Interviews

1. Backstory of Parents

2. Parent’s Marriage

3. Adoption Story

4. Reiko's Name

5. Moving to Torrance

6. Voluntarily Moving to Salt Lake City, Utah

7. Parents in Utah

8. Topaz Visit as a Child

9. Coming back to Los Angeles after the war

10. Finding out about adoption

11. Kent State Shooting, Ohio

(b. 1939) a businesswoman whose family volunterily moved to Salt Lake City in Utah during the war.

Backstory of Parents

My father was born on June 12, 1903 in Fukui, Japan and my mother was born on February 7, 1906 in Fukui, Japan, but in separate villages. So they didn’t really know each other at that time.

And my mother was the eldest of four children. And she was, she was the favorite of her father. And which is what she told me. And she always wanted to be a nurse. And the father finally after many years of being badgered, relented and they sent her off to nursing school.

My dad, he was a single child and his father remarried someone else and they had so he had a bunch of half-sisters.

When he was in his pre-teens or teens, his father left Japan and brought his only son over to the U.S. and sent him to work in the Bingham Copper Mines, which is pretty hard labor.

And once once a month when he got paid, Grandpa was there to collect all his money and give him a couple of dollars to last until the next month’s pay. And my dad said that he had never gotten anything. His father had never given him anything which is why when they had me, you know, he felt that he needed to give me everything if I asked for it.

families Fukui (city) Fukui Prefecture Japan parents

Date: May 13, 2022

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Evan Kodani

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Reiko T. Sakata was adopted from an orphanage in Los Angeles in 1939 at 5 months old by Issei parents. To avoid incarceration, the family moved with other Japanese to Salt Lake City, Utah until 1948. Returning to Los Angeles, her parents ran a laundromat in East Los Angeles, where she grew up. Years later, she and her parents moved to Torrance. Reiko graduated from Torrance High School, then went to the University of California, Berkeley. After Reiko got married, she and her spouse moved to Kent State, Ohio and witnessed the “Kent State shooting.” She received her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in Business Development, and served as a faculty member there in Organization Development and Business. She returned to Southern California to help her parents before they passed away. Prior to her retirement, Dr. Sakata was an entrepreneur and businesswoman in a variety of industries and fields for 32 years. She currently lives in Monrovia, California. (May 2023)