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-01-0004

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[Ed. Note: Due to technical difficulties, the video is missing during the interviewer's first question.]

SF: Shosuke, I was going to ask you, why did your dad leave Japan from a relatively privileged position to come to a distant place like Pomeroy and become a restaurant operator?

SS: Well, that, he was working on -- after he graduated school -- he was working on a transpacific ship. In those days they were sailing ships and he had come... the ship, unfortunately, was captained by a fellow who must have been a double for Captain Bligh. And my father had made a friend with other members, with another man on the, working on the same boat and both of them agreed that they would not make a return trip on a ship run by this captain.

FA: They jumped ship.

SS: They jumped ship. Vancouver, B.C. And my father, my father's friend left, it was night when they left sometime when it was dark and my father had urged this friend to go first and wait at the end of the dock and my father would then meet him there. Well, as his friend left the boat, the plank on which the, which he was using to get up on the dock clattered and that sound, it made such a sound that my father was afraid that someone would come and check. So he did not cross onto the dock immediately. He waited for a while to see if anyone would come to investigate. When no one did, why, then he got on the, got up on the dock and walked to the end of the dock where he was supposed to, this other man was supposed to meet him. Well, when he got there, there was no friend there. And my father said he looked around and called out in a low voice. He called his friend's name, no response. And he was quite beside himself with what he should do under the circumstances and then he realized that if he stood around at the end of the that dock much longer, dawn would break, in which case he could easily be picked up taken back to the ship. So he said if he was going to be successful in making the break from the ship, he'd have to do it while it was still dark. So he decided to give up waiting, looking for his friend and I guess he must have gone into the woods. There were trees there in those days. And he... oh yes, the first thing he made for himself was a drinking tube made from a small branch of an Elder tree which he split into half and then scraped out the pith inside and then he tied the two halves together with a string and made a drinking tube out of it.

FA: A drinking tube for what?

SS: What?

FA: A drinking tube for what?

SS: Drinking water from the streams.

FA: To suck like a straw.

SS: Yes. He made the equivalent of a straw and he used that to drink from streams and he crossed the, he came down across the border. And of course in those days the border wasn't manned or anything and you could walk across any border you pleased and then he crossed. I don't know how he did it in those days, but he must have found some kind of a road or a path going across the Cascades. And one day while it was still fairly dark, he suddenly tripped over an animal and he said he, that was one of the biggest shocks he ever received in his life. He thought he had tripped over a wild animal or something. But it turned out the animal he tripped over was a cow that was lying there. [Laughs] And then he also realized that there must be human beings near here. And he found his way to a farmhouse and asked the farmer if the farmer knew where there were any other Japanese. And the farmer pointed out that there was a Japanese railroad repair crew somewhere in a certain direction and he followed the instructions and he went and he got, came to where this group of Japanese were working on the railroad. They were the repair crew. Well, when he met the rest of the crew, he said that the other people working on that repair crew were extremely glad to have him join them as one of their co-workers. For one thing, he was the only one there who could read, write and speak both English and Japanese. And they were based apparently in Spokane and so he was kept quite busy acting as interpreter, translator and especially writing return addresses on envelopes of letters that other members of the crew wrote to Japan.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.