Densho Digital Archive - Mary Suzuki Ichino Interview I (denshovh-imary-01-0016)

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RP: So you had your, your education interrupted by the war. And how did you feel about that?

MI: Pretty bad. Well, for one thing, you're kind of an impressionable teenager. And I said, "They would have to have a war just before my prom." I'm looking forward to this prom all these years, you know, and that's, it tells you that when you're a teenager you don't think beyond or deep enough. You're thinking about yourself, what you're missing out. And so then you think, god, that was superficial. You know. But it was. That meant a lot to me to go to a junior prom and I didn't go. But then that soon passed and I thought, yeah. Sacred Heart has since honored me, as not having graduated but I am a graduate. And I thought, I wished they had done that us Sacred Heart students while we were in the camp to remember us, you know. And apparently from some of my classmates, they said nothing was mentioned about the camps.

RP: Oh, during the, the graduation?

MI: So they didn't know anything. But I said, you know what? That can't be true either because I had a couple of girls who wrote to me constantly. So they had to have known. Somebody had to have known.

RP: How many other Japanese American kids were in the...

MI: At Sacred Heart?

RP: At Sacred Heart.

MI: Let's see, in my class there's Pat, Theresa, Mary, Marie, Helen Kim, Aiko Ohmaye, that's six. There was seven or eight in my class. And then the upper class there might have been another I don't know how many, but a little bit more.

RP: You, you talked about kind of coming out of your sheltered life there and learning about these cliques. And how did these cliques operate? Did they run along ethnic lines or did you just hang out with Japanese American kids at Sacred Heart or did you, did you mix with other groups?

MI: Yeah, I think we did. But, the thing was when, when we clicked with the Hispanic group, we didn't care what the other groups thought of. We were just having a great time. I mean, we were having our own fun. We weren't concerned about, oh, well, they were a clique-y group. We knew that they were, but it didn't bother us, which I think was good. Because one of our classmates married the president of Tom McCann Shoes. Not bad. [Laughs]