Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Sarah Sato Interview
Narrator: Sarah Sato
Interviewer: Dee Goto
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: April 9, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-ssarah-01-0012

<Begin Segment 12>

DG: So, let's go back to Pearl Harbor day. What happened?

SS: I was going on a picnic that day. My dad was going to play mahjong with his friends and they usually played outside, so over the clothes wire they hung a sheet, to shade themselves. And, all of a sudden the bombing started. And we couldn't believe, and we lived in Pawaa, and there was a building in Makale that got bombed and which is only about three blocks away or little more, I guess. That got bombed, and then my dad, we turned on the radio and they said, this is war, Japan attacked. And immediately, we had blackout and that night, we could still hear the bombing...

DG: So what was the blackout? How did you...?

SS: We had to get black cloths and everything to black out, because otherwise you couldn't turn on your lights.

DG: How did you know to do this?

SS: I think the newspapers must have told us how to do it.

DG: So fast? Just that same day?

SS: We didn't do it the same day but gradually we did, because without the blackout, we couldn't turn on the lights. And school was out for several months until we had dugouts... shelters, bomb shelters. And then, we were issued gas masks that we had to carry to school and if we forgot, we had to either go home and get it or get demerit.

DG: Oh, really? So how old were you then?

SS: When war started I was sixteen, when we had to evacuate. Fortunately I wasn't eighteen.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.