Life Goes On

by Ruth Sasaki

“They went to see a Jack Oakie football movie. My mother must have been smitten as this was not at all her kind of film.”

The stories you hear from camp are often stories of what kept people going—the humorous incidents, baseball, dances, poetry clubs; love and dreams for a better, shared future; the everyday, human things that people clung to to keep from being consumed by the yawning abyss that had opened under their lives.

My mother and father were married during the War. But their story started long before Pearl Harbor. This is how they met:

My mother and her family lived on Pine Street in San Francisco. Their next-door neighbor in the 1930s was my dad’s older brother and his family. When Bachan (my grandmother) traveled to Japan to buy merchandise for their store on Grant Avenue in 1935, she took my mom with her. My mom was 16 and this was her first trip to Japan. They paid a courtesy call to their next-door neighbor’s mother, Mrs. Sasaki, in Hiroshima. 

The Sasaki family had lived in San Francisco and Berkeley for over twenty years, and all the children except the older brother had been born in the US. The family had returned to Hiroshima in 1926, and my Sasaki grandfather died three years later. While Bachan and my mother were eating strawberries in the living room with Mrs. Sasaki, my dad and his sister came home from school on their bicycles. My dad was too shy to be introduced and peeked at the exotic visitors from America from the kitchen.

Mrs. Sasaki was so kind, and insisted on taking them to Miyajima to eat momiji manju (a pastry in the shape of a maple leaf, with sweet bean filling) and see all the sights. A year later, my dad returned to San Francisco to stay with his brother and became “the boy next door.”

By 1941 my dad was in America on his own; his brother’s family had returned to Hiroshima, where his mother and sisters still lived. My dad was working days and going to school at night, one of the single young men in Japantown who often benefited from my grandmother’s open-door policy when it came to feeding guests. 

My mom and dad’s first date was on December 6, 1941. They went to see a Jack Oakie football movie. My mother must have been smitten as this was not at all her kind of film. After the movie they were going to go to Blum’s, but couldn’t find parking, so they went all the way out to the Koffee Kup on 18th and Geary. On their next date, they went to see her choice, “How Green Was My Valley.”

My dad had received his draft notice before the attack on Pearl Harbor and reported for duty in January. While my mother and her family were incarcerated in Tanforan, and then Topaz, he was stationed at places like Camp Barkeley, Texas; Camp Shelby, Mississippi; and Fort Riley in Kansas. They stayed in touch through letters. In November 1942 he visited my mother at Topaz while on furlough.

Nov. 14, ‘42

On the day I came back from my furlough I did K.P. What a life…

Oh! what a sad world this is but let’s keep our chins up always & wait for our future happy day…

The following day my mom and dad took a bus to Delta and a train to Salt Lake City for their honeymoon. A school friend of my mom’s who had relocated to Salt Lake City made a hotel reservation for them at the Wilson Hotel on 200 South, and they spent much of their honeymoon seeing my mother’s friends and acquaintances who had relocated to Salt Lake City and Ogden.

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About the contributor: Ruth Sasaki was born and raised in San Francisco after the War. The Takahashis, her mother’s family, were incarcerated in Tanforan and Topaz. A graduate of UC Berkeley (BA) and SF State (MA), she has lived in England and Japan. Her short story “The Loom” won the American Japanese National Literary Award, and her collection, The Loom and Other Stories, was published in 1991 by Graywolf Press. She shares her more recent writing via her website: www.rasasaki.com.

Copyright 2017, R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.