Densho Digital Archive - Saburo Masada Interview (denshovh-msaburo-01-0014)

<Begin Segment 14>

KL: What, tell us about coming back to Caruthers. I guess there was never any question that you would go somewhere else or anything because of your property.

SM: Yeah. Of course, we didn't know anything about that, but it turned out that the Sorensons and the Nielsons had looked after our things. I don't think we knew that we were going to come back for sure, but it was more in case we did. And when we came back the ranch was not in the best shape, because I'm sure the Sorensons didn't have the help they needed to, and it wasn't their land, so when we came back we had a lot of work to get the weeds out and get it back in shape again. But the day after we got back we enrolled at Caruthers High School, as a freshman, my sister was a senior. That was about April, around April 24th or so, so just before graduation. And the first thing I did was look up my friends and found out that they didn't say anything about how bad it was that I was gone. But my sister, just before graduation had a, they were in the library and the intercom said, "All the seniors come to the principal's office to get your cap and gown measurement," so she, with her classmates, excitedly went to the office and Mr. Butzbach took her aside, the principal, and he said, "We don't want any Japs at our graduation, so you can't attend." And you read her letter, she felt like she was just slapped in the face. She was so stunned that she didn't even tell her family that such a thing happened. And I don't know why we didn't question her graduation. Probably because she went to Watsonville for this new job that she got the day she was told not to come back, or not to graduate with her class.

KL: What was the job that she got?

SM: WRA (War Relocation Authority) formed a temporary office in Watsonville to help resettle the people coming back out of the camps to that area. And she probably had helped Marion's family locate the Buddhist temple, and then the Westview Presbyterian Church, a Japanese Presbyterian church. Of course she wouldn't have known the, her family, and her family wouldn't have known my sister.

KL: Did she say anything about her feelings about having that job?

SM: No, except she was glad that when she got, when she was told she couldn't attend she just dropped out of school, and the same day, she said, "I got this telegram saying to come to work." So she said, "I rode the Greyhound bus and it was, like, first time I'd traveled alone like this." But when she got there, the newspapers were filled with this anti-Japanese sentiments, that, "We don't want them back here," in Watsonville, Salinas, Santa Cruz, and so I guess she had, she's quite a strong thinker, so I guess she fired a letter to the editor. And I think Mr. (G.W. Cornell) must've had something to do with that Methodist church, if only not to allow her to come back to church there. She was just a, just a teenager in a youth fellowship. But anyway...

KL: It's another research question, maybe. It'd be interesting to --

SM: Well, you know, I checked with the church leaders there, especially through a friend, and they said the church never had a board meeting like that. I don't think they would record it, but anyway, it might've been a special board meeting. And I know that church supported the Japanese coming back to the area.

KL: The denomination?

SM: No, that particular church and certain other Protestant churches, because some of the ministers, like at the First Baptist Church, had -- I don't know who the minister was at Methodist church and the Presbyterian church -- they all said, "Let's welcome them back." But then all these other people wrote letters to editors saying, "We don't want them back. They should go back to where they came from." Things like that.

KL: That's in Watsonville, the churches supported the return?

SM: Uh-huh.

KL: Interesting.

SM: Because, I think primarily, not because only the ministers, because their, like the major denominations, they weren't supportive of this kind of mass incarceration. Course, the headquarters had nothing, didn't know of anything about the West Coast anti-Japanese movement, so they thought that didn't make sense. They're Americans. But so those, what we call the major denominations, they passed resolutions at their conventions saying this is not right, but it was more the Pentecostal, Four Square and the more conservative churches that didn't want us back or didn't want us attending church. Like my brother and sister came back early in March, their best friend, not best friend but a classmate, Effie Haggard, invited him to their Easter worship and two days later the minister of that church brought Effie with him and they told my brother, "My congregation says they will not come to church anymore if you two continue to come to church." My brother said, "Oh, don't worry about it. We're not going to," and went two blocks away to the church that became a home church, the Methodist Church of Caruthers.