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KL: So it was you and you said you have just a sister, a younger sister?

JM: I have one sister, yes. So my mother must have had the miscarriage before 1930. My sister was born in '33, and my mother had had a stillborn child first, and then a miscarriage, and then my sister. And my mother always told me my father made a funny face when I was born, because that meant four girls, and he wanted a boy. [Laughs]

KL: What year were you born?

JM: '34.

KL: Okay.

JM: And Dr. Tanaka delivered me at the old Portland Sanitarium, which was now a rehab place on Belmont... is it Belmont and Fifty-Seventh, yeah, somewhere around Sixtieth.

KL: Who was Dr. Tanaka?

JM: Well, he delivered probably almost all of the children in Portland, and I think... I don't know what he did. I don't remember him being in camp. I remember Dr. Kinoshita and Dr. Shiomi being in camp, but I don't know... oh, he may have gone to Ontario, because that's where his son, when he became a doctor, was practicing also. But he's the one that my mother loved the name Mary, she wanted to name me Mary, and he said, "No, there's too many Marys," because he probably delivered Mary Nakata first, and so then he said, "Name her Jean, so I was named Jean." And where they ever came up with the name Alice for my sister, because they could barely pronounce it, it was always "Arisu," and it just surprised me that my sister's name was Alice, because like I said, you would have thought May or some other easy name like Jean.

KL: Did you guys have Japanese names, too?

JM: Yes, uh-huh. My sister's name is Midori, which means "green," and my name is Akiko because I was born in September and that's "fall," or "autumn."

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.