“I really don’t know what happened, but I know that Marian must have helped
my mother in many ways in the early days of relocation…”
Marian King – a special friendship
By Julie Azuma
When I was a child growing up in Chicago, my mother, Alyse Azuma, had a special friendship with a woman named Marian King. I think Marian must have helped my mother when she first arrived in Chicago from Tule Lake.
I grew up knowing that Marian was very important. We used to visit her and her family, Bill and Billy in Cicero, Illinois. I really don’t know what happened, but I know that Marian must have helped my mother in many ways in the early days of relocation in Chicago. She carried that friendship until Marian passed away.
© 2026, Julie Azuma
Photo by Francisco Redd on Unsplash. In the public domain, attribution optional.
Julie Azuma is a Vice President of the Japanese American Association of NY, one of the leaders of a Japanese American Oral History Project funded by a grant through the US Parks Department, and serves on the Board of Governors of the Japanese American National Museum. A New York regional co-chair of the US-Japan Council, she is also a kenjin-tatsujin at Ashinaga, U.S.A. Thirty years ago, she started Different Roads to Learning, Inc. (https://difflearn.com), offering products which support the education of children on the autism spectrum, and is an advisory board member of the Association of Science in Autism Treatment.
Post-story ODG note:
The persistence of this remembrance of help is similar to what others have shared with our project. Many of us grew up after WWII knowing there were certain people who had unforgettably assisted our families during the wartime, but we were left not knowing exactly how or in what way. To have told these stories in detail to us as children would have perhaps been too complicated to understand and too emotionally complex, coupled with a cultural reluctance to talk about life’s unfairnesses and difficulties that could not be helped.
What could a child understand of their parents’ wartime removal from home, incarceration, and displacements throughout their country? “They helped us during the war, we have to visit them again some day,” my mother would say of certain people. And we did. A visit in those days was a gesture of gratitude in itself. – MM