Densho Digital Repository - David Sakura Interview I (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-498-12)

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VY: Well, what else about camp life do you remember? Like, say, eating in the mess hall, playing in the area, going on picnics?

DS: Well, I don't remember the day to day. I think school was very important for me. But I do remember some highlights of life in the camp. But before going into some of those highlights, I'd like to talk about my father.

VY: Okay.

DS: (My father) helped get us settled in our little, our one room, he built different kinds of furniture, he built a, from scrap wood, a little wash basin stand to clean up, to help clean up the boys. Dug a cesspool in the, underneath the barracks so the wash water could be poured down through a hole in the floor of the cesspool. But within a month or two, he volunteered to help with a sugar beet harvest. So we arrived in September and I can imagine by October, no later than November, October of 1942, he volunteered and was gone for at least six weeks through almost Christmas, well after Thanksgiving, leaving my mother to get settled, set up her household, get accustomed to life in the camps where my father was working, living in migrant housing with other Japanese American men, including his brothers, harvesting the sugar beets. So when he came back in the winter of 1942, the call came out in the spring, in May of 1943, just less than six months later. The call came out for volunteers to join the U.S. Army, and my father and his three brothers volunteered. So my father had spent less than six months in the camp, leaving my mother to spend the entire two years in the camps struggling to raise these three boys. And the reason my father and my three uncles, the four Sakura boys, volunteered. It's because they were responding to their father, my grandfather, who said you have to be loyal to this country because a war is coming. But there were unintended consequences because then I didn't see my father until the end of the war. So the most difficult thing for me, for the rest of my life, was my father said, "You're now the head of the family." I was, what, seven years old? And so take care of your mother, and, of course, your brothers.

VY: That sounds like an impossible thing to live up to.

DS: It is, it is. So I wondered why my father left. And it really touches on patriotism, a sense of adventure, much like my grandfather left and traveled to points unknown. And I think there was maybe part of that, that this offered my father a way to points unknown. But I'll never know because he rarely if ever talked about the camp experience. But the family lore speaks of my mother who begged my father not to enlist in the U.S. Army. He was thirty... he was thirty-eight at the time, well beyond draft age. He didn't have to go, but he felt it was his patriotic duty. So I think it illustrates the impossible situation that the internees in these concentration camps were faced with. Loyalty to family, loyalty to country, it was an impossible situation with impossible consequences.