How Auntie Onions Got Her Name!
Jun
20
Chiyo "ONIONS" Marooka NakanishiDuring 1942 - 1945 Incarceration
Chiyo explained, “My birthday is in May and I turned 16 in camp so it must have been April 1942 that we were taken on buses from where I lived on King street, next to the Nichiren Church to Puyallup. We were in Area C.”
“Were you scared,” I asked?
“There were a bunch of us, so I wasn’t scared, but wondered because the bus windows were all covered.”
“What did you take in your bag? What were you wearing,” I asked.
“We didn’t have much anyway, so I don’t remember. Oh, as I think about it, we had a Toy Fox Terrier name “Junie”. When we sang, she would sing too. We had to call the Vet and he came to take her away as we were about to leave. That was so sad, I couldn’t worry about what I was taking.
We didn’t wear jeans those days. Wooden clogs were the shoes in style so, I wore that with my skirt and sweater. It turned out that camp grounds were all dusty and muddy so those shoes really came in handy.”
Chiyo went on to explain about her nickname,”I was on my way back home, walking along the road from the Recreation Building. I knew a lot of the guys on the back of the truck as they passed me, driving vegetables to the mess hall. Poison Kato and his brother were some of them. Bako Kinoshita threw one of the onions at me and I caught it. When I threw it back it went through someone’s open barrack window. The next day they started giving me a bad time about that and started calling me “Onions”. The more I protested, the more the name stuck.”
Nothing like good name calling to make the forced imprisonment bearable. Here’s a bunch of nick names we brainstormed: Tomatoe, Tinky, Gunner, Buster, Beansy, Slug, Lover, Shorty, Gas House, White Christmas. When they meet today, they still use those names.
Yes, Auntie Onions won big time today!! I won the last hand, but I was hundred's of points behind.
