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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: David Sakura Interview II
Narrator: David Sakura
Interviewer: Virginia Yamada
Location: Thornton, New Hampshire
Date: July 22, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-513-4

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VY: Well, okay, so after college, so how long were you in college? When did you finally get to the point where you were able to graduate, and what degree did you graduate with?

DS: Well, I had a string of incompletes, let's say, at a small state college in northern New Mexico. Whereas my classmates went off to Cal Berkeley and other schools, I went to New Mexico Highlands University in the backwaters of northern New Mexico. And it certainly wasn't Cal Berkeley, but it was a turning point in my thinking and my experience, because I was finally, in the real world, away from home, away from the confines of a religious upbringing. That was, I never did finish my master's program. I then went on to the University of Oregon where I did qualify. But I subsequently got married and decided that the University of Arizona would be a good place to restart. And because I now had a family, I really had to focus as my last chance to get my doctorate in biochemistry which I did receive after six years in 1970.

VY: So it was around the 1970s, is that when you started your family, or was it before then?

DS: Well, Dan, my firstborn son, who was born in 1964, and Peter was born in 1968. And by 1970 I had finished my doctorate and had received a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University in Boston, and so we moved to Boston.

VY: That was in, sorry, that was in 1970?

DS: In 1970.

VY: Okay, that you moved to Boston?

DS: And I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow and then joined the research faculty staff at Harvard Medical School, and conducted research in the neurosciences for about eight or nine years, at which time, during that time, I was divorced and began to think about making a career change. So in 1979, just about the time of JANE, I enrolled in the School of Public Health and began taking a program in Health Policy and Management.

VY: Sounds like, I think a lot of things happened that year for you.

DS: It continues to be a, not a tale of woe, but a series of major life-changing events. But at about the time of 1979, when I decided to make a career change and move out of academic research and look at what I felt, well, I characterized academic research as being a high-risk, low-reward career for me. And so I decided I wanted to retrain myself so I could pursue a career of high risk, high reward.

BY: That is very interesting to hear you say that. As someone who entered adulthood with all that anxiety and not wanting to take risks, and now you were kind of flipping the narrative a little bit.

DS: Well, flipping the narrative a bit, but I should add that in 1974, my mother passed away. She died when she was quite young. She was about sixty-four years of age, and she, at the time I was married, we had two children, my mother, very ill, came, and she passed away. And I think about the trajectory of her life and the impact of the internment, and she never spoke of the internment as did my father, hardly ever spoke again about the internment. But I think the loss of my mother, who now, in retrospect, I was very close to, because as you recall, my father said I had, I was the head of the family and I had to take care of the family. So the loss of my mother was really a major blow. And my father subsequently passed away a year later, so there was major losses in my life. And so all traces of the internment experience had disappeared. So moving on, I had gone through this career change, or was in the process of changing my career from a research associate to who knows what. And then JANE came along. And JANE came along at the same time I was re-creating myself.

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