Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Clara S. Hattori Interview II
Narrator: Clara S. Hattori
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: January 23, 2015
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-427-1

<Begin Segment 1>

TI: Today is Monday, January 26, 2015, and we are in Seattle at the Densho office. And in the, or in this studio we have your daughter Karen. On camera we have Dana Hoshide, and then interviewer is me, Tom Ikeda. And so this is the second interview that we're doing with you. The first interview we did about a month and a half ago, and we covered your family history and then your life up until about 1937, 1938, when you were, I think, going to business school in San Francisco. And where we left it was we'd just started talking about an interesting job that you got at the San Francisco World's Fair. And so why don't you start with, tell me, how did you first hear about the World's Fair?

CH: Of, course, it'd been advertised, not advertised, but in the papers, that they're thinking of opening a World's Fair in San Francisco and New York. And so at that time, I thought, gee, it'd be kind of fun to work at the Fair. And so that was just my thought. Then there was, they did advertise for jobs opening, and so I applied. I did have a friend that was more or less in the beginnings of trying to get the Japanese pavilion there, and the work, and so he knew just about when they would be hiring. So I was notified that this was coming up, so I did apply.

TI: Now going back to that advertising for the job, where did you see it? Was it in the newspaper?

CH: Newspapers, uh-huh, San Francisco Chronicle was carrying a lot of that. And gee, I don't quite know the details of it, but I remember... what's the main hotel in San Francisco?

TI: Oh, on Union Square?

CH: Yeah, Union Square.

TI: Yeah, I've stayed there.

CH: St. Francis, okay. They said that the interview will be at the St. Francis, so I made an appointment. And it was that one, I can't remember... but anyway, I got a notification to go there.

TI: Now at this point, what position were you applying for?

CH: Applying for secretarial, because I graduated from business college, I thought, well, I could go into secretarial. And so I thought it was just going to be secretarial type of thing. And then when I went there, I found out that there's an opening for... well, it really was a secretarial, because I worked in the office for a little while until I found out that they needed somebody for interpretation, for a description of that machine. And I thought, gee, that'd be great.

TI: But backing up a little bit, so applying for a secretarial job, was it was job for the overall World's Fair?

CH: No, no, just the silk department.

TI: So the Japanese Pavilion silk department.

CH: Silk department. There were other jobs opening for girls, and you could see in my book there, San Francisco, they had all kinds of positions open, especially for just tourists, taking tourists through. But I wanted, I just thought maybe, through my friend, I knew that there was a silk department, that they needed somebody to do some interpretation.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.