Densho Digital Archive - Bo T. Sakaguchi Interview (denshovh-sbo-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

JA: Do you have any memories of holidays? Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving?

BS: Well, I think I... Thanksgiving, I'm sure we had turkey. At Christmas I'm sure we had a special meal. And then New Year's we had a special meal, and then for New Year's, the Japanese do mochitsuki, the pounding of the sweet rice and forming little balls of what they call mochi, and they use that as a, for celebration of New Year's. So they used to do that in every, every block. I remember that being a ritual. But other than that, we weren't really very religious, so we celebrated Christmas as well as we could.

JA: What's your best memory of Manzanar?

BS: My best memory? My best memory I guess is that I got to meet a lot of young kids my age. I got to play with them, because when you farm, you work six days a week, and after you get out of high school, I mean, schools at the end of the day, I had to rush back and work on the farm. And the only time I ever got to meet -- and then North Hollywood, not having a large Japanese population, we had very, I had just a few Japanese friends. So I kind of looked forward to Saturday when we had a Japanese school, because then we got to get together with my Japanese friends and got to play. So, when we got to camp, hey, this was everyday, I got to play with Japanese kids, and so it was fun for me. I got to meet a lot of people and became friends with over the years. So that's the only happy experience I have at Manzanar.

JA: What is your least happy?

BS: The least happy? Well, the worst things were the windstorms, you know, the ground being freshly worked to clear the brush away for, to build the apartments and things. Whenever the wind blew in Manzanar, we'd have these horrendous whirlwind dust storms and you walked to school, you walked to your place of work, and you were just covered with dust and dirt where you'd just see the outline of your face if you wore glasses. And your hair would just be full of dirt because in the old days we used to use the real heavy wax, heavy wax, hair wax and we'd put it on the side and when the wind blew we had nothing but sand in our hair and we'd comb out just big gobs of dirt. That's the worst part of Manzanar. And then I lost, my father died in camp, and so we had a funeral. My sister died in Philadelphia, so we had the funeral in camp. My brother died in, well, he died at the county hospital because he had cancer, but we had his funeral in camp. So there were three sad days all within a six-month period in 194-,1945. That's the worst. Other than that, for kids it wasn't as bad as I think it was for young adults who were just starting to make a, earn a living. Of course, that's the same with anybody, they got drafted into the war and things.

JA: To lose family members in that kind of environment, that must have compounded it.

BS: Well, yeah, it wasn't easy. The only good thing was that we didn't have the money to pay for funerals, so the government paid for the funerals, which it wasn't easy on my mother to lose a sister first, the oldest daughter, then her husband, my oldest brother. He had just gotten married in November of the year before and died in August. He had cancer. He was a dentist, unfortunately. I felt sorry for the widow, the young widow that he had to leave.