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BY: And so they were there in Shelton when Pearl Harbor happened. And you told me that Jimmy Mirikitani was living with the family. Can you tell about that?

SS: Yeah. So I met Jimmy Mirikitani when he first came to the Tule Lake pilgrimage, and he came to every one after that. But it was maybe the third or fourth time he was there, my cousin Pam had been researching, looking up WRA records, and she found the records for the Okano family and it listed everyone taken from Shelton, Washington. So it had all of our family, all the Okanos, and then a Tsutomu Mirikitani. And it just had a note saying, "Working for the Okano family." So she wrote to me and said, "Hey, could this be Jimmy Mirikitani?" So the next pilgrimage I asked him, I said, "Hey, Jimmy, my cousin was looking through records and said that there was a Tsutomu Mirikitani working with the Okano family in Shelton, Washington." And said, "Is that you?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that's me. I made a fishpond for them in front of the house."

BY: So did you ever ask your mom about him?

SS: No. By then, Mom's memory was kind of fading.

BY: All right. So she and her family were living in Shelton, so were they incarcerated?

SS: Oh, yeah.

BY: So where did they go?

SS: So everybody, all the Japanese Americans in Shelton, of which there like two families plus Jimmy, got taken to Olympia and put on a train, and from there, they were taken directly to Tule Lake. So Japanese families in that area of Washington did not go through any assembly center experience, they just went directly to Tule Lake.

BY: And how long was she there?

SS: I asked her that when I took her on the Tule Lake pilgrimage, and her answer was, "One year, one month, and one day." So they arrived in late May. Like I think the camp actually opened on May twenty-something. So they must have gotten there the first week it was open, and then she left on June 4th.

BY: So they arrived in May '42 and left June '43.

SS: '43.

BY: Okay, great. And where did she go?

SS: She went to Denver and began to work as what she called a housegirl in a well-to-do family's house, as did my aunt Janet in another house, but also in Denver, so both of them went to Denver. It was a Jewish family, too.

BY: And how long was she there?

SS: The duration of the war. Once the war ended, they moved back to Shelton to restart the dry cleaning business.

BY: And she was there when your uncle or uncle's wife, anyway, served as the go-between between your father and her. So how did incarceration affect her life?

SS: Well, I mean like everyone else, it made a huge disruption. The Okanos were fortunate in that they closed up, they owned the business and the property, and they just boarded everything up and left it. And they must have gotten somebody to pay taxes. But anyway, it was still there. There was a little bit of vandalism, someone had broken a window, and there was some water damage. But pretty much everything was there, no equipment had been stolen, building hadn't been burned down like some other people experienced. So they were able to restart the business. But it took away three or four years of her life when she was in her early, mid-twenties.

BY: And did she ever talk about the incarceration to you?

SS: No, nothing specific. She would always avoid, basically avoid it. She would say, "Oh, it wasn't that bad," or, "We don't dwell on those things, it's better just to forget it." The only references that either of my parents made were when they were, usually when they were talking about people they knew and they'd say, "Oh, I haven't seen them since camp," or, "Didn't they get married in camp? They got married before the war or after the war."

BY: You said that you always knew about camp but didn't know the specifics about your parents' experiences. As a child, what did you think camp was, or what did you know about camp?"

SS: Well, what I knew is that everybody who was alive at the time was in this camp together. Because my older brother, my older cousins, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, they were all in some camp. But I had no idea what a concentration camp was, for sure, but I guess I thought it was like a church camp, because that's the only thing I knew, been to, or heard about.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.