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VY: You know, I realize I jumped ahead. I want to back up a little bit and talk about your parents and when they started having kids. So how many kids they had and what was the birth order, and so the names of you and your siblings.

DS: Sure. Well, I'm obviously the number one, and I still maintain the role of the prince-elect, the crown prince of the family because I'm the firstborn. My brother Jerry was born in 1939, and so he and I are about three and a half years apart. My brother Chester was born in February of ('41). So just nine months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And after the war, when my father came home, my fourth brother, Bruce, was born in 1947. So there were four boys in our family, which was a point of disappointment for my mother, who always wanted a girl. And my father, in his creative bent, would publish a birth newspaper. And every time a boy was born, the headlines would read, "She-boy-again," much like there's a town in Wisconsin called Sheboygan, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. So they headlines read, repetitively, "She-boy-again 1939," "She-boy-again 1941," "She-boy-again 1947." And my mother so desperately wanted a girl that Chester, the number three son, born in 1941, was called Junnie after, instead of June Sakura, they called him Junnie, and they didn't cut his hair until he was well past two years of age, so he had long hair like a girl. And we kid him even today that he had a mixed upbringing and had difficulty in terms of his sexual orientation. That's not true, but it really is the family lore.

VY: But that's so interesting. You know, I spoke to someone earlier in the week who, he was the youngest in his family and he said that he was kind of raised to be sort of like the girl, that he was taught to do more the cleaning and the cooking and that sort of thing. I'm wondering if it was the same for Chester?

DS: For Chester, Jr.?

VY: Chester, Jr.

DS: I don't think so. I think that it was... after having two or three boys, I think it's only natural to wish for a girl, and just, boys kept coming.

VY: So before we move on to talking about the war, is there anything that we didn't cover about Eatonville that you would like to talk about now? We can always come back to it if we need to.

DS: Well, just as an aside, the tofu house has been rescued, and it sits on the town common grounds in Eatonville. And there has been a movement to restore the tofu house and serve as a small museum dedicated to the members of the Japanese community that lived in Eatonville. That project has had its fits and starts, but you can go to Eatonville even today to see the tofu house. The tofu house was also the subject of a story that I had created about two boys who got into a mess of trouble by destroying the day's production of tofu and the results of their troublemaking and what happened. And I tell that story to grade schoolers and emphasizing the need to always tell the truth. The truth is the best way out. So the tofu house has, is the subject of one of my storytelling adventures.

VY: Yeah, because I know that you give talks to all different levels of students, it sounds like. And we'll talk more about that later, but it's interesting how you pull from your own history and to create this interesting narrative to talk to different grade levels about your experience and the experience of the Japanese American incarceration.

DS: When I think about it, my father was, I think he could have been a newspaper reporter. At the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and our incarceration, he was, in fact, friends with many people in the community in Eatonville, but he was a friend of the editor of the Eatonville Dispatch, the local town newspaper. And he and the editor agreed that if my father wrote dispatches from the camps, he would publish them in the newspaper. Now, when you think about the anti-Asian, anti-Japanese feelings that were raging up and down the community, up and down the coast in the community. It was such a brave gesture by the editor of the Eatonville Dispatch to report it as it is from someone who was in the camp. And so my father wrote a series of dispatches from the detention camp in Puyallup all the way to Minidoka. And he wrote dispatches until the end of that year. Those letters are still available and serve as the basis of my understanding of what happened as a child, as a family during the internment.

VY: Wow, that's such a valuable treasure. How did you come across these letters?

DS: Well, that's a whole different story, but I'll give you a short synopsis of that story. I can't recall the date, but one night I was surfing through the internet and found a series of internment photographs that were part of the repository at the Bancroft museum library at the University of California. And my wife was looking over my shoulder and she said, "Oh, David, there's your photograph." And sure enough, there was a series of family photographs that I could access on the internet. At the same time, I began researching on Eatonville, and I found that the editor of the Eatonville Dispatch, her name is Dixie Walters, had met my father in (1975) and was effusive in meeting him, and wrote quite a bit about encounter and then began writing about the Eatonville Japanese community. And she's, ever since that time,, we've been in communication. And unfortunately she's passed away a few months ago, but she's been a longtime supporter of telling the story of the Eatonville Japanese community. So it's again, an example of the internet and how it can uncover different aspects of your life.

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