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RP: This is an oral history for the Manzanar National Historic Site. Today we're talking with Toshiko...

TA: Aiboshi.

RP: Aiboshi. And Toshiko is -- A-I-B-O-S-H-I -- and Tosh, as I'll refer to you on the, on the interview --

TA: Yes.

RP: -- lives at 5325 Etheldo in Culver City, California.

TA: That's Etheldo Avenue.

RP: Avenue, okay. And the date of our interview is January 20, 2011, and Kirk Peterson is behind the camera, and Richard Potashin is the interviewer. And we'll be talking with Tosh about her experiences at the Amache War Relocation Center as well as the Santa Anita Assembly Center today. Our interview will be archived in the Parks library. Do I have permission to go ahead and record our interview?

TA: Yes.

RP: Thank you very much, Tosh, to share some time and remembering some of your experiences for us today. Let's start with a little bit of biographical information. What year were you born and where were you born?

TA: I was born on July 8, 1928, in Boyle Heights, California.

RP: And tell us a little bit about your, what you recall about your father and mother.

TA: Okay. My father -- I learned that I was born in Boyle Heights by looking at my birth certificate -- my father, Torataro Sakamoto, and my mother, Oshima Sakamoto, apparently were cousins in Japan, in Wakayama-ken. And I don't know when they got married or really when they came to the United States, but I understood from friends of theirs that when, it took a, it was a long time before I was born, and so when I was born my parents were delighted. And then they were married and I think my father was working for a family in the, who had a produce market in Los Angeles, and at some point he changed from there to go into some business of his own. And when I was about four years old, I'm told, my mother developed tuberculosis and so she could not be at home, and my father could not take care of me all by himself while having a job. And at that time the people who had that produce section of the grocery store, who were Shigeto and Ishio Yoshimune, were members of this church and very, probably one of the leaders of the church, apparently volunteered or something to take care of me. And so I went to live with them, and they lived in the kind of Figueroa and Fifty-Second Street area, and their produce section of the market was about two blocks away, and so I started elementary school at the Fifty-Second Street school. And I don't remember ever seeing my mother for quite a while, and I think my father came by occasionally on Sundays. And I saw a picture of a church gathering, and my mother and my father are both in that picture and I am in that picture, but it's in one of the archives over here.

RP: And which church would that have been?

TA: That was called the Japanese Church of Christ, and it was on Thirty-Seventh Street, in between Normandie and Western. It was a two story building, and I think it was donated to the church by George Pepperdine, of Pepperdine University, because the minister of the church, who had come from Japan, and George Pepperdine had become friends when he, they were at college. And George Pepperdine had made his money with the Pep Boys and apparently gave him, was doing very well and gave them seed money to start this church. So that was the church that I went to.

RP: Is that church still around?

TA: And that church, during the war, many of us had to go to Amache, Colorado, and it so happened that when we went to Amache the only churches that were really allowed to hold services were a Buddhist church or a Christian service, and then I think the Catholics could have a service on Saturday evening. It just happened that the director of the Amache Center was a Church of Christ member, and so he allowed the Church of Christ people to meet separately, and so we continued to meet separately during that time. And so... I don't know what to tell you about the rest. [Laughs] But anyway, around the time I was about seven, my mother was deemed well enough to come home, and so -- excuse me. Okay, and so then I moved into kind of the Seinan area, and I was on Thirty-Sixth Place. And then I went, I had gone first to the Fifty-Second Street School, where I was in kindergarten and the first grade, and in the second grade is when I changed over to the Thirty-Seventh Street School, and at the Thirty-Seventh Street School there were, it was a different population mix, because at the Fifty-Second Street School everybody was Caucasian. At the Thirty-Seventh Street School it was a mixture of Japanese, Spanish-speaking people, black people. It was a very cosmopolitan, or if you use that term for a mixed culture, and so that was kind of interesting. We lived on the second floor of a two story house, and it was across the street from the Buddhist church, but we were not Buddhist so we didn't go there. But that was the time that my parents decided that I should go to Japanese school, and so I went to the, where the Methodist Church was having a Japanese school. And everybody my age had already been to Japanese school for about two years, and so I was very poor at studying or knowing anything about Japanese. And so the, it was very difficult for me when I was used to doing fairly well in school. But I did okay in the elementary school. Then I think we continued living that way for about three years. My father, at that time, was running a hotel on Main Street near the bus stop, the Greyhound Bus place, and so he came home on the, in the evenings sometimes, but sometimes he had to stay at the hotel. And so I stayed with my mother, who had to just stay in bed all the time, so I didn't really get to know her very well.

And then at, I finished elementary school at Thirty-Seventh, no, it was Thirty-Seventh Street School, and then I was going to go to Foshay Junior High School because that was the next place, but when I was eleven my, I was told that my father had died. And they said that he had fallen out of a window on the second floor of the hotel onto the sidewalk and was instantly killed. And I had adored my father because my mother was just always in bed, and he took me to many places, he took me to see the merry-go-round, he took me to see Catalina, he took me to see the fireworks at the Coliseum, and so it was a huge loss to me. And then, obviously my mother could not take care of me, and there was a woman downstairs who had sometimes prepared meals for me, but I think, as I reflect now, probably my father had paid her some money to take care of me and she said she could no longer do that for free. And so then I moved back with the Yoshimunes, who lived at 3737 Dalton, which was closer to Foshay to begin with. And so I moved again with them, and they had a daughter who was ten years older than I was, and so she became kind of like my big sister. I don't remember her before, when we were living, when I was living with them, but I do remember afterwards that we did. And so I continued going to that church. And then my mother's TB had also flared up, so she could not live, and so she was sent to a kind of a home.

RP: A sanitarium?

TA: It was not a sanitarium in that it was like a hospital kind of thing. She was, I think, in a kind of a homey situation or something, alright.

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