Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Shosuke Sasaki Interview
Narrator: Shosuke Sasaki
Interviewers: Frank Abe (primary), Stephen Fugita (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 18, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-sshosuke-01-0013

<Begin Segment 13>

FA: What were your thoughts on the day that you actually had to move out? Pack your suitcase, go to the assembly, assembly point?

SS: Well, I wasn't in a state of shock or anything. I said, "Well, this is something they've been building up to for years." They finally succeeded in stripping us -- the Japanese community -- of whatever property it had.

FA: You took a bus from Seattle down to Puyallup fairgrounds.

SS: No, no we didn't. They told us to assemble on certain corners in the -- so-called International District today -- and people who lived in certain houses or had certain addresses and those people who had certain addresses were told to assemble on the corner of such and such street, which we did. We had to take our... oh yes, we could take with us only what we could carry.

FA: And how were you transported to Puyallup?

SS: Well, they supplied us with buses to get us to Puyallup. I remember one of my friends was sitting next to me on the bus and he was a communist. Nisei communist. And I remember he knew my sympathy. I made no secret of the fact that I was loyal to Japan. I never claimed that I was disloyal to Japan. And when we, I remember we were riding on that bus to the concentration camp and this friend of mine -- Dyke Miyagawa was his name -- He was a very active leader among the Cannery Workers Union. He was one of those who led that. And Dyke was well aware of my sympathy toward Japan in those days. I felt Japan was being forced into an impossible situation by the U.S. who was trying to make an issue of the so-called "Japanese problem" in this country. And I remember... oh yeah, well, we were loaded, we had to get on the, we had to wait at certain street corners. And I remember my sister at that time, her second child had been born two or three months previous to the actual evacuation. And oh yes... that morning where we had to wait at that corner, it was raining. And my sister had not expected rain and they were wearing straw hats and the rain was coming through the straw and the children were getting rather wet. And that was a Sunday, I remember. And I didn't know about this incident until some time after it had happened, after it happened. But, when my, that area down there where they told us to assemble, that was full of whorehouses. It was full of houses of prostitution.

FA: Whorehouses?

SS: Yeah. That was Weller, Seventh and Weller or something like that.

FA: [Laughs] The heart of Chinatown today.

SS: What?

FA: That's the heart of Chinatown today.

SS: Yeah, it is. But that was the heart of the whorehouse district down there. And I remember my... it was only later that I heard about this. I guess my sister, it never occurred to her to tell... it was a few years later that my sister told me what happened to her children. They were all on that same area as I was. Mother and I were standing in a certain place and they told us to be there. We got on the bus. It came to pick us up and -- this was the part that I didn't know about until a couple of years later -- the madam of the whorehouse, that was closest to where my sister and her husband and her children were standing, felt sorry for them because they were getting wet in the rain, and she came out and said, "Bring your children inside so they won't get wet." And my sister and her husband, they went inside just to shelter from the rain. And so I asked my sister, "Did you ever do anything to thank that madam for that kindness?" She said, "Well, we certainly tried." She said, "After we were able to get back to Seattle, the first thing we did was go to that place and ask for that woman that was running that place." And they didn't know where she had gone. But it seemed to me that on a Sunday with all these white Christians in churches singing hymns and so forth, the only woman who acted like a Christian or a human being, was that madam that offered that shelter to my sister and her children.

FA: Was she hakujin, Caucasian, the madam?

SS: I don't remember. I don't remember. She might have been black. She might have been.... I never, it never occurred to me to ask that question.

FA: This prostitution district, was it Nisei women, or...?

SS: No, there was no Nisei or Japanese in that business at all.

FA: So either white or black.

SS: Either white or black, yeah. But they never did locate the woman. I think she probably was white. If she'd been black, they would have, my sister would have remembered that.

FA: The bus ride to Puyallup, riding with Dyke Miyagawa. You told Dyke you were loyal to Japan. Dyke knew you were loyal to Japan. What was Dyke's comment to you on the bus riding to Puyallup?

SS: Oh, when we looked from a distance, I saw all the posts erected for the barbed wire.

FA: As you approached.

SS: As we approached and I turned to Dyke, and I saw the barbed wire from quite a distance and I turned to Dyke and I said, "That's barbed wire, I'll bet." And he said, "No, they wouldn't do anything like that to us." Well, it was right to the very end, he was supporting the commie party line. Strangely enough, when we were pushing our redress thing, I got a letter from Dyke, quite unexpectedly. And he said he approved of our efforts to get redress and wished us success and he wanted to see me again and talk about the old times. But he died before that took place. It was only two or three months after that letter, that I read that he had died. But Dyke was an honest person and one of the few Nisei of that day that I still remember with respect and a true wish that he had not died then.

FA: You were not surprised, were you, to see barbed wire being erected?

SS: No, I wasn't. I expected it. And Dyke wasn't willing to see that.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.