Densho Digital Archive - Kay Uno Kaneko - Hana Shepard - Mae MatsuzakiInterview (denshovh-kkay

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LD: Through a fourteen-year-old's eyes, the eyes that, you were a kid, what do you remember about that? What do you remember of your brothers coming to visit you?

KK: Oh, boy, that's going to be hard. As a fourteen-year-old in Crystal City camp, I was really proud of my brother that served in the service, and I was grateful that he came back alive and not wounded. And Ernie and I were not real close, even when we were growing up. I was closer to Edison and Bobby and Stan, and somehow Ernie wasn't in there, but he and I were not very close. So although I was glad to see him and everything, there was not quite that closeness as if it was Howard or any of the other brothers. And I felt sad for my father and my mother. I think because we didn't have a home for him to come home to. And we were still on the deportation list and thinking we were going to be deported, right? And you think, well, maybe you still could be off to Japan, and what's he going to do, he'd have to go live with Hana and the rest of the family were going to be together, and we weren't. It was a very confusing time. You know, as years go by, you forget the bad parts, you just hang on to the good memories. And I've got a lot of good memories of camp because I was just a kid and had a lot of things happening. But I also remember the tension. I remember Edison and Bob not wanting to go to Japanese school, so I was the only one that went to Japanese school, and all the pressure was on me. [Laughs] And I thought, "Oh, those lucky boys." I was the only one that had to join the youth organization. We had a, comparable to Girl Scout, Boy Scout, but they were very militaristic. Both the German side had that and the Japanese side had it. I remember my brother graduating from high school, working at the hospital, and thinking he would like to become a doctor, but here we are, we don't know if we're going to be in Japan, what's going to happen? And I remember he was very depressed, and he sat in one side of the camp in front of the fence, and we were afraid that he was going to try to climb over it or do something, make the guards shoot him or something. And we had to gently talk him, a friend of ours gently talked him into coming away, coming home. It was very tense. And shortly after that, they made arrangements for him to join my sister in Chicago essentially to go to school. But being of draft age, he knew he would be drafted, and he didn't want to go into the army so he volunteered for the navy. But Edison stayed in camp.

And after they sent me out, in '46 they sent me out because there was no school. So I traveled with another family that was going to California, I traveled by myself to California to join my mother and my sister. Oh, my mother went out earlier because my sister in Chicago was, has a miscarriage, and my mother went out to take care of her. And when she did that, my father said, "Don't come back into camp." So there was maybe a half a year, nine months, maybe a whole year. But I was the only female in our household, and took care of my father and my brothers, did the cooking and the washing and the housecleaning and all those things that, "women's roles." [Laughs]