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VY: So maybe let's go ahead and back up and go back to camp, and maybe now is a good time to talk about the experience that your mom had in camp giving birth.

MM: Yeah, okay. The reason I kind of blamed the U.S. government is because we were there in camp. And my mom, I realize now as a grownup how important it is, prenatal care while you're pregnant, what kind of care you get, and how your delivery goes. So she got really big. I was only five pounds something or six pounds, I mean, I was very little. She had an easy birth, and I've always been pretty healthy my entire life. And I attribute that to the fact that she ate a really good diet while she was pregnant with me. But when she was in camp, she had to eat camp food, and knowing how things happened in institutions, kind of, they give you the cheapest food possible, and it's not necessarily healthy. So my mom got really big with my brother. He was like eight pounds, almost nine pounds, which is way too big for her. She was a big woman, but not that big. And so then, when it was time for her to deliver, it was a makeshift hospital in camp. She didn't get out of the camp, she had to go to this makeshift hospital, apparently. And they were having a riot at the time that she was trying to deliver this big baby, and no anesthetic. She didn't have any anesthetics or the thing they give you, I forgot what they're called, to dull the pain. And the doctor, I think was, she said, afraid for his life probably. First of all, there were soldiers coming in with bayonets looking for somebody while she was trying to give birth. So here she is trying to give birth to this very large baby, and they couldn't get him out, so the doctor apparently just pulled him out, I mean, just pulled him out. And I think he wasn't quite ready, I mean, you have to kind of know when to pull them out. And he was just pulled out. She hemorrhaged really badly and the nurses had to -- the doctor, he didn't even sign his birth certificate, sign the birth certificate. And when my brother, when they tried to enroll him in school, they didn't have a birth certificate because the doctor just fled right away. And so apparently the nurses there tried to stop the bleeding and everything. But she lost a lot of blood, but she didn't get any postnatal care. So then when my next brother Alan was born, the doctor told her she couldn't have any more kids otherwise she would die, because she didn't heal properly from the last one. And so she hemorrhaged really badly and so she never had kids after that. And she lost so much blood, one of the things was that she had to take yeast and eat lots of red meat and that sort of thing, but it was really hard on her, the birth thing.

VY: That's such a horrible story, and what a horrible experience for her to go through.

MM: Oh, the reason why we don't know his birthdate is because we always celebrate it on October 27th, but I think your dad, Alan, when they went to a pilgrimage, they said that the riot, oh, there was a riot going on, I forgot to say that, when he was being born, was November 4th. So it might have been that he was born on November 4th and not October 27th, but I don't know. Do we know for sure?

CC: I have some clues that October 27th is probably right, but there was a lot happening in Tule Lake at that time regardless of whether the riots were happening right when he was born or if he was born right before them, it was probably all chaos in the camps.

MM: So we don't know for sure.

CC: I think the 27th is probably accurate. His birth announcement is in the Tule Lake newspaper.

MM: On the 27th?

CC: As the 27th, and this came out on October 28th or 29th, so it was definitely before November.

MM: Oh, okay. That's good to know, I didn't know that. So thank you, Caitlin.

CC: It's probably his real birthday.

MM: It really helps to have somebody who does this kind of work.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.