<Begin Segment 11>

EO: Tell me about... now, you have a baby, and sort of how you cared -- where did you get diapers? How did you get baby clothes?

AH: Yes, that's right. Isn't it funny? I didn't think too much about it. Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards were two large stores that probably made a whole lot of money on the Japanese camp residents. We read those two catalogs from the two companies like Bibles. I think I remember memorizing what page the chocolate candies were on in the Sears Roebuck catalog. What page the diapers were on, or the, all those necessary things were, in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. We bought diapers -- during those days there were no Pampers or Huggies. We bought diapers through the catalog. Baby clothes, layettes. Of course, it was something. I remember going through these books and thinking well, this costs three dollars, we only get sixteen dollars. How much of that -- what do we have left for the rest of the month? Fortunately, we didn't have to pay rent, or buy our meals, but everything still cost the same for us as for people who lived outside of the camps and they were making a hundred dollars a week -- or maybe not that much -- a hundred dollars a month as opposed to what we were making, sixteen dollars a month. It wasn't easy. I remember being pregnant and saying, "I've got to have this box of chocolate," and order it, wait for two or three weeks, anticipating every day a box of chocolate, and then a notice coming, saying, "Sorry, we're out of stock." I remember crying and crying when that happened. [Laughs]

[Interruption]

EO: So, let's talk about...

AH: I was talking about the diapers.

EO: Right.

AH: Right. The latrines, the men's latrine, the women's latrine and the laundry room, those three different structures were built between rows of living quarters, barracks. We mothers especially, young mothers, knew we wanted to wash our diapers in real hot water, so we'd have to get up very early in the morning before the hot water supply would run out. We'd get up very early, do our laundry and, of course, there was no washing machine then. We had a washboard, and some very rough soap, that looked like lye or whatever that is, big soap, washing, rinsing and drying on the clothesline. No sooner than we, when we had hung our diapers, we would hear somebody yelling, "Here comes the dust. Here comes a dust storm." We'd rush and take these diapers, thirty-six diapers usually for me, every day. And try to get them off the line before the dust storm came, oftentimes successfully, sometimes not. When we were not successful, being in the dust storm, there we were again back in the laundry room washing all of this again, and it wasn't just diapers, of course, it was all the other clothes, the sheets, everything was done by hand. I think nowadays, I'm so pleased for young mothers who have the Pampers and diapers -- Pampers and Huggies, disposable, easy to take care of, so that they have more time to be with their children. I think that's a real blessing and I hope young mothers will appreciate the progress that we've made in this country. [Laughs]

[Interruption]

EO: Oh, I think we were just talking about diapers, kind of the the day-to-day of having a newborn in that situation.

AH: Yes. Having a child in this, in the camp was certainly a very interesting, traumatic, experience. It is, having a child anywhere is. When you don't have running waters and you have diapers, I'll tell you, it's something else. Having running water is something I appreciate to this day because I was deprived of it during those three years in camp. I think one never realizes how important it is to have a little faucet. When you have a child and the child has to be, has to use diapers, six, eight, ten, twelve times a day you have to change the child, you understand how important it is to have running water, to swish out the soiled diapers and then be able to wash them right away for use, immediate use later. And in the camp, since we had no running water, it was not easy. Every time I changed the child's diaper I had to run outside to another building to rinse it out, bring it back again and stack them up, so that the next morning, I could wash all those thirty-six diapers. The lack of water also was very important in homes, in apartments like my mother's. My mother was very ill, so was my father. And so ill that they actually had to use bed pans. Now imagine not having running water when you have a house, an apartment with somebody who is ill who requires the use of a bed pan. You have to keep running back and forth and back and forth from another building in order to rinse out bed pans. These day-to-day, the deprivation of the niceties of life was something that most of us who had to go through that don't forget.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.