Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 6>

JC: I want to backtrack for a minute. When you were all taken to the assembly center, what happened to your father's business? What happened to Mr. Oyama's printing press? You're one day just disappearing to a place. What happened to all your family's belongings, everything?

HS: Well, when the exclusion orders were issued, I think that was beginning in February of 1942, then you knew for sure that you're going to be evacuated, so you didn't have a lot of time to get rid of your property or get rid of your business. There were a lot of like for example grocery stores sold their inventory on short notice, a lot of businesses, if they were able to sell their business and farm land, so the losses were quite heavy. And a lot of families put their personal belongings in storage in the churches, but then later on, the churches were vandalized and a lot of the properties were stolen, so the losses were quite, quite huge. And if you had property to sell, whether it be inventory or your business, you talk about a dime on the dollar. So one of the congressional commissions, the one that was created in 1980, their estimate of the losses was in the billions of dollars. The Evacuation Claims Act which was in 1948, I can't recall specifically, but they were talking about $130 to $140 million in losses, but that was a nice act but not really fruitful in terms of remuneration dollar for dollar. It fell far short in that.

JC: Did your father sell his business, and if so, who did he sell it to?

HS: Well, we didn't sell the business. On reflection, it was very, very fortunate. Most of these small hotels that were run by Japanese, and they were small. They were places for the, retirees because the rents were low or maybe some transient people that were looking for low rent. And some of the Japanese owned the building, but my parents leased it. And because of the tenants, the tenants tended to be long term tenants. And there was one gentleman who was there for a long time, Lee Martin. He gave me another name. My Japanese name was Shig. He called me Chig. I didn't write that down. But anyway, he agreed to take care of the hotel for my parents while we were gone not knowing, how long we were going to go, but they had an agreement that he would run the hotel and send my folks some money every month, so we had a little bit of cash flow, and not a whole lot but a little bit. And the, when my parents returned to Portland in 1945, the technicalities of the arrangement was a sublease to Mr. Martin, and my parents were able to do that. So when they came back to Portland, they came back to the hotel and took over again. Mr. Martin did an adequate job, but one of the conflicts was that he decided to go make money out at the shipyard, so he was a shipyard worker for part of the time. So the upkeep of the hotel property wasn't all that great, so there was a lot of fixing up work to do when my parents came back. But you know, it was a good arrangement. And one of the, well, it's not a curious thing, but the family that owned the Brookshire Hotel building and leased it to my parents was the Charagino Family or Italian family, and I don't know for sure, but if it was the patriarch that was assigned the hotel but he came down every month to collect the rent and he didn't speak English all that well and neither did my parents but they'd sit at the kitchen table and drink a cup of tea and kind of nod and say little things, and then he'd take, collect the rent, then go home, but it was a ritual every month. But anyway, because of the lease arrangement from the family, my parents were able to sublease it to Mr. Martin. That was a good deal for my parents. At least they had something to come back to after the internment whereas many families didn't. If they had sold their businesses and had nothing to come back to, it was like starting all over again when they first immigrated to the United States.