<Begin Segment 19>

RM: All right, this is Rose Masters, I'm interviewing Pat Sakamoto in Monterey Park. I guess I should say it's at the house of Raymond and Toshiko Kurihara, and this is tape three of our interview. We were just talking about the library downtown and how Pat and her sister Janice would go to do dances there, but also check out books. I guess there were some things I wanted to ask you about just what your family life was like after Paul and your mom got married. Because it sounds, I think you said that you didn't know that he wasn't your father for quite some time, and it also sounded like he really cared about the two of you kids. So if you could just tell me what your family was like.

PS: I think it was almost like a normal family. Well, eventually, the one I remember is when we moved to Third and Flower, I was in the third grade, I was eight years old. He worked for... I don't know whether he worked for Big 5, but I think he did, and my mother worked in the garment industry. And I went to Fremont Avenue School, and I loved it. And lots of friends, and they used to shoot a lot of movies in our neighborhood because it looked like the gangster area. And I just remember it being a good time, because it's not far from Angel's Flights. And then I remember when we moved to the house on Virgil, it was in... let's see, I was twelve. So it had to be '56, 1956, when we moved to the house. And over the years my mother told me this was a house she dreamed about owning. Being on the bus going to work, and she would see that house and say, "I love that house. I hope that it could be my house one day." And they made an offer on it in 1956, and it was theirs. I don't think they could get a regular loan for some reason. I think they paid twelve thousand dollars, and the people that owned the house before took the loan back. And my father put, they put down five thousand dollars on that house. And I remember that little booklet in the mail that came, they paid so much on the principal and so much on the interest.

RM: What was the house like?

PS: It's a two bedroom, you know, living room, dining room, it's a wood frame house, and it has a breakfast room and kitchen, service porch, it's fairly large. I think it's close to fifteen hundred square feet.

RM: It sounds like your family had to move around a lot, and then was this finally you all could settle into it.

PS: Yeah, they bought the house and my mother never would leave that house. Even if my father worked in Torrance, and he wanted to move to Gardena, and she said no. This was her dream home and she wasn't going to give it up.

RM: For those of us -- I guess I was trying to imagine where Virgil is, and for those of us not familiar with that...

PS: It's near Koreatown now. It was on Virgil between First and Second Street, which is just east of Vermont, if you know where Vermont is, Vermont's a major street.

RM: I think so. Somebody who watches this will know all of those streets. I have talked to people who said that they had trouble buying homes in Los Angeles because they were Japanese American. Did your family ever face that kind of difficulty with renting or buying?

PS: Well, I think the reason why we rented where we did was because people would rent to us in those neighborhoods? I think they did come across that when they bought the house, and that's why the owners or the owner took the loan back, because they couldn't get a loan. My parents never said, but I know that even into the '60s when I graduated from high school, I couldn't rent in Los Feliz, they wouldn't rent to me. And I would go and look at an apartment, I had a Caucasian girlfriend, and they wouldn't rent to me, they'd say it was filled. And then my girlfriend would go and they'd rent to her, and then we'd have the apartment.

RM: And this was in the 1960s?

PS: Uh-huh.

RM: It's sad that that lasted so long. I guess I'm going to maybe fast forward, but first I want to ask Kristen if you have questions about Pat growing up and L.A. and everything? Maybe if you wanted to just summarize sort of your continuing, going through school and what that was like for you, if there was anything that really stood out that you'd like to share. Especially because, I think something that I'd like to know more about is that you just had this terrible experience in school when you first entered it in Burbank, and it sounds like it really improved. Did you ever have other issues in school with prejudice or kids that were...

PS: Not so much. But I do know when we used to go to the swimming pool in Hollywood, I remember kids calling me a "dirty Jap."

RM: And when was that?

PS: I had to be... I used to take the bus, I had to be maybe... oh, back then I could have been eleven or twelve taking the bus to Hollywood, because it was only one bus line I had to take.

RM: So in the mid-'50s then.

PS: Yeah.

RM: Do you remember that kind of prejudice just all over, or was it usually just specific regions of L.A.?

PS: I don't think I felt it too much anywhere else. When I went to high school, there was no prejudice, 'cause I went to an inner city school, and it was a big mix of kids. I felt it in the church, like when I joined... I think a neighbor down the street asked my mom, I think she felt that we needed to have some sort of religious background, but she asked my mother if she couldn't take us to church, and it was the First Baptist Church. And I think I felt prejudice there, and especially when I went o the camp, the kids weren't nice to me there. Same thing when I went to the Presbyterian church on Sixth Street, I felt the same thing when I went to camp, but I wouldn't tell my parents. I still let them pay for camp, even if I was having a miserable time.

RM: Did your mom continue practicing Catholicism?

PS: You know, she couldn't anymore, because by then she was divorced and she couldn't receive anymore. So she couldn't be included in a lot of the ceremony of the Catholic church. So she joined the Hollywood Independent, which was just a, I think, a Presbyterian church.

RM: Was that hard for her?

PS: She never said, she just changed churches. Mine, my stepfather now was Buddhist. Not that he was a practicing Buddhist, but he felt that we needed to go to church no matter what, because they all preached basically the same thing.

RM: Did you ever go to a Buddhist church with your stepfather?

PS: No. Only funerals.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.