Densho Digital Archive - Richard Sakurai Interview (denshovh-srichard-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

RP: Where were you sent after you left Troutdale?

RS: To the Portland Assembly Center at the Expo Center which is still there.

RP: Had you ever visited that center as a kid growing up on a field trip or any other --

RS: Yeah, as a kid I remember the schools every once in a while when they had an expo show, the school would sometimes have a field trip there and we would... I remember going there, yeah, so I knew the place.

RP: What were are some of your most vivid memories of the short time you spent there?

RS: Well, the most vivid one is the one when I mentioned there is about walking out the door of the building which had a fence surrounding it, and soldiers outside the fence and guard towers every once in a while, walking out the door into the space between the building and the fence and looking up at the guard tower and seeing the machine gun pointed directly at me. And the soldier, a really nervous looking soldier standing or sitting behind that machine gun holding the machine gun and looking right directly at me. And there's this soldier with a machine gun pointed right at me and I was just stunned. It was just... it was a real big shock and I think that was the moment that I knew I was in jail. Before, you see, I knew that I was going into someplace that I didn't know anything about and of course I knew that there were soldiers around there and so forth. But to really understand what the situation was like was to have that experience of having that machine gun pointed at me with the soldier behind it. Of course it was very early in the time that we were all there so the soldier, of course, he was just a young kid and he was nervous, you could see he was nervous. He didn't know what was going to happen and so he was supposed to make sure that none of us escaped. And he sees this boy coming, walking out the door, he's got to watch and see and he got to be able to do the right thing. Well, that, to me, that was a really shocking thing. It really made me think about where I was. Of course, there were a lot of other things in the assembly center. Being able to play baseball in a league, there was an internal league there. And I got to play baseball game on a regular basis.

RP: Did you have a team?

RS: Yeah, there was a team I was on and there was a schedule for us and we played. That was a great thing from my point of view. And I think I mentioned in there about going out in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it was very quiet because everybody was sleeping. But during that walk to the bathroom, which is several hundred feet away, I could hear this woman crying. And she was just crying and crying, terrible crying, it really, really... she was so sad about something and I can still hear it, I can still hear it. There are lots of experiences like that coming from a country, out in the country where you don't... it's a small community out there and then go to the place there and under one roof there's 3,000 people. And all sorts of things are going on and I never experienced those things before, and never experienced hearing something like that. It's something that's haunted me forever. First time some significant thing happens, some things you keep remembering.