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BK: The church was a center, it seems as though, for many of your activities. Besides sponsoring the girls' basketball team on which you had played, what other kinds of things were you involved with at the church?

SU: Oh, at the church. From the time we were little, we had a very good pastor. The original pastor who founded the church, Reverend Okazaki. He had about -- one, two -- about four girls and two boys, I think. And the oldest of the, his girls was a graduate of the Baptist Missionary Training School. After the missionary, she came, she became, well, she got to know the missionary from Baptist Missionary Training Schools, who, by the way, was a graduate back in 1918. And so the minister's wife -- I mean, daughter, she had gone there, too. When she came back -- yeah, I guess when she came back, she gathered us teenage girls. And we learned how to sew, do hemming, and things like that, how to cook American food, because our parents, my mother didn't know how. And like my mother, I said, as I said, she was so liberal, I'd learn something at this cooking class, and the next week I would have it at home. So she would allow me to buy these things, like pork chops, how to do pork chops, or Spanish rice, or things like that. She was willing to try. My mother allowed me to try these things.

So besides sewing and cooking, then we played gym. We were on a gym. That's how we got active in the basketball activities. Japanese Baptist Church was the only Japanese church which had a regular gymnasium. See, rest of them were even portables or built later. That was different. Japanese Baptist Church was built back in 19... I think they moved to this new place about 1927. And they already had a gym. So that's why I think the Baptist people were able to use that gym lots more than other church members. So we were very fortunate in that.

In conjunction with the Japanese Baptist Church, they also had what they call Fujin Home, Japanese -- what is it? -- women's home. And they were started by Mrs. Okazaki, the wife of the pastor, who, we were all under, the head of our church office was in New York City. So she wrote to them and said, "Here are all these picture brides coming in from Japan. Temporarily, they have to have housing." Some of them didn't want to get married to the fellow that, whose picture they had, things like that. They refused. So they had to have lodging. And so the Baptist Home Mission Society funded the building that was built about two blocks away from the Japanese Baptist Church on East Spruce. And that became the haven for so many troubled people. I remember when I was growing up, if there were families where the husbands would die, and the wife would be left with all these little children, well they could always go to Fujin Home for, to stay there and eat there. And quite a few were there. I know one family that came in from Montana. The father had died and the widow brought all those children to Fujin Home. So that was another wonderful thing that...

BK: Like a temporary shelter?

SU: And even after war, it became one, a place where they could stay. So Fujin Home was a wonderful place for us.

BK: Yes, indeed. How did you, as a teenager, you again, you talked about all these different and various kind of projects that the Baptist Church had sponsored. I'm sure you probably were also there for the religious kinds of things. Could you tell us anything more about the gathering? Did you have conventions or conferences or --

SU: Yes. Before war, we had what we called the Young People's Christian Conference. That's YPCC, patterned after a group that started it in California two years prior to our starting it here. We had about 300 delegates that came in from Spokane, Yakima, Wapato, Vancouver, Portland. And we would gather, every year, the weekend of Thanksgiving. So the conference was Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And we had to house them. And so different homes would open up, and they would have guests like that. And here we were, only about fifteen or sixteen when we started all this. And the nerve that we had.

BK: And yet, I think back, in terms of the kind of leadership that you exhibited, even at that time, then.

SU: Well, it developed us. It really helped. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened?

BK: Gave you the confidence, gave you the opportunity to try out some of these things.

SU: And we had meetings at various market churches, especially up at the University District, because they had great big churches where they could accommodate all of this. But I remember particularly our last YPCC, before we were put into camp. That was the fall -- what was it? -- Thanksgiving time of 1940, because war started at '41, didn't it?

BK: Correct.

SU: '40. And Kurusu, the ambassador from Japan, was in Washington, D.C., trying to negotiate. It was right before war, so it's 1941.

BK: November of 1941.

SU: And we were so naive. We thought, we would pass a resolution. Send a wire to Washington, D.C., "Please don't have any war. We are for peace." And these are these young people meeting who are praying for your success. And we did send a telegrams like that, but alas, it didn't...

BK: But the fact that you young people took that stand and actually acted on it.

SU: Oh, yes, we did.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.