Densho Digital Archive - Shigeki Sugiyama Interview (denshovh-sshigeki-01-0004)

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RP: You discussed, you know, this kind of four block area that was kind of the community, the Japanese American community, were you pretty much told by your parents to kind of stick around that area?

SS: Well, no, well one of the four block area, say four block radius, that is four walking blocks, the area extended quite a distance out, I mean, but there are pockets of Japanese and there were a few families that lived outside that area but not too many but essentially within walking distance of the two churches.

RP: Do you recall other ethnic communities based around the Alameda area?

SS: Not that I recall, there weren't that many, well, the Italian I guess you might call it, community I guess would be the most identifiable. I know there was in my class, there was a girl of Greek extraction and I think she attended a Greek school. In my class, it was a small class, only twenty-seven, twenty-eight students, and there's three Japanese Americans, myself and two girls. And then there were two Chinese, a boy and girl, Benton and Lily May. But those were the only identifiable, you know, recognizable ethnic minorities. There were not that many African Americans in Alameda at that time. And so I would say that probably, of course in those days just the Chinese and Japanese. The Japanese community was much larger than the Chinese, there were very few Chinese families in Alameda. Of course, in Oakland there's a large Chinese community and so forth.

It was the de facto segregation, there were a number of restaurants on Park Street and otherwise that the Japanese could not patronize. One of the shops still there, owners have turned over a number of times, like Oly's Waffle shop, but it's interesting, there's a... well, vacant lot near Oly's, in sort of a back alley like area, and I recall we were playing baseball one time when the owner of Oly's brought us a couple of rubber baseballs to play with. On the one hand, you know, it sort of a schizophrenic type of thing, you know, we couldn't patronize the store but yet... so community life as I recall it was the Japanese community was separate from the rest of the community. We interacted at school and so forth but definitely... of course, again I'm speaking the time was during the Depression years, the '30s, so that was just one of those things that we expected. We had good relationships in school and among the young people and so forth, and it was cordial relationship but it still was that separation, it was understood. And so when the evacuation came in February of 1942, well, it was war and our parents were technically "enemy aliens" so unfortunate but it's wartime.

RP: You mentioned that Alameda was declared a strategic zone, were there military installations nearby?

SS: Well, there's the Alameda Naval Air Station was just established, I think it was 1940, '41. They took over what was part of the Pan American Airlines terminal and then the rest of it, I think it was part of the dump. But it was a naval installation and matter of fact, the navy took over, when after the evacuation, the navy took over the Buddhist temple and they used it for a school, which in a way was good because we (had the) government occupying it and so forth. I don't know what happened to the Methodist church, I'm not sure what the property rights are within the church. I left in 1942 and didn't return 'til '66, so even then I've never returned to Alameda per se, but my family returned to Alameda in 1945, '45 and '46. But I've never gone back to Alameda to live although I'm a member now of the Alameda temple. And so I consider Alameda my home but even though I live here in Richmond.