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RP: Let's talk about Eizo. He was born in Manzanar.
MY: Yes, he was.
RP: Roughly 1943, and you have a very memorable story you shared about Eizo's birth.
MY: Yes. When my mother was in labor, she already had her suitcase packed, she said that she was going to have the baby that night, or perhaps the next morning, and my father decided he would stay home with Kenji, who was three years old, three and a half years old. And so my brother Aki, who's a year and a half younger than me, had the suitcase and my mother decided to, it was time to go. It was about eight or nine o'clock. It was really dark outside, but the hospital was just up the road, a block and a half away. And so Aki carried the suitcase and my mother leaned on me, and every so many steps she would have to stop to take a deep breath. We didn't have any telephones in camp, and my mother said the doctor said it was not going to be a difficult delivery, so just get to the hospital in plenty of time, because since she already had three children she knew what the signs were and how close the labor pains were. She would ascertain for herself. And then she decided -- and I know sometimes if she was taking a breath she would be rubbing her back, and then we'd stop for her. But she never flinched, she never cried, and we just kept going. And it was uphill, I remember that, and she would lean on us. And she was so cheerful. She was not angry or upset. My brother and I, we were the ones, we wanted to, her to hurry up and get up there so we could go back home. [Laughs] But, so we took her to the hospital and made sure that she had registered, and she just waved goodbye to us and said everything was going to be okay. And then the next morning an ambulance driver came down, he had no patients in the ambulance, but he drives down to announce to us that Eizo had been born. But when she was in labor I could not go up there to get the ambulance to come because it was going to be a normal, uneventful delivery.
RP: Wow.
MY: So when I had my first child I certainly appreciated what my mother went through and how stoic she was. But the big disappointment was that I didn't have a baby sister. It was a baby brother again. [Laughs]
RP: So was it, what was that like with a baby in the barrack?
MY: My mother nursed him, so it was, it wasn't too hard. And they did have a system where an older woman, not a full-fledged nurse, but she would come, I think she came every day for about, she stayed in the hospital for at least a week, and then they brought her home in the ambulance, and then she came to wash the diapers and make sure that he had enough diapers 'cause I couldn't do it all by myself. And then I think she came to help with the laundry for maybe four weeks. But by the time he was five or six weeks old my mother was doing everything she was doing before he was born. Of course, I was helping and I wasn't in school because he was born in June, so July and August, hard time for me, doing a lot of the laundry. [Laughs]
RP: Did she pretty much completely breastfeed him, or did she use formula too?
MY: I don't remember formula. I know that she breastfed Kenji until he was almost a year old, so I think she did the same thing with Eizo. My most, the thing that concerned me the most was that we had enough dry diapers, because when winter came along it was hard to dry the diapers. There weren't disposable diapers at that time, and so that was my responsibility, make sure there're enough diapers, at least four or five.
RP: Wow. So you were busy.
MY: Yes. [Laughs]
RP: Very busy.
<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.