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-01-0004

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RP: Tell us about your siblings, Dick. Maybe rank them in order from older to younger in relationship to what your age was how much older or younger they were.

RS: Okay, yeah, my sister Lily that you're going to see tomorrow, is two years older than I am. And she of course had graduated from high school just as the war started and I told you about her being assigned to be a assistant teacher in the camps and becoming a teacher. And of course that's what she did during the camp days. Afterwards she, for a short time she moved to... when she left camp she moved to New York to be with Tomiko's father's family. Let's see... Tomiko's father and his family, they all moved to New York for a while and my sister went and joined them and worked in New York for a while but then she came back to Portland after a while to rejoin the family.

RP: You were next?

RS: And I'm next and then George is next and he was just starting high school when the war started. And so during the war he was always high school age and actually he didn't finish high school until a year after the war ended. He finished high school in Portland after being back. Do you want more information about him?

RP: I think maybe a little bit later.

RS: Okay.

RP: Who's next?

RS: Next is Betty, the one that had all these handicaps. She was born with cerebral palsy and had multiple multiple handicaps, and so she always lived at home until she was about, I think it was in her fifties or something and she finally got... well, the responsibility for her was transferred over to the Cerebral Palsy Center in Portland and they took charge of things for her. By that time you see my mother was getting quite old and it was hard to take care of her. But she lived to be... I think she lived to be seventy years old, she only died five or six years ago.

RP: And then?

RS: And she was always a good person to have in the family. Even though she had all these handicaps, somehow or other something about her that just made everything... her attitude and everything was, just made everything much better. So it was always good to have her in the family even though it was a lot of work for everybody, particularly my mother, but still it was good to have her around.

RP: And who's next?

RS: Then it was Eddie, Edward who was I think about just about six years old when we went into camp. He started school in the camps. Back in those days there weren't any such thing as kindergarten so he went directly into first grade so he was just old enough to start first grade so he did that in the camps. He was just one of the rest of us. And then lastly there's Judy, the youngest one, who was four years old so I guess she probably started school in camp, not at the very beginning.

RP: Well, thank you, Dick for sharing the rest of your family with us.

RS: Yeah, actually I'm really proud of all of them. They've all accomplished a great deal and I'm really proud of them.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.