Densho Digital Archive - Saburo Masada Interview (denshovh-msaburo-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

KL: And we're starting up again, and I did want to ask you if you would talk to us about your father's death in Jerome?

SM: Okay. Three weeks after we arrived it started to snow and turned extremely cold, and we had no heat in our barracks. I think that's why my father caught pneumonia, and he died in a makeshift barrack hospital. And what I regret about my, my experience for that was that, here my father was seriously ill and I was playing monopoly with my friends, which was what we were doing all the time in the camp, just playing sunrise to sunset and beyond. And if we were back home in Caruthers, that would've never happened. Not only that, after the funeral was held we all went back to life as if nothing had happened, because there was no gathering of relatives or families coming to our barrack room, 'cause there was no room in our barrack, space I mean, and we couldn't use the mess hall or anything like that for hosting friends or relatives. So it was just unfortunate that we didn't go through, I think, the grieving process that would've normally happened if we weren't in the camps.

But one of the things that surprised me, which I didn't really realize what was happening 'til later, I realized that my mother had contacted her Christian minister friends and had contacted the, a Christian funeral service, and we had never, ever stepped into a Christian church. We knew nothing about what Christianity was about because we were going to a Buddhist, we were nominally Buddhist. And that was November 19 or so, when we had the funeral, at his death, and then three weeks later, it'd be about Christmas Sunday -- and I didn't know it was Christmas Sunday, but I could tell it was Sunday before Christmas -- so it was Christmas Sunday and we were all in the, in this barrack full of people, and we were in the front row, all eight of us, and we were all being baptized, and I didn't know anything about what was happening. It was just that we were all, as a family, asked to stand up and then something was happening, which I didn't even know was baptism 'til years later. And we were all baptized, and we started to... I personally didn't go to any worship service. There was a Sunday school for junior high boys, and only thing I remember about church was when we had a guest, guest minister from Rohwer visit us in Jerome, and my junior high teacher -- there were a class of about maybe four or five of us -- he said, "Today we're, we have a wonderful visitor who's a guest, and he's going to teach us a song." So Reverend Hopper Sakauye, who, I didn't know his name then, but it was, I know it was, he got up on the board and wrote on the blackboard, "Every day with Jesus --" he sang, or teach a wonderful, wonderful song. He's one of those very enthusiastic ministers, and he wrote, "Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before." And all I could feel and remember is, "Yuck. What's so good, what's so sweet about --" I was a junior high boy and I wasn't interested in anything sweet, and about a name. [Laughs] Course, I didn't know who Jesus was. But that's all I could remember of my church experience in camp, which was, like, one year in Rohwer. No, excuse me, Jerome, that'd be almost two years in Jerome.

In Rohwer, I don't remember going to church. Except one Sunday when they were passing around something, and I asked my friend who was a Christian, which I didn't know what a Christian was, but I said, "What are you supposed to do?" He said, "Oh, they're going to pass that around and you're supposed to take a little piece of bread and eat it. And there's going to be a cup coming around and you're supposed to take and drink it." So I did what he said we're supposed to do, but that was Holy Communion that I didn't know was going on. And I think that's about the only service I attended. Must've been near Easter or something.