Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Akiko Okuno Interview
Narrator: Akiko Okuno
Interviewers: Kristen Luetkemeier, Alisa Lynch
Location: Saratoga, California
Date: January 31, 2013
Densho ID: denshovh-oakiko-01-0027

<Begin Segment 27>

KL: How did other, the rest of your family spend their days? What did your mom do?

AO: Well, my younger sisters went to school, they were in school. My youngest sister found a friend, and the two of them knew everything that was going on. The two girls would sit and watch the world go by and learn about everything that was going on in everybody's lives. [Laughs] They're having a great time.

KL: How did you feel about that?

AO: It was nice, they were cute. So, what, she must have been like about eight years old or so.

KL: She sounds like a happy kid.

AO: Yes, yes. She's now very... yeah, she's strong. And she became a teacher. Yeah.

KL: Did your mother teach or tutor in the camp?

AO: No. And she got a job in the hospital sewing the sheets and things, mending things, so that she could be near my father.

KL: He was eventually put in the hospital?

AO: Yeah, he was hospitalized.

KL: When did his illness come again, or when did it make itself...

AO: He wasn't that night watchman for too long. It was only a couple of months after camp.

KL: So like later that fall or that winter?

AO: Yeah. So then my mother found out that she could get a job there, because she was going to see him at the time.

KL: Did you see him in the hospital?

AO: Pardon?

KL: Did you go to the hospital?

AO: No, he didn't want us coming to see him. I guess he was afraid of infecting us.

KL: Was there a separate ward?

AO: I think it was a separate ward for TB patients. And at the end of the war, they began closing the hospital. And I think they allowed him to come home and try to help my mother with the packing to get ready to leave camp. But by then, I was out of, I had left camp.

KL: Did your mother talk to you about what the hospital was like?

AO: No.

KL: The doctors, the staff?

AO: No. Well, my sister had talked a little bit about how things were there at the hospital.

KL: Did she feel like it was... I forgot we're short... did she feel like it was... what was her impression of the staff, your sister's impression?

AO: That they were doing the best they could with what they had, and she had no [inaudible] with that.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.