Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 1>

JC: Let's begin at the beginning.

HS: Let's begin at the beginning?

JC: Begin at the beginning. I'd love to hear a little bit about, from the start, you're growing up, who you are. Tell me about your early life as a kid.

HS: Well, my early part of my life, I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I was born in an old hotel on Southwest First and Market Street. January 27, 1927, was my birth date, and I remember some things about that area because we didn't have a whole lot of neighbors. We had an old hotel, right next door was an apartment house and, brick apartment house, and we had Japanese friends that lived there. But the other if you want to call it a Japanese neighborhood there maybe two or three blocks away, and I remember we used to, I used to ride my tricycle around and around the block, and I don't remember too much about that growing up period until I got to grade school. Grade school I went to Shattuck Elementary on Southwest Broadway and Hall, and Shattuck is now part of Portland State University. So I went there first through eighth grade, and first day, my dad took me, and I guess he signed me up. And when they asked my first name, he said Henry, and that's, and the R sounded like a D, so for the first five years of my matriculation there, I was known as Hendy, H-E-N-D-Y Sakamoto. It's also on my old report cards. After about five years, I figured out that it's supposed to be Henry, so I made the change. From then on, I was Henry Sakamoto.

One of the classes that I remember at Shattuck grade school was auditorium class. And in the auditorium class, it's, the class is within the auditorium so you're sitting there row after row, and Mrs. Pygate was our teacher, and she taught us a lot of good things as I recall, something in the order of Robert's Rules of Order, how to run a meeting, and demonstrated that, and we participated in the process. And she even taught us something as simple as how to avoid pedestrian traffic when you're walking with, against somebody else. She said, "Always pass to the right, and you'll never collide," simple rule, but it, you know. Over in Europe, you get confused because they do right from left over there. One of the things that she also did was put on short plays like pirates and bad people, and she put on short plays about some of our American heroes like Nathan Hale, historical things, and she asked me if I would play Nathan Hale, and I said, "Gee, I don't know. I'm Japanese and Nathan Hale's American." She said, "You're an American and you can play Nathan Hale," so I did. Anyway, went from there, oh, another name I happen to remember that during the seventh and eighth grade, our class, the boys, we were a good softball team and championship caliber even in the seventh grade, and I was always a poor hitter at bat. But one of the names I had when I went to bat, they'd cheer me on, they'd say, "Sock that tomato, Sakamoto." So I was Saka-Tomato as well. After grade school, we went to Lincoln High School, the old Lincoln High School down there on... was it Broadway and about Harrison, I guess. Anyway, old Lincoln High School is now part of the Portland State system, Lincoln Hall I guess. So a lot of my early experiences had to do with developing Portland State University, you see. Well, we went to, I went to high school for a couple years, and it was during my sophomore year that we had to leave because of the internment, evacuation. And in the spring of 1942, we had our evacuation order, so I had to go around and, all of us Nisei had to go around and get our sign-out sheets signed by our teachers. And my English teacher at that time, Mrs. Town I recall, when it came time to give her the slip to sign me out, she cried.