Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Toru Sakahara - Kiyo Sakahara Interview I
Narrator: Toru Sakahara, Kiyo Sakahara
Interviewer: Dee Goto
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: February 24, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-storu_g-01-0013

<Begin Segment 13>

DG: Tell me what your mother said later about it. [Laughs]

KS: [Laughs] Contraceptives were not even thought about in those days, nobody knew about them. But I remember many, many years later when she found out about them. She said it's too bad they weren't there when she first got married. We wouldn't be here! [Laughs] But it, Kingston was a nice place for our family to move to, because we lived near the beach and my dad would take all of us down there and said, "We're gonna have a picnic and we're gonna go swimming." So we all would pack up our food, go down to the beach, go for a swim, it was really an ideal place. There are many times that my dad used to say that he was poor in money, but he was very wealthy in having seven children who are all healthy and they could all swim! [Laughs] Anyway, it was very nice.

DG: He talked to you a lot about...

TS: Spoke English.

KS: Yes, my dad spoke very good English. He had spent twenty years in America before he even got married so he... I can't say it was the King's English, but he could speak very good English and had quite a nice personality.

DG: He always seemed to be preparing you to live...

KS: ...here in America.

DG: Right.

KS: Yes. He had no intentions of ever going back to Japan, or... I think that as the years went by, my mother could see the possibilities of... I think at first she had many reservations about living in America. It certainly didn't answer her ambitions that she had, but...

DG: You eventually came here to go to school then?

KS: Yes, when I was in the (eighth) grade in the Kingston school. It was a small country school that had about three or four classrooms and we all doubled up. The sixth, seventh and eighth grades were all together. We were fortunate to get a good teacher who got library books from the Seattle Public Library, and I had a chance to be the school librarian. I know my mother always wanted me to go on to school and my brother to go on to school, but the teacher in this little country school is the one that actually gave me the initial push. She says, "Well, you want to go to college don't you?" Well, what's college? And so...

DG: He was hakujin?

KS: Yes.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.