Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

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JC: So now you're in high school, and it's pre-World War II.

HS: Pre-World War II.

JC: What's it like?

HS: Well, in as much as there was a pretty huge population of Japanese and Chinese going to Lincoln High School as well, the social part was not a problem, and then some of my buddies from Shattuck grade school, some came to Lincoln High School as well. And going to high school from grade school, their horizons enlarged, so part of our, a lot of my relationships with my Caucasian buddies got a little thinner; however, they remembered, remembered me, and we would have social discourse in the hallways now and then, but you know, it wasn't as bonded as it was in grade school. And grade school, you go mostly eight years together, so you get to know them quite well. So anyway, it was, well, my early high school periods, freshmen, sophomore year at the old Lincoln High was really not memorable. You know, I went to school, cut classes. There was one fellow I got really friendly with and Sid Ziggler was his name, but he and I decided that we'd cut class one day and go see a movie, and we went to cut class and went to the Paramount Theater and saw this movie. And then after the movie, we went back to school to get our stuff out of the lockers, and we felt so guilty about cutting class that we kind of like tiptoed through the hallways to get to our lockers. We thought, oh, we're going to get caught. That's how sensitive we were to being naughty or bad, I guess.

I was saying that early on that when we had to go to internment, I had to sign off with the teachers and had a, Mrs. Tom, my English teacher got very, very emotional because of the internment, started to cry. But, harking back to December 7th which was a Sunday and Monday, we went to, went to class at Lincoln High and Mr. York the principal called an assembly right away to... excuse me, to reinforce our, the student body's patriotism, and he remarked on the emergency. I'm trying to recall. Then we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and, well, everybody felt so patriotic we almost shouted the Pledge of Alleiance.

[Interruption]

HS: A lot of our Caucasian friends supported us, and so I didn't have any negative experiences at Lincoln High School. The negative experiences came up outside of school in terms of some pedestrian traffic, and people would look, scans at you or a side at you and narrow their eyes, and some would call you "dirty Japs." But you know, we avoided encounters because we were probably pretty sensitive to the possibilities that those things would occur, and our bringing up pattern was we don't make trouble, we avoid trouble. And so there were in my experience not any real bitter problems. We, during the period of time after December 7th, we had the curfew imposed, and we were all supposed to be off, all persons of Japanese ancestry supposed to be off the streets from I think it was 8 o'clock in the evening until 6 o'clock in the morning. So we'd be out playing with our buddies, playing out in the streets or we would in the South Park Blocks in that park Lownsdale Square across from the county courthouse or the county building, we'd play football up there because it was the only place nearby in the neighborhood that there was grass, so we could play tackle football. And as soon as it got close to 8 o'clock, we all ran home because of the curfew. We were very obedient, you see, didn't want to break any laws. But it became a fact of life at that time. Too young to realize the injustice of the curfews imposed on people of Japanese ancestry as opposed to Min Yasui who challenged the curfew and walked the streets of Portland after 8 o'clock and had to ask to be arrested. Well, that took a lot of courage. So then came the internment.