Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 8>

HS: So I think it was along about in August of that year, rumors were that we were going to go to Minidoka, Idaho, and then it was, became a fact that we knew we were going to go to Minidoka, Idaho, and whoever heard of Minidoka, Idaho, before that time, didn't know where we were going to go. And well, demonstrates another facet of the internment for the Issei who had, if they came to the United States in the early 1900s, they had been here by 1942, thirty, forty years, a lifetime for a lot of people, and all of a sudden because of the Executive Order 9066 and the exclusion orders, there is no tomorrow. When, before the exclusion order, we didn't know what was going to happen. Then the exclusion order, we're going to go to the assembly center, and then you're in the assembly center, what's tomorrow? There's no tomorrow. Then we find out we're going to go to Minidoka. So then you're in Minidoka in the fall of 1942 and there's no tomorrow again, there's no future. On reflection, that would have been very, very difficult for the Issei to tolerate that after one lifetime of hard work. Running the hotel for example, some hotels were large, maybe fifty rooms or maybe a hundred rooms. If you have that many rooms, you can hire people to do those kinds of things. Our first hotel, the Vaughn Hotel, 1015 Southwest First Avenue, not our first hotel. First hotel was where I was, where we were when we were on born on First and, Southwest First and Market Street, and the Vaughn Hotel was the second hotel and my parents took over that one because the Gokamis, the Gokami family went back to Japan, and so that became an available property, hotel to run, and I think it had twenty rooms, not much more than that anyway, two levels.

But while we were running that hotel, then my mom decided to augment income by opening up a small laundry, and she would do laundry but contract the laundering out to a commercial company, and they would deliver the wet wash back, and she would dry it and then iron it and whatever. And so it was largely sheets and basically shirts and underwear and things like that. But every once in a while, I had to give my mother a break, and I would tend to the laundry. That's where I learned how to iron, flat stuff of course, not the shirts. But then she sold the laundry business to another Issei couple. But still one small hotel's not enough. So then on the corner of Southwest First and Main is the Brookshire Hotel, 1036 Southwest First Avenue, and that became available because the Nishimura family went back to Japan, and so my parents took over that lease. So for a time, family was running two hotels, the Vaughn Hotel and the Brookshire Hotel. The Brookshire Hotel had thirty rooms, two floors. We had to, us siblings had to help out, particularly on weekends. On Saturdays, we would vacuum the hallway and wax the woodwork and polish the brass. There was brass on the stairways. That was it. There is a technique to polishing the brass. It came in handy in my lifetime later on. I would mop the stairs and try to do a lot of the grunt work, even help make the beds, so I learned a lot of useful things, parents running the hotel. And I had two brothers. George was the oldest and Tom, and I was the youngest. So being the youngest, for whatever reason, I had to do a lot of the girl stuff. Didn't have any sisters so I became the, kind of like the girl in the family, washing dishes or running these little errands and things like that. So I helped with the home laundry, washed dishes. I even did a little, I had to, usually I had to watch the rice, you know. Mom would put the rice on the stove then she'd have other things to do, so I would be assigned to don't let the rice burn, so I learned the old fashioned technique of cooking rice Japanese style which technique I still use.