<Begin Segment 10>

MK: You took your six children, and where did you go?

CE: We went to Portland first.

MK: You went to Portland.

CE: Then we went to Minidoka.

MK: You went to Minidoka.

CE: Yes.

MK: So you were in Minidoka with six children to take care of by yourself.

CE: Yes. [Laughs]

MK: Oh my, it must have been hard. Your eldest son was already eighteen years old though.

CE: No, no. He was not that old yet, but he took off and went to work. We went to the assembly center, and our eldest daughter, Akiko, was a Sunday school teacher. At the camp, we had a very nice high school teacher, and the teacher offered a scholarship to Akiko. To an enemy foreigner. She went to New York and learned sewing. She was staying with a pastor family. She spent three years there. They took her everywhere, to family visits and all.

MK: Did she learn English too?

CE: She didn't have English classes. She was learning sewing.

MK: Was it an American pastor?

CE: Yes.

MK: Then she learned how to communicate in English.

CE: Yes. She also went to school.

MK: Yes, she went to school too.

CE: The children speak English. She was there for three years. We started a hot house and came back. We worked so hard on it. [Laughs]

MK: I heard that you were receiving about eleven dollars every month when you were at Minidoka.

CE: Yes. We couldn't receive it without working. I worked. We spent the money for clothing and other items. We also had a lot of different classes like embroidering and flower arrangement at the camp, and everyone was taking some classes. I could hardly go to church as I had small children to take care of when we were at home. My husband went to church. [Laughs] I always stayed home. Pastor Hayashi baptized me, but I didn't know anything about the Bible. There was someone who came for mission work, and I went to her class. There was also Pastor Sakuma offering a class. We had Pastor Shoji from Seattle. I was taking bible study and church song classes. [Laughs] I didn't take any flower arrangement classes at all.

MK: Many students take bible study and church song classes to learn English in Japan. Was that your intention, too?

CE: The classes were all in Japanese. Even church songs were in Japanese. Bible study was in Japanese. The teachers were Japanese, and I didn't learn any English. [Laughs]

MK: Was it in Minidoka?

CE: Yes, it was in Minidoka.

MK: What made you interested in Christianity, not Buddhism?

CE: My husband's family has a history of Zen religion. We didn't have Zen priests in the States though. We had Buddhism temples, but he was not crazy about Buddhism. He wanted to have the children religious. We had a church upstairs, and the children went there for a long time since they were little.

MK: Because you didn't have Buddhist temple...

CE: Right.

MK: That's why you went to church?

CE: Yes. They were singing the "Jesus loves me" song when they came back from the church in their father's lap when they were small. We had them baptized in 19... That was the 2600th year of the Japanese Imperial reign. The girls got baptized by the pastor. All four girls. Our boy was supposed to go back to Japan as he was to take over the family. [Laughs] They were baptized by Pastor Hayashi later in Portland when they were older. [Laughs]

[Interruption]

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.