Densho Digital Archive - Toru Sakahara - Kiyo Sakahara Interview I (denshovh-storu

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DG: So now let's talk about your parents getting together, coming to America together.

KS: When my father went to Japan, he fully intended to get a bride and come back to America. He was not, he had no intentions of staying in Japan and I think my mother probably welcomed the opportunity to see another country, because she had in her readings and (education), she had studied about America. So they both came with very high hopes of doing some evangelistic work and also doing well in the United States. I know my dad says that when they first landed in Seattle, he looked in the papers and saw an ad for cook in a home, and so he applied for the job and they hired him. But they also expected my mother to do some housework, and my mother had not done any housework in her life at all. She didn't even know how to wash her own clothes, let alone somebody else's clothes! [Laughs] And I think after working a few months there, my mother said they were fired. [Laughs] So my dad decided that that kind of work was not going to feed them. But in the meantime he had saved some money, and they were starting some farms in the South Park area of Seattle, that's where Boeing is right now, and that used to all be farmland. And that's where my brother and I were born, in South Park.

DG: That was what year?

KS: That was in... my brother was born in 1917 and I was born in 1920. The farms there prospered, they did very well, and a group of them got together and found some farmland near Kent, little bit south of Kent, in a little area called Thomas. I think my parents and a few other families got together and built a (group of houses) and they were going to farm about thirty acres together and my dad planned the whole thing. There were living quarters and one large mess hall and one laundry room and they were all going to work together. It was working just fine and somebody was negligent and a fire started in the kitchen and burned the whole place down. I think that was a very sad thing that happened to my parents, because I don't think they ever financially recovered from that. Since my dad was one of the instigators of this plan, they had to declare bankruptcy and I know that my earliest recollection of a place to live was a tent and they, after the house burned down, they had to put up tents and we lived in (them).

DG: In this house, several families lived together?

KS: Yes, uh-huh, well, it was like a dormitory, I think, although families sort of stayed together. There were living quarters and there were places to eat and places to cook and...

DG: You said it was the Katsunos and...?

KS: No, that was different. We lived in this tent and that's when my dad and mother both, went into a partnership with four other, no three other families, the Katsunos, and the Hirabayashis. And they had, there were separate homes for these so we moved out of the tent, that was rather rugged living.

DG: How long did you live in the tent?

KS: It must have been two years.

DG: That long?

KS: About two years maybe... yeah, about two years, 'cause I can remember winters there when it rained and it was so cold.

DG: Were you school age already?

KS: I was about five or six, so that's my first recollection of home, that tent house.

DG: How many children were there?

KS: I had a older brother and a younger sister and I think another... and the next sister from that.

DG: About four of you.

KS: Four of us, about that. Then we moved into this little house and the family farmed with the Katsunos and the Hirabayashis, and that lasted for about two years. Then we moved to another little house up in the Steel Lake area and that didn't pan out so well. It was a nice place to live, as I recall, but then the family moved back down to the farm and worked with the Hirabayashis and the Katsunos again. I can't say what the reasons for their not continuing with that, but it just didn't work out and the family moved to Seattle. My mother got a job...