<Begin Segment 23>

MA: Well, is there any, any messages or anything else you'd like to share about, about your life?

CY: Well, no, nothing about my life, but I certainly, if I had to do this evacuation over again, I would never be able to do it. I would never be able to sleep in a horse stall or wait in that line to eat in the mess hall and things, but I don't know how we did it. We did it without any complaints, we took it as gaman and shikata ga nai, that attitude. And so, and so when I was at Topaz, I worked my head off, and I kept myself so busy that I, I didn't have... and then some of the younger people that was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, they had no idea. And they had a nice time in camp, so when you ask my brother, they said, oh, they had the time of their life. They didn't have to, they didn't have to come home, they didn't have to eat with the family, they just went to the mess hall when the mess hall was open, they were fed, and, well, you couldn't go out of the camp, and so the parents knew that the children were safe. And, but there were some people who really suffered. [Interruption] And in those days, I think the Japanese Issei people were about the change of life, too. You know, they were in their late forties or, between forty and fifty, so it was hard on the woman to adjust to all these things. And they probably lost their life earnings, too, because they lost their, they had to leave their farms and things. So, but we lived in the city, and fortunately, our neighbors were very good. We had very good relations, so it wasn't as difficult. Some people really had to go through some ugly situations where they were called "Japs" and things like that, but we never had that situation. But we had a curfew, so we couldn't go out.

And I couldn't go out anyway, my mother wouldn't let me go out of her sight. In those days, you didn't have all the freedom, so I was a stay-at-home daughter. So it didn't matter to me. And even in camp, my mother wouldn't let me socialize with other people, I never did. But that was my mother's Japanese style; a Japanese girl has to be a very domesticated child, and I accepted that. But my sister, when she went to college, she started to smoke, and you know, she did all of that, and my mother was too tired to call her down and tell her to stop doing that. And so she played cards and everything, and I never had a chance to do all of that. But after I was married, I told my husband one time, I said, "Maybe if I smoked, I would feel relaxed." And so my husband was the kind of person that would let me try, so he says, "Well, if you think that way and if you think that's going to help you, just go ahead and try." And so I had the okay, but then I thought, well, at that time, my husband had to stop smoking, and I thought it was kind of funny for his wife to be smoking when the husband isn't smoking, so I thought, "Oh, I better not start," and so I didn't start. And it's a blessing. If he had said, "Oh, I wouldn't do that, it won't help you," well, then I would have gone against his, and forced myself to do something. I was a woman just like that. [Laughs] But anyway, since I was told, "Go ahead and do it," I didn't have to. And so I thought, "Well, that saved me," I never had to smoke. And my sister used to be able to enjoy drinking, you know, socialized with her friends and played poker. Not poker, bridge. But I was never allowed to do that at night.

MA: Well, as the eldest, too, you had -- as the eldest child, you had more responsibility.

CY: And my mother was too tired at that point to correct my sister. So even my brothers wondered, says, "Boy, if you did that, Chiyo-chan, you would have never heard the end of this." [Laughs] I remember that, but I certainly hope there's never another evacuation, something like this happening. But my father always gave the impression that, shikata ga nai, this is wartime, and wartime people do things that they really don't, may regret later on, but not right now.

[Interruption]

MA: So is there anything else you'd like to share?

CY: No.

MA: Well, thank you so much for doing this interview.

CY: Oh, thank you.

MA: It was a wonderful story.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.