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-01-0002

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FA: What do you recall of your childhood? How old were you in Pomeroy? And, how old were you then?

SS: Well, I was seven.

FA: What do you recall of being seven years old in Southeastern Washington State where you were probably the... you were the only Japanese family.

SS: Yeah, the one and only Japanese family in that area.

FA: What was that like?

SS: Well, we were looked upon like we were, I suppose, you go to a zoo or something and you see a pink elephant or something different. That's the way we were looked at. We were just total curiosity.

FA: How about conflict? Fights?

SS: Oh, conflict, well that started at an early age. I was taught never to, to leave an insult unchallenged.

FA: Really?

SS: Oh yes. And the use of the Jap, the word "Jap" was quite prevalent there and if anybody called me a Jap, I immediately objected and very often I ended up in a fistfight. I used to come home with bloody noses. And at that time, I had some defect in my nose or something and the slightest tap on my nose and the thing would start to bleed. And I don't know how many times I came home with a bloody nose until my father said, one day he said, "We've got to stop this. You're getting a frequent nosebleed like this." So then he showed me a judo hold. And I remember he made me practice that for a whole month. Every day after I came home from school. And after a month, he said, "Well, okay. You know how to throw a man now." So I used that on the kids and that ended the getting into these fistfights, which I was always at a disadvantage because I was always the smallest kid in the class. I didn't have the reach, nor the weight. And I remember the one advantage of being so darn small was while I was in those fights in those days when I used to end up with my nose bleeding, it usually scared the kids that I was fighting with from trying to continue the fight. That always... they used to burn me up. I'd tell the, shout to the kids, "Come back here, I'm not through fighting yet." [Laughs]

FA: I'm surprised, Shosuke. You know, the stereotype is that the Japanese would try and avoid fights, try and... I'm surprised your father would not have told you to avoid trouble.

SS: No. See, my father was a graduate of the Merchant Marines school in Japan. And his family -- he was adopted into the Sasaki family later -- his family was not samurai. They came from the... they were shoya. That meant the head of the village or the town and it meant being, in effect, the mayor of the town. The mayor of the town in the feudal period, his main job was seeing that the rice crop was taken in and properly taxed.

FA: So your father taught you to never let an insult go unchallenged.

SS: Yeah, and when he came... I remember my mother used to tell me, how when after they were married and came back, he left the family and my mother was back in Japan. We lived in one of the best houses in the town on a hill overlooking the whole village and socially, I think we were about the top or right up there with one or two other families that were considered equal class.

FA: In Japan.

SS: In Japan, yes.

FA: Was it hard for him to come to Pomeroy, Washington and be a curiosity? Be the only Japanese family in town?

SS: Well, no. My mother felt the loneliness. And that's another thing, she never bothered to learn English, either. And it benefited me, in fact, it kept my Japanese up to a level higher than it would have been if I'd been allowed to use English at home.

FA: How could you tell your mother was lonely?

SS: Well, she often spoke of Japan, but I could tell she was lonely because if we had any Japanese visitors, she was really happy to speak Japanese with some people that she could speak Japanese with.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.