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BN: And then before I turn it back to Issay, I wanted to ask, through this period -- and this will recur later -- but did you know about, I mean, did your parents talk about their camp experience at all growing up or even taking Asian American Studies courses? Did that prompt you to ask them about it? What did you know about their wartime story at this point?

KM: You know, we had heard stories, bits and pieces, but about camp itself, not a lot until my sister asked my mother, who had said that she had been at the gun club, they told her to go home because something had happened, and then the family being in a flurry to get rid of things and to find a way to leave, but they couldn't, and her father being picked up. We thought it was after Pearl Harbor, but it was much later. So a lot of things were mixed up, and they had been at the Tulare Fairgrounds. She didn't say much. She said that her job was to escort a mental health patient, mentally ill folks, on the train, that's what she said. She ended up being a nurse's aide for a while at Gila working under one of the, Marianne Masaoka, she married one of the Masaoka brothers, so she remembers that. She was a nurse's aide, and she didn't talk much about the conditions. She didn't talk at all. I didn't hear about the barracks, didn't hear about the food, none of that. She didn't talk about her family, what her father did. I think there father was a cook, though. And the only feeling she expressed was, at first she didn't say much, she just said that, "It was okay, it got us off the farm," which it did. And then later on, at the end, she really did say it was the worst thing that ever happened to their family, so she said that. But she always talked about the good times, going to Chicago and really loving that kind of experience, the fun she had with her girlfriends and living on... I can't even remember the name of that avenue around Lake Michigan, Geneva Terrace. She'd throw out these names of places that sounded like, "Oh, it was really great, what a fun time it sounded like," and really neat places, you know. The Kanne family, and loaning her a car, and she had an accident, and they said, "It's okay." So it just sounded great, and then meeting my father at a dance or whatever it might have been. And my father had really good memories of being in the military and being in Chicago as well. And he wasn't in camp. He visited his family, but he didn't even talk much about that. And I just asked my father how he felt about the end of the war, because Japan lost. And he's so funny, he just said there was fliers coming down or something like that, and said the war is over, he said, "Oh, the war is over." That's it. But I did ask him, I said, "Did you think that the emperor was a god?" Because he's Kibei, raised in Japan all that time, and he seriously said, "Yes." And I think he still might have believed him. So I thought, oh, okay. But he was able to reconcile that with his being here in America. Never had any feelings.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.