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Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Laurie Sasaki Interview
Narrator: Laurie Sasaki
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Richmond, California
Date: April 16, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-slaurie-01-0006

<Begin Segment 6>

RP: And what were your interests as a young kid in Imperial?

LS: My interests? My goodness, I don't know. I can't say, I can't even remember.

RP: Did you play? Do you remember what you liked to play as a kid?

LS: Oh, my goodness, I think my mother used to always have to entertain me, my poor mother I keep thinking. Yeah, 'cause I don't think I did very much.

RP: And she used to take you out in the fields, didn't she?

LS: Yes. Yes, in the summer... if we were... well, it was always hot there. But she would take me out in the field and make these little tents so that I could sit under the, you know, tent and then make my mud pies and things like that while she went up and down the rows tending to the tomatoes and things like that.

RP: And of course you had a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit right off the farm.

LS: Right. So now I can't even eat tomatoes from the grocery store. I hardly buy tomatoes or cantaloupe. Because we'd just go out in the field and get whatever we needed and it was so good. And it just, you just can't replace those tastes that you remember. Watermelon, we used to grow watermelon also. So, that's another thing. You'd just go out in the field and crack it open and just get the heart.

RP: Did you have animals out on the farm too?

LS: Yes. We had dogs and cats and couple of horses all the time.

RP: Did, do you recall your dad having a tractor?

LS: Yes, we had a tractor. And, the horse, I don't know why he named the horse Mary but my sister's name was Mary so every time he used to get mad at the horse, my sister would always think that he was mad at her because he would say, "Mary!" This and that. [Laughs]

RP: Yeah. So it sounds like you had a pretty happy childhood growing up on the farm.

LS: I did, only because maybe I was the youngest and I really didn't have to work that hard. I was getting in everybody's way so they just wanted to shove me aside, you know. But my recollection is that I lived a fairly good life.

RP: I know you were young, but how successful was your father with his farming operation? Especially towards the years leading up to the war?

LS: You know, I can't remember that we were ever in need of anything. I can't say that we were ever rich, you know. I mean, we just got by every year. But...

RP: Well, you did have that opportunity to travel to, you know, to the coast every year too.

LS: Oh, that's true. Yes. That was fun.

RP: Do you remember the car that...

LS: Oh, this... Japanese always had to have the latest cars, right? So we always had a car. You know, it was just a normal thing. So we always had the cars and then my brother was very active in church and JACL so he traveled all over the place. He's a very, very well-known, popular person so I just got to see everything through his eyes.

RP: Was there a JACL chapter in Brawley or in that area?

LS: Uh-huh, yeah. And so my oldest brother and sister used to travel to San Diego or Los Angeles and my sister was always in this oratorical contest or something like that and traveled up to Portland and things like that, before the war.

RP: Before the war, let's see, she was what, maybe twenty-one, twenty-two years old? Did either of your older brother or sister attend college?

LS: No, they did not. As I said, my sister was, could have come up to Mills College but because my parents just didn't want to let her get out of the house or whatever, the area, she just did not.

RP: So she never... when she even, when she came back from Japan, the two years that she spent there, she didn't, she didn't attend college in the United States?

LS: No. By that time I think the war broke out or something.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.