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BY: I understand your father was a farmer, but that he was active in the Japanese American church. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

SS: Yeah. So I'm not sure if Grandpa Shikuma was Christian before he arrived here or if he converted once he arrived. I know there were missionaries who worked with Japanese quite a bit. Some of the early church photos, group photos, we'll see these white ministers in the photo with them, and I was told they were the missionaries who worked with the early church. So anyway, my grandfather Unosuke Shikuma and Mr. Sakata -- we used to call him Old Man Sakata -- were two of the founding members of the Westview Presbyterian Church in Watsonville, and that started, I believe, in 1902, so even before my dad was born. So he literally grew up in that church. So when I was growing up, he was an elder... my other uncles were either elders or deacons, my mom and my aunts were all active in the women's society. So our social life very much centered around the church.

BY: And how do you think incarceration affected his life?

SS: Oh, well, it destroyed his hopes of working in an office and getting away from the farm. I think that's one reason he really discouraged me from coming back to the farm. I remember asking him about, "Maybe I should just go back to the farm and carry on there," and he was pretty negative about that. He said, "No, you shouldn't come back." I think partly that might be because he felt like I could do other things and have a better life doing it, but I think partly it was 'cause that had been his dream and the war crushed it. I think he realized that he couldn't make a living with his family. After his experience in Chicago, I think, his decision was that he's not going to be able to make a living working in the business world, so the safest thing, or the thing that would keep his family alive, would be to go back to farming, because that was a sure thing.

BY: So did he ever talk about incarceration to you?

SS: No. He died when I was still... in '73, so I was a sophomore in college, so I was just starting to learn about the camps in depth. I mean, I always knew that the camps existed, it was kind of this mysterious thing, I didn't really know anything about it. I was just starting to read things like Years of Infamy and Gidra. So I was just at the verge of being ready to ask some questions about it and then he passed.

BY: All right, is there anything else about your father that you'd like to share?

SS: Well, he was a member of JACL. I remember JACL meetings happening at our house. All these guys, still all guys, would come and meet, and my sister and I were kind of banished to our bedrooms, but we would sneak out and peek through the door to see what they were doing. He was very big in the church, both in our church and also in this regional conference of different churches, and he was active in that. I remember him taking us to go visit either other churches or like an orphanage that our church was supporting.

BY: So were all of these churches Japanese American churches?

SS: Yeah.

BY: Yes, okay. Alright, just wanted to clarify that.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.