Densho Digital Archive - Richard Sakurai Interview (denshovh-srichard-01-0008)

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RP: This is tape two of a continuing interview with Dick Sakurai, and Dick, we were talking about your Dad's farming techniques on the Troutdale farm. By the time you were growing up did he had tractors or mechanized equipment or was he still using horses?

RS: He started out with horses when I was young. Last few years he did get a tractor, and I remember when the last horse died and we buried him and then after that instead of getting another horse he got a tractor, but that was in the late '30s.

RP: Did you help in packaging vegetables?

RS: Yes.

RP: Onions.

RS: That's one of the things I helped him do. We never did any fancy packing, packing things in boxes and things like that, but not wrapping and things like that, just making sure the boxes were filled in correctly and things like that.

RP: And did he haul his own vegetables to market?

RS: Almost all of it he did. There were a few things which he had some neighbor come who had a big truck, big truck to come and when he had some kind of harvest, that was done all at once you know, not as the things ripened. And so there was a big truckload worth he had this neighbor come and pack it off for him, but most of the time he used his own truck to take it to market.

RP: Was he a member of a cooperative?

RS: Yeah, I think there was something like that, at least early in my recollection, but I don't know how much of that went on. I just don't know.

RP: Was your dad interested in current events? Did he keep up with what was going on in the world?

RS: Oh, yeah, yes. He could read and write English too, you know. Actually, after he got here, fifteen years old, fifteen, sixteen years old, there was a little school up near where we were at. He went to that school for a while to learn English and to read and write and so he was able to do that. I remember after he went into the camps, into Minidoka he insisted that we subscribe to Life magazine so he could see what Life magazine was showing, things like that, you know. So yeah, he knew what was going on in the world.

RP: Your mother briefly worked for a Japanese language newspaper?

RS: Yeah, she also was a very intelligent woman and she knew the Japanese language very well and she knew, Japanese language has all these characters and to know a lot of characters is an important thing for the printing business. So that's one thing she did was to work for the newspaper.

RP: And do you know the name of the newspaper?

RS: I think Oregon Shimpo. It was the newspaper in Portland. I'm not quite sure about the name of it but anyway. About my mother, she was a really good haiku poet, she was a really good haiku poet. She was published many, many times in the foremost haiku poetry magazine in Japan and so in the haiku community in Japan she was well known. She started this back in the '30s, she started sending haiku to Japan to this magazine and they started publishing her haiku. So that she had haiku published in almost every issue of that magazine. Of course, haiku is not very long, you see it's a short thing so each issue could publish a fair number of haiku. But she got published very often, sometimes even more than one haiku per issue and then of course during the war she couldn't do that, you couldn't send things back and forth to Japan. But after the war was ended then we moved back to Portland and she started up again, and until she got too old she continued to do that. So she was very good in that kind of thing, language things in general she was quite good at that. I think she was quite well read in Japanese literature and things, like that sort of thing.