Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Richard Sakurai Interview
Narrator: Richard Sakurai
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Portland, Oregon
Date: July 24, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-srichard-01-0010

<Begin Segment 10>

RP: How long did you have before you left?

RS: I don't remember. I think it was a couple weeks between the formal notice and the time we actually left.

RP: And what do you recall about your preparations to leave in terms of what you did with the farm, the property and that type of thing?

RS: I think my father had an agreement with one of the neighbors to, I think, I'm not sure, to rent the place. I do know that we sold all the big equipment, the car, the truck, the tractor, and we sold... we had a refrigerator because I said we didn't have electricity at first but in the middle of the '30s the electricity did come through and in the middle of the '30s the running water did come through but anyway so we had electricity so we had a refrigerator. But we sold that. We sold all those things, not for very much money, but we sold them all. The little things, all the little farm equipment we just left there. Used little farm equipment I mean nobody's going to buy it from us and then other things we didn't have very much anyway. I keep trying to figure out with my sister what happened to one valuable piece of equipment that we had, my mother had a Japanese musical instrument called a koto. And I remember she had it, now what happened to it? I know we didn't sell it. Did we leave it there? I don't know, I don't quite remember.

RP: There were instances where families burned items, buried items that were Japanese.

RS: Well, there is one thing we did something like that. When they knew that we were leaving, the school that we were going to gave all the Japanese Americans that went to that school like a going away party. See, those are the good guys, those are the people that weren't the ones that were against us. They were our good friends and so they gave us going away presents, party, including a present, a going away present. When I got home with the present, the present was a flashlight, right, the flashlight is one of the things that we were not allowed to have, we were not allowed to have flashlights anymore because flashlights, we could use to signal any Japanese airplane where to go. So flashlights were forbidden so we were not allowed to have flashlights. Of course the school didn't know that, so they gave us a flashlight as a going away present. So soon as I opened it, saw this flashlight, we can't have this, so I went over to the outhouse and dropped it into the outhouse. That's how we got rid of that one thing.

RP: That contraband.

RS: Yeah.

RP: Great story. Was your family visited by the FBI at all in time after Pearl Harbor?

RS: Yes, they came once to search the house.

RP: Were you there?

RS: No, I was at school. I remember when we came from school, my younger brother and sister, Eddie and Judy, came running out of the house running towards the school bus that we came off of and saying, "The FBI was here, the FBI was here." [Laughs] Of course they didn't know what it was all about but they just knew it was some kind of excitement, and so they were telling us. But they came and searched the house and see if there was anything there that we shouldn't have had.

RP: Your father... there were other men, Issei community leaders that were being picked up in the communities in Portland, but your father had --

RS: He was not picked up.

RP: Was there any fear that he might be?

RS: Well, I don't remember that, but of course, I don't think I would've thought that there was any reason to have him picked up.

RP: Dick, what was the most difficult item for you to leave behind when you left home?

RS: Well, as I said there, knowing what's going happen. Unknown life, I mean, to leave something, a life that I knew what it's about, it's something that was completely unknown. Besides, we didn't have anything, what did we have to leave behind anyway, we were just a poor, didn't have anything. So the only thing we left behind was really these things which are not tangible items, they were intangible things like the knowledge and so forth.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.