Densho Digital Archive - Mary Suzuki Ichino Interview II (denshovh-imary-02-0004)

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RP: And you know we've heard what the rooms looked like when people first located in there. How did your barrack room change over time? What happened to it? Do you remember the changes?

MI: Yeah. I really don't know where my dad got this lumber, but somehow he was able to make a long table, like a dining room table. And so when my mother and dad thought that the food was not up to par for the children, they had brought canned food and stuff with them, just in case as an emergency, 'cause they didn't want us to starve. And that was really thinking ahead. So they had all of that and they were, they made sure that that came up with them. So my dad made this little kind of a corner kitchen like, you know, and he had all this stuff. And so my mother would cook rice and we would have whatever she could put together. So that was the front end. Then people used to buy bedspreads. Bedspread was the partitioning between different parts. And so assuming that there's this front end was like the dining room and there was this -- later on came the oil heater, oil burning heater -- in back of this bedspread was the beds. And in back of the beds was another spread. And that's where my mother put the clothes and things. And then we didn't have any shelves but the windowsills worked. So you'll see, you know, cups with your toothbrushes and stuff on the windowsill. And then some people got innovative and made little hooks, you know. Yeah, they were pretty clever I thought. You know that's what you call survival.

RP: Did you store water inside your room in buckets or pots that you could use for...

MI: Only pot, for a pot of water, hot water. That's after we got the oil heater.

RP: So you didn't have an oil heater when you first got in there?

MI: Not in the beginning, no. Of course they issued these peacoats or pea-jackets and army clothes, the old World War I khaki thing and I said, "I don't care if I freeze to death, I'm not wearing that thing." So my mother took it apart, 'cause she was a seamstress. That was, she had a degree in costume designing. And she made a skirt for me out of this pair of pants. I wore it one time and I said, god, this thing is so darn itchy, you know. That was the last of it. I kind of wished I saved that peacoat. I think it would have been worth a fortune today.

RP: She made a skirt out of a peacoat?

MI: No, the peacoat... it was just a khaki colored, yeah. But yeah, that peacoat would have been nice even today. I don't know. Fashion statement.

RP: Many, many folks also were able to sort of improve their barracks by ordering items from the Sears and Roebuck catalog or Montgomery Ward's. Was that, was that one of the bibles in your living room?

MI: Well, yes and no, because you didn't get half of it. Probably because it was wartime, too. Every Christmas I remember that, oh god, they had the most luscious pictures of chocolates. Oh my god. You know, boxes of chocolate candy. You know what, every year that we were in camp we ordered it early, never got one. Never got one. I don't know what the reasoning was for that. Who knows what was going on outside, you know. But a lot of families I think depleted their savings by ordering stuff that they needed. I'm pretty sure my dad did, too.

RP: Did you father bring in money with him?

MI: I don't know that at all. He must have brought his checkbook. How would he have been able to pay for some things, you know. But that's something that never occurred to me to ask him. He had to have because... hmm. I remember one time him saying that they had used their savings up or something like that. That was a, that I remember.