Densho Digital Archive - Katsumi Okamoto Interview (denshovh-okatsumi-01-0018)

<Begin Segment 18>

RP: Can you share a little bit with us the impact of camp life on your parents at this time and also your older sisters? You said your dad was, was he still ill in Minidoka?

KO: Well, he couldn't do heavy labor, so they gave him a job at the hospital. He helped in the, assistant cook in the kitchen. So he ate well, and he was able to bring home some...

RP: Special treats?

KO: Special treats, but I never, I wasn't home so I never got to eat it. I was with my friends. I think this is very typical of everybody you talk to that they hung around with their group. Yeah, a disruption of the family structure.

RP: With a lot of, yeah, a lot of different events and sort of dynamic things had changed the whole family structure.

KO: It broke it down.

RP: Right, just the life in camp, as well as kids like yourself going out on farm furloughs, the "loyalty questionnaire."

KO: I was never in on the loyalty because I was a little too young when they put it out. You had to be eighteen, remember, eligible for the draft.

RP: Right.

KO: I never got to be eighteen in camp so I didn't have to face that.

RP: Right. How did your mom adjust or did she, to sort of the routines of camp?

KO: My dad was very Americanized; he believed in this country. In fact, I understand in the early years, my mother had an older sister. They had a big machine shop in Manchuria and they had no children. So you know how that goes, they asked my mother for me, 'cause they had an older brother, they wanted somebody to take over. And my mother was rather concerned a little bit, because you know how, family pressure. My dad just said no. He was very Americanized, and he says, "No, that ain't gonna happen." I wouldn't be here today otherwise, because they were all captured by the Russians and put in prison camps.

RP: Prison camps, wow. The other thing was, I mean, a number of Nisei kids were sent back to Japan...

KO: To study.

RP: To study. Became Kibeis, a different perspective.

KO: But look at it the other way, the U.S. Army were lucky that they did go back, because when they came back, they were the ones that... I'd been reading the history, 'cause I was in the MIS studying, and they did a lot. History is proving that they did shorten the war. They were the ones, remember the (Battle of Midway), that the general was shot down? Admiral that was in command?

RP: Yamamoto.

KO: Yeah. The guys were the ones that intercepted a message and translated it.

RP: They saved so many lives. And they were Kibeis.

KO: Uh-huh. And some of the guys that landed -- [laughs] -- I think we had a guy in Seattle that landed in the second wave of Marines. And he probably had two or three Marine buddies with him, looking after him 'cause he would have been shot. But anyway...