Ichikawa. And he was from the Seinan area.

SY: So he grew up in Los Angeles.

CI: Yes. And he was also in Santa Anita and I never saw him or never met him there. Then they went on to Amache. And you know, he carried the American flag in the Nisei Week festival for thirty-some-odd years.

SY: That was his thing, huh?

CI: Oh, yeah.

SY: Did he talk much about being in the 442 after you met him, or after you knew him, got to know him?

CI: Oh, yeah. They always talk, those guys, you see the same thing at the reunions, talk about the same things over and over. Well, yeah, for them it's recollections.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.