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MN: Let me ask you a little bit about how you met your future husband. How did you meet Akira Frank Kageyama?

KK: Well, let's see. He lives on the other end, so I see him go by. He didn't say hello to anybody. He goes right past. And then his sister worked in the hospital, you know, Mae was working as a steno there. So I knew of him. He was working on the guayule, and my father worked in the same guayule but he was more or less on the farm side. And I had a brother working there, too, and he was doing what my father was doing, taking care of the plants outside. Akira was doing something more technical. I mean, he was making cuttings and stuff like that and counting chromosomes. And then he got to know the, Dr. Emerson who was heading the project. He's the one that got all the plants and everything. He's the one that got Frank interested in counting chromosomes to see which ones would make a better plant, guayule plants. They were culling... what do you say? Differentiating the difference in the grade of the plant, how well it produces rubber and things like that. So he got to know Dr. Emerson quite well. He'd come and visit Manzanar every now and then, see how the plants are doing. There was another fellow that was a graduate of Berkeley, and he knows quite a bit about plants, too, because his father used to have the Nishimura Nursery. So he knows quite a bit of plants. So Dr. Emerson got him because he knows how to do things. Knows how to... what do you say? Well, anyway, he got to know these two people real well. In fact, Shimpei was his best man, yeah, my husband's best man for the wedding after the war, after we came back. But he was the brain, and Dr. Emerson knew about him. So between the two of them, they started on the rubber project, and they made the best rubber plant and things like that.

MN: Going back to you, though, I want to ask you, when did you first start talking to Akira, when did you start going, spending time with Akira?

KK: That was toward the end of our stay. [Laughs] That's when he went out to beet topping, that's where he got my, made enough money to get me my engagement ring.

MN: Is that the ring he bought you?

KK: Yeah, this is the ring he bought me.

MN: You still wear it?

KK: Yeah, I still wear it every day. I've had it on for sixty-something years. [Laughs]

MN: So did you know that he was gonna go and buy you a ring?

KK: Oh, no. He asked, you know, his sister left Manzanar. Some people start going out of Manzanar to get jobs outside. Well, his sister and her husband left Manzanar earlier than us. But anyway, they were out. So he gave her the money to buy the ring, so she bought it for him.

MN: Do you remember how he proposed to you?

KK: [Laughs] Kind of came as a surprise.

MN: You know, before he proposed to you, you spent a lot of time with him, but where do young, what do young couples do in camp?

KK: Well, they went to... they had block parties, and they had dances. So we went to a few dances, and we went to a few movies together. That's about all you can do.

MN: You were also sharing how you played tennis?

KK: Oh, yeah. And we had a tennis court right close by, right between the blocks. So we played tennis there. About all we could do.

MN: What kind of tennis court was this?

KK: You know, like clay. It was hard, hard packed, so it bounces. You get the sand out and you water it down and it becomes solid. So anyway, we played tennis.

MN: Now, like for privacy, did you go to, like, Merritt Park?

KK: Yeah, we went to Merritt Park, spent time there. We went pear picking. [Laughs] There were some pears right by us, so we picked some pears. Nice Bartletts. We picked our own apples close by, or raided somebody else's. [Laughs]

MN: Now, did your parents ever try to set you up with somebody else?

KK: Oh, yeah, she tried. But he was a Kibei, and very quiet, short. [Laughs] I said, "No, no thank you."

MN: Now the Children's Village is right next to Block 29. Did you have any interaction with the children?

KK: No, I didn't. Because I was working at the hospital. But his youngest sister, she used to play with the people from the orphanage because she was more or less left an orphan, too, because she's the youngest of all the sisters and brothers. And she never had a mother or father to look after her, just like the Children's Hospital, I mean, Children's Village. So she kind of felt like them. So she used to play with them, some of the children there. So she knew a lot of them.

MN: Now, Akira left Manzanar with a special permission to work at Cal Tech in 1944. Were you worried when he went out by himself?

KK: No. He was staying with Dr. Emerson, he was staying at their house and working from their house. So I had nothing to worry about.

MN: Did he propose to you before he left?

KK: Yeah, I think so. We were going together around that time.

MN: So how did you tell your parents that you were getting married to Akira?

KK: Well, they kind of suspected. [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.