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LG: When you were growing and getting older, did your parents share stories with you about their time...

DM: You know, just like every other Japanese parent, I don't know of anyone who shared, actually said, "Let's sit down and talk about camp." Little things would come up here and there, but most of all, you know what I remember when I was growing up, they would talk about their life before the war when they grew up in California, and they would mention all these names, Japanese names about the people who owned the store, the people who were the bankers. Because I was ignorant of the fact that I thought everyone grew up like me. No, they were wealthy fishermen, the men who owned the stores and the bankers, so they were quite wealthy people. So when they went into camp, they sacrificed a lot more monetarily than my parents did. Because my parents sold their crops, paid their bills, and then started paying, taking everything through seasonal credit until they sold their cops again, paid their debts, then went into debt again. That's how they lived. But there were other families who lost fishing boats, lost houses, lost businesses. So you know, they had a different attitude, you have a different attitude. So my parents used to talk about "back home." Because to them, those were their true friends, they went to church with, they socialized with, and they were like family to them. And then they went into camp with a bunch of strangers, and that wasn't their family. So I remember when we moved to New Jersey, my dad's friends tried to get him to go back to California, tried to entice him to go back, and he wouldn't. He says his family is settled here, he's going to raise them here.

LG: In raising your own children, were you open with them about that experience?

DM: We talk about it, but being so young, there isn't that much I can tell them, except I tell the little ones, "Where's Grandma's privacy when you want privacy while you're going to the toilet?" Because I said I had no privacy at four years old. So you know, little things like that. But as far as playing with friends, toys or anything, there was nothing.

LG: If your parents didn't really talk about what had happened, when did you begin to understand what they had gone through?

DM: Later on in life, my mother would tell me that... because she always sewed. She somehow got a sewing machine, I think she said someone loaned it to her. But there were Caucasians who worked in the camps, and they were very, very kind, and they would need clothes altered. And so my mother would alter the clothes for them, and she would say, "Give me fifty cents," or whatever, and they said, "No. We are going to pay you what the seamstresses would charge us in San Francisco." So she said she really was able to make a little bit of money, I mean, a dollar here, a dollar there. They weren't rich when they came out of camp, but at least they had someone. Because I don't know what the women did in camp, because I think, like my father-in-law worked in what they called the mess hall, he was one of the cooks, and I don't think my mother-in-law worked. So as little money as you could get.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.