<Begin Segment 3>

LT: Okay. You said that you were raised in Seattle, and can you tell us about where you lived and what it looked like and what it sounded like, and what it was like to grow up there as a kid?

DS: Well, I lived in Japantown where all the Japanese, they were all Japanese. And they had hotels, little restaurants, grocery stores, there was a movie theater, Sagamiya, which was a Japanese confectionary store. I mean, all the kids were Japanese, lived upstairs and went to school, I think we all walked to school, I don't think there was a school bus. We all walked to school, and I remember one little kid who lived close to us, he was an announcer for the baseball team in Seattle. He got to be, he knew how to imitate the announcer, and that was a big thing for him. They made a big thing out of this little kid. [Laughs] But life in Japantown was... we went to school, we played together, we shopped at all the stores, and it was just something that you accepted, that's what you did every day.

LT: Okay. And so where did you live?

DS: We lived in a hotel. My mother and father had a hotel, and there too many rooms, but that's where we grew up. I think we lived in the hotel until I went to, until I finished eighth grade, and then we sold the hotel and moved into a little family house. And since then we bought another house and that's where we were when the war broke out. But life in Japantown was just one day after another. You did the same thing, you went to school, you went to church, you played with the kids, and they had programs at this Nippon Kan Hall up the hill there, and that was a place where they always had programs, safety patrol programs, I mean, awards, school programs, everything generated from there. It was quite a haul. I think it still stands there, I'm not really sure.

LT: I'll ask you to go back, being a country kid, growing up in Japantown, the people nearby, and growing up in a hotel seems like another world to me. Can you tell me about the hotel, what it looked like, what the rooms were like, the people who came?

DS: They were, as I remember, we had a flight of stairs going up, probably twenty steps, which we had to clean every so often to help my mother and father. And the rooms were small, and they're all transient; they didn't stay there for months, they came maybe for two or three nights. And they were all races. But we were not the hotel, the only hotel in town. There were probably ten hotels in Seattle in Japantown. I mean, many Issei people had hotels, like they had grocery stores. And it was just a way of life for us. We lived there, too, in a hotel, so it was not like living in a home. We had different rooms, kitchen, where we slept, parlor, we had several rooms that we went in and out every day. So that's the way we grew up, and I guess that's what we accepted growing up.

LT: Did you provide meals for the hotel guests?

DS: Oh, no. No, they just paid for the room. And my mother was in charge of cleaning the room and changing the sheets for each person that rented. No, we never provided meals, it was just a place to stay. And they were good people who stayed there, but they didn't stay there for months, they would just... and we also had Japanese people staying there, too. We had some colored people, Filipinos, and some Japanese people also staying there. They would have grocery stores or something, and they'd find a place. They didn't have a place to live, and they'd stay there. So we grew up having a lot of friends in Japantown. We went to church, the bus picked us up to go to church. My sister was a Catholic, and so we ended up going to the Catholic church every Sunday, the bus came and picked us up. And it was just everyday living, but it was just all we knew. We went to Japanese school after we went to English school, and we must have gone there for years. But that was just a way of life with us, and then we'd walk to school, walk to Japanese school, we walked everywhere, or rode the bus or the streetcar, it was the streetcar then.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.