Densho Digital Archive
Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection
Title: Shosuke Sasaki Interview
Narrator: Shosuke Sasaki
Interviewers: Chizu Omori (primary), Emiko Omori (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 28, 1992
Densho ID: denshovh-sshosuke-02-0003

<Begin Segment 3>

EO: So, what was Seattle like before the war?

SS: Well, now, let me tell you something about where I lived in this country when I first came. My father was, had a restaurant in the southeastern corner of the state of Washington, in a little county seat town of Pomeroy. And that town, my sister and I were the first Japanese children the people of that town had ever seen. And I will always remember that town and its people and particularly the Gibson family, who were my father's best friends. There was love and affection. They, Ed Gibson was the county auditor at that time. I should have called him Uncle Ed, really, but since my mother and my father called him Ed, I just called him Ed -- [laughs] -- and never realized I should have addressed him as Uncle Ed. But his, his mother, Ed Gibson was widowed, his mother, his father had died some years long past. His mother had come across on a wagon train on the old Oregon Trail and she was, as you know, people who were able to become a part of a wagon train have their own prairie schooner and so forth from the East or the Midwest. Those people had to be of at least solid middle-class economic status in order to afford that trip -- the cost of the equipment, horses and so forth was too high for people of the lower economic levels to afford.

[Interruption]

SS: What made it, made it so great for my sister and me to spend the first four and a half years of our life there was the fact that we were, being children, the first Japanese children that had ever lived there. The people of the town generally just took us to their heart, you might say. The first Fourth of July -- we got there in May, 8th... let's see, we came to this country in May 8th and shortly thereafter, within a few days we were in Pomeroy. Well, that first Fourth of July that I spent in this country, the town, people there asked my parents to clothe my sister and me in our Japanese clothes. And they gave us, made each of us hold an American flag and we led that Fourth of July parade down the, down Main Street. And I think we did that the following year, and then after that, of course, the novelty of it wore off and we were growing up so we never appeared in that Fourth of July parade anymore. But still, the people there treated us in many ways better than they did their own children. The, when, when the town built its first swimming pool, public swimming pool, they somehow gave my sister and me free season tickets for admission to that pool. I think we're the only ones that got such tickets.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.