Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

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HS: And continuing my Ohio Wesleyan experience in making money during the summer, the following summer, 1945, I went to Detroit, decided to try another city, you know. And so coincidentally, I found a job in another war plant in Detroit, a defense contract, and this one's a little bit different. They're making ammunition cans for transporting ammunition and it's an assembly line kind of operation, and my job, they put me at the end of the assembly line, and as the product comes off the assembly line, I'm supposed to check the rivets and things for soundness, bang it, see if it falls apart, whatever, through these things, apply some force to it, and then you put it in the reject pile or the good pile. And at the end of the day, first day, my arms were so tired and my hand was throbbing and I could barely close them, you know. They're kind of swollen. So the next day, I go back to work and the foreman says, "I'm surprised you showed up. Most people don't come back." I should have told him I need the money, but I can't recall. I guess the job started in June, and in August was VJ Day. As soon as the word came that Japan had surrendered, their contract is over, so they closed up shop just like that. Yeah, so I went out on the streets and heard the VJ Day celebration from downtown, really loud and noisy.

And continuing my education at Ohio Wesleyan University. When I first went there, being out of the internment camp and the environment at the school of 1,500, 1,500 enrollment, really small college and generally small classes, and you know, if you're there a year, you know just about everybody on campus. But most of the other students, I mean if they weren't from internment camp, they were from the eastern seaboard and other populous areas, Ohio. Being in Ohio, you get a lot of students from Ohio. I discovered right away that my education was really lacking. I really wasn't prepared for the college level stuff. I could read and write and knew my A, B, C's, but that's one of the things about going to high school in the internment camp. The teachers were dedicated and they were, or else they wouldn't be there. Why subject themselves to life in an internment camp to teach internees? The teachers there had to live under circumstances that were very restricted as well, live behind barbed wire and whatever. If you were able to teach on the outside, why, so therefore, they were very, our teachers were very dedicated, very conscientious, but we just didn't have the equipment, the books, the supplies, and the caliber I would, maybe the caliber of teaching or the level of teaching, not necessarily the caliber. And well, the chemistry lab was, when they built Minidoka, they didn't even think of a school building, so they took over one of the blocks that was meant for living, residential living, and converted that into the schoolrooms, and the laundry room was our chem lab, chemistry, where they taught us chemistry because we had running water there. But anyway, I don't fault the teachers because they were a dedicated group. But I have to fault myself as well though, put blame where it belongs. I was not a real good student. I was interested in extracurricular activities. For whatever reason, I was president of the sophomore class at Hunt High School. I was vice president of the junior class. But since I graduated early, I wasn't an officer for the senior class. But anyway, being responsible officer in the high school, you have to do a lot of other detailed things that frequently take you out of the classroom. So one scholarship I applied for, they get to transfer it from Hunt High School and they rejected my applications, said I lack seriousness of purpose because you spent more time out of class than in class. So you know, the troubles I had in freshman year at Ohio Wesleyan, I have to lay on my own shoulders too.

But the total experience was very, very good, very, very positive, and the classmates were, accepted us without question. I didn't experience any rejection, romantically maybe, but scholastically no. [Laughs] Then working a way through school, I tell my kids before when they were thinking about going to college, what you need to do is find a job in the kitchen area washing dishes or bus boy or whatever because you get meals with that job, so worked as a dishwasher basically, and you're entitled to two meals. And you know, dishwashing, you have a dishwashing machine, so it's not hard. It just takes time away from whatever else you might want to do. But I made great friends with those other students who are working their way through college, waitresses as well as other guys, and did that for two terms there. Most of the guys that worked in the kitchen area were music majors, and so what they had going, they had formed a singing group based on their focus of employment. This was in the girl's dormitory. So in the girl's dormitory dining hall, they have two traditional breakfasts, Easter breakfast and Christmas breakfast, and so this male singing group, music majors, sing a cappella, they serenade the girls. It was kind of a tradition by them. So they asked me to join their dishwashers' choir so to speak. So I says, "I like to sing, but you know, I don't know music." So they said, "That's okay. It's not important. If you can sing the melody, we'll work around that," so I said, "Okay." So I joined the dishwashers' choir, so my singing career had its beginnings. Anyway, oh, oftentimes, we would go serenade the girls at night and get together and then go to the, the girl's dormitory was built so that the building is a U-shape, so we go into the U, and the girl's dormitory is, I don't know, four or five stories, and we'd go there at night and not late at night, like 8 o'clock in the evening, and serenade and start singing. It sounded great. And one of the fraternity traditions at that school is that if a guy from a fraternity pinned a girl, he would go serenade her and the fraternity would serenade her and she would light a candle in the window, you know. When we sang, there'd be twenty candles. But anyway, and thanks to the music majors, we sounded great, you know. We continued at Ohio Wesleyan University. And in the spring of 1945, my draft notice came up, and by then, of course, 1945, the internees were returning to the West Coast. My parents were back here in Portland, and so I decided to be drafted out of Oregon instead of being drafted out of Ohio, so I came back to Oregon and got drafted.

Let me go back to the beginnings at Ohio Wesleyan. I said that I didn't suffer rejection but maybe romantic rejection. But one of the girls that was a waitress in the same dormitory I was, she was very, very friendly, and she's Caucasian, and she and her buddies and I would get together now and then just to socialize or converse or whatever. But anyway, I came around to ask her to go to a movie and kind of like dating but not dating and I think going to the school social place after the movie. That would be the extent of it. And it was not really a romantic relationship, although, there were times that we would kiss, whatever. This went on for, oh, a better part of a year. Then somehow or other, it changed. But one year, it was the next year I think it was, I was in the school social place by myself and there was a freshman girl there and she was very friendly, and so we started talking, whatever, and I don't recall for sure. I think maybe we went to a movie. But it wasn't too long after that, I found out that she dropped out of school. And I had the real strong suspicion that her parents made her drop out because she socialized with this Japanese American, and there was some foundation to my suspicion. I can't recall exactly, but you know. So anyway, there was kind of like a rejection there, but otherwise, no.