Densho Digital Archive - Bo T. Sakaguchi Interview (denshovh-sbo-01-0001)

<Begin Segment 1>

JA: Just for the record, to have it on tape, tell me your name and where you're from.

BS: My name is Bo Sakaguchi. Where we lived before the war?

JA: Or where you live now.

BS: I live in Northridge, California, and before the war we lived in North Hollywood, California.

JA: Tell me about your family. Where they came from, what they did.

BS: Oh, well, my parents were from the Nagano-ken, Nagano-ken, and there were seven living just before the war. My oldest brother had just finished dental school in 1941, and my second brother was in his junior year in dental school at USC, and my third brother was in medical school at Marquette University in Milwaukee. And then I had my sister, my oldest sister had just graduated UCLA, an English major, and was working for the local newspaper, Japanese newspaper.

JA: What kind of work did your father do?

BS: My father was a farmer. They worked six-and-a-half days a week, and because of that they were able to earn enough money to send the kids to college because my mother believed in education.

JA: And when did your father come to this country?

BS: I can't tell you, I don't know. All I know is... let's see, I am seventy-seven, so my oldest brother would have been eighty-eight. So somewhere...

[Interruption]

BS: My father was a, was a gardener first, but the children, he knew that if he put them to work on a farm, it would be more successful, so he became a farmer. That was in about 1931 or 1930.

JA: So he did achieve some success, then?

BS: Yeah, well, they achieved success in that they were able to send kids to college, and we even were able to buy a piece of property when the kids were old enough.

JA: Was your father able to buy property?

BS: No, my father could not buy property. It was bought under my oldest brother's name, because you had to be a citizen to own property. But my father believed in property, it's a good investment, is what he used to always tell his friends, and he encouraged friends to buy property and they did. It was lucky for them because they had something to come back to in North Hollywood after the war ended, they'd have a home, yeah, so we were lucky.