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-01-0006

<Begin Segment 6>

RP: Did you have any personal experience with prejudice as a young man growing up in Troutdale?

RS: Growing up before prewar?

RP: Before camp, before war.

RS: Well, there were times which somebody would call me a "Jap" which not really a very nice term because of all the implications behind it, you know. I don't remember a lot of real explicit things but there was, "He's just a Jap," kind of a casual underneath kind of experience. No one really ever came out and really did something really explicit which represented their prejudice but I knew that there was always was underneath it this sense that Japanese were inferior.

RP: How did you feel about your ethnicity and your heritage as a kid? Is it something you wanted to run from or did you --

RS: I think probably I must have had, felt a little bit as if I wish I didn't... in some ways I wished I wasn't Japanese. At the same time I think... I think probably a kind of a mixture of knowing that I'm Japanese and that was a good thing and then at the same time thinking well, gee, I wish I didn't have to be that, I wish I was white and therefore I wouldn't have to feel this way. But I never felt really explicit senses of that. Maybe because I don't know whether it's because I just avoided it I don't know.

RP: How was your upbringing kind of a mixture of Japanese culture and American culture?

RS: Yes.

RP: And your parents' outlook? Your mom was originally born in America.

RS: Yeah, but she also was raised in Japan.

RP: In Japan.

RS: And raised by her grandparents and so they were much more traditionally raised and so forth. But as long as you're going to school here in Oregon you can't avoid... American culture is all around you, and that's a predominant thing. And at home my parents sometimes would say, "Speak in Japanese so we can understand what you're saying." Or sometimes they would say, they would talk about some particular point of view which is particularly Japanese and that's, you know, that's the way we ought to behave and so forth. But at the same time I think that they recognized that we're here in America and that we're just surrounded by American culture. But I think their wanting us to speak Japanese was mostly so that they could understand what we were about.

RP: Did you attend Japanese language school?

RS: They tried to set one up out where we lived in a small community. And I think we probably went may have gone maybe... it was kind of after school, it was very infrequent, after school one day a week. I think it probably lasted a couple months and then we just stopped, so in effect, no, we never went to Japanese school.

RP: How about religious background?

RS: My mother and my father were members of a Buddhist church but we never went, we never went 'cause we lived in the country. And coming into town, it was a big thing. For our father coming into town was delivering vegetables and things like that, but coming into town for other things it was not... it didn't happen very often. After we moved to Portland, after the war, of course my mother was a much more regular participant and things in the Buddhist church. Of course my father never went unless it was some special occasion. But growing up we just never did very much in the church. All I can remember is a few times going to a funeral or to a memorial service or something like that. The Buddhist temple here in Portland, my grandfather on my mother's side was one of the founders of that, but we were always kind of members but we never participated.

RP: Where did you attend school, Dick?

RS: In Corbett, Oregon, which is another small town just east of Troutdale.

RP: And what kind of student were you?

RS: Me? I was a good student. I don't know, I probably was the best student in class, I don't know. I mean each class had twenty five students or so like that, you know.

RP: Had any of your older siblings gone to college yet or did your parents emphasize that fact to you?

RS: Prewar, no, none of my siblings... of course none of my sibling were old enough to consider college. My cousins who lived next to us, they never went to college. One of the neighbor Japanese people, two of their sons went to college before the war. I don't think that ever came up for us. We were too young. And I don't think that was the sort of thing that we thought about.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.