Interviewee: Fred Sasaki
Interviewer: Terry Yamada
Date: Part 1 - September 24, 2004
Location: Toronto, Ontario
Accession Number: 2010-004[Start part 1]
Terry Yamada: Hi.
Fred Sasaki: Hi.
TY: Can you tell me your name?
FS: Fred Sasaki. Do you want my other name, too? Frederick Yoshihide Sasaki. And
I’m known as Fred.
TY: And were you born here in Canada?
FS: No, I was born in Hiroshima, Japan.
TY: When did you come to Canada?
FS: My mother brought me when I was 9 months old.
TY: What was your mother’s name?
FS: Midori, that was her maiden name.
TY: W as she also from Hiroshima?
FS: Yes.
TY: And can you tell me what your father’s name was?
FS: [Unintelligible]
TY: Why did they come from Japan?
FS: Well, my father always told me that he came here when he was sixteen, in 1907,
and ultimately his goal was to promote trade between Canada and Japan. That was[his] dream. That’s why he came to Canada.
TY: So, did he go back to Japan after he came, and then came back again?
FS: No, he went back to get married, and my mother brought me when I was - in1919. My father went back, got married, and when he was back I was conceived, but
my mother’s mother wouldn’t let her come until I was born in Japan.
UM1: When’s your birth year?
FS: July 28th, 1918.
TY: Do you have any siblings?
FS: Yes, I have 6 sisters, but one died two years ago. All younger than me. I’m theoldest.
TY: Where have you lived, starting from when you came to Canada?
FS: In Vancouver, and then I went to Calgary, and then came to Toronto.
1 Unidentified man.

TY: And were you interned duringFS: No, what happened was that, I was in my final year at UBC, University of British
Columbia, in 1942, and Pearl Harbour came on December 7th, 1941, and the night of
Pearl Harbour, the RCMP came around seven o’clock that night and right throughour whole house, took all of my father’s documents, insurance papers, passport,
everything, and they took him away. He was interned that night.
TY: Where was he interned?
FS: Well, first he was in [unintelligible] for about a month, and we were finally toldthat there were about forty of them that were interned that night, forty of them in
the immigration building, in the wharf of Vancouver harbour. And then from there,
they were stationed in Seebe, Alberta, where there were German prisoners of war.
And he was there for a few months, and then they took him to Petawawa in Ontario
and then to Angler.
TY: The night that he was taken away, what do you remember about that night?
FS: Oh, I answered the door, and I just remember three tall, very tall RCMP2 people,
in plain clothes. They showed me their badge[s] and they wanted to know if myfather was home, I said yes, and then they went through our whole house. That’s
what I remember.
TY: How long were they there for?
FS: They were there a few hours.
TY: And what was the reaction of your family?
FS: Oh, we were just bewildered, just scared. Didn’t know what was happening, why
they would take our father away.
TY: Did your family end up following your father to Petawawa, or- did you stay inBC?
FS: Oh, no, the RCMP took him away, and they interned him, so the family, we werein Vancouver.
TY: So you were in Vancouver the entire time?
FS: Well, what happened to me was that in January, all enemy aliens had to get outof Vancouver, and since I was here since I was nine months old, I was classed as anenemy alien, so I had to get out of Vancouver, so I had to leave UBC. But fortunately
for me, my sister was married to a family that had a residence in Calgary, so I went
to Calgary, and, there, I arranged with my professors to have my courses sent mycorrespondence. And I studied in the local library, and I took my exams in April, andmanaged to get through.
TY: What were you studying?
FS: Commerce and finance.
TY: Okay, so, your family moved to Calgary2 Royal Canadian Mounted Police

FS: Just myself. Because I was the only one that, my mother and my 6 sisters, whatreally worried me was that my mother and 6 sisters were left in Vancouver, myfather was stationed to a Prisoner of War camp, and I was told to get out of
Vancouver, so, my mother was left by herself with my 6 younger sisters inVancouver, and they didn’t know what to do.
TY: Did they move to Hastings Park?
FS: No, what happened was in - they were told to leave right away, in April 1942, toleave for Kaslo, B.C., the location camp in Kaslo so they were given only a few days,
so they left everything, just a few belongings, so we lost all our photographs, lost all
our family things.
TY: So you finished university in Calgary, in April?
FS: Yeah.
TY: So, what did you do after that?
FS: I worked in Calgary until the following April, 1943, and I wrote to the B.C.
Security Commission to ask permission if I could go to Toronto.
TY: So, you and your other family members were separated?
FS: Yes, separated. My mother and the sisters were in Kaslo, my father was in aninternment camp, until about April, May 1943, but he was the first one to bereleased, because he used to work for Nelson Spencer, a lumber, logging export
company, they exported all over the world. And he was the Far East sales manager,
so he knew the President of the Company. He happened to be the Colonel in thearmy, Colonel Nelson Spencer, from the First World War, so, with this info, my father
was released, on the understanding that he would go to a logging camp way up in
northern Ontario [chuckles], as a kitchen helper. And my father had never done
work like that before.
TY: So, you stayed in Calgary until 1943, and thenFS: Until I got permission from the B.C. Security Commission to come to Toronto.
TY: So, what did you do in Toronto?
FS: Well, my goal in coming to Toronto was that I wanted to get my family together,because we were all separated, my father in Ontario, my mother and sisters in Kaslo,
so my goal was to get them together, and they told me the best way to get together
was to come east, and then perhaps work for a farmer on the Niagara peninsula. And
get work there, then we could all be together, and perhaps the farmer would, youknow, provide us with accommodations. So, when I came to Toronto, there used tobe the B.C. security Commission had a man here, Mr. Truman, that looked after thepeople coming here, to look for jobs for them, so he sent me to this farmer in
Niagara, near St. Catherine’s, and he start[ed] to talk to me, you know, and he asked
me about my family, and I told him I had six younger sisters, and he shook his head[chuckles], “they’re not useful to me” on the farm, and so he turned me down.
TY: Eventually, how did you get your family?

FS: So, I came back to Toronto, and I applied for different jobs, but in those days, youknow, no nisei could get a white collar job.
TY: What did you get, then?
FS: Before I went to university in Vancouver, I worked at the Royal Bank for 3 years.
So I thought I’d apply to the Royal Bank, I remember it so clearly because I worked
at the Royal Bank as a junior, but, I remember it very clearly, through myconnections, I had good recommendations from the bank, so I went to the head
office in the Royal Bank to the personnel manager, and showed him my letters ofrecommendation, and he looked at me and said, “You’re a Jap, get out of the office,”and he kicked me right out.
TY: So you kept hunting for a job?
FS: Yeah. But what struck me most was that, when I eventually became Vice
President of Finance of Canadian Tire, the President of the Bank would invite us, meand the President, for lunch in the dining room, because they wanted our business.
And at that time, I felt like telling them about my experience, but I didn’t [chuckles].
TY: Why didn’t you?
FS: I don’t know, I guess I was a little nervous, you know.
[Recording skips]
TY: What a fascinating life. What’s your name?
FS: Fred Yoshi Hidei Sasaki.
TY: And where were you born?
FS: In Hiroshima, Japan.
TY: And when did you come to Canada?
FS: In 1919, when I was 9 months old.
TY: And you mentioned before, you came with your mother?
FS: Yes, my father came in 1907, and he went back to get married, and while he wasin Japan, I was conceived, and he came back to Vancouver, but my mother stayed,
and I was born in Japan. Because her mother insisted that she have the baby in Japan[chuckles].
TY: Was there a reason behind this?
FS: I don’t know. I guess she just wanted to be sure her daughter had her baby assafely as possible.
TY: That’s a very good reason. Do you have any other siblings?
FS: Oh, yes, I have 6 sisters, all younger than me.
TY: And were they born in Canada, then?
FS: Yeah, they’re all born in Canada.
TY: Which area? Where were they born?
FS: They were all born in Vancouver.

TY: And that’s where you lived when you were younger?
FS: That’s right.
TY: How long did you live there?
FS: Oh, until December 7th, 1941- until, January ’42.
TY: Did you attend any school there?
FS: In Vancouver? Oh yes, I went to Strathcona Public School, which was right in the
middle of Vancouver, and it was a very, I guess what you’d call today, a multicultural
school, all nationalities there, I remember there were coloured people, Chinese,
Jewish, myself, lots of Japanese, you know. So it was a really multicultural school in
Vancouver. I went there until I was in grade five. What happened was that, I had abrother, but he died [at] aged three. He died when he was three years old, and it
broke my mother’s heart, and she didn’t want to live in that house anymore. So wemoved towards Hastings Park, so, at grade five I moved to Hastings Park, it was a
totally different school from Strathcona. It was predominantly Anglo-Saxon school
now, so it was quite a different environment, so we moved there.
TY: Did you find with the school being multicultural that everyone interacted
together, or was it fairly- everyone hung out with their ownFS: Oh, yes, I just remember that my best friend was a Jewish boy. I remember that,and we got along very well.
TY: And did you find that changed when you went to a school that was
predominantlyFS: Oh, yes. It changed a lot. What I remember most of all is that on Valentine’s Day,
they used to give each other cards, and of course I’d be left out [chuckles] because I
had nobody to give a card to, you know in those days, I was a Japanese and everyone
were Anglo-Saxon so, I knew my place.
TY: And were there any other Japanese families?
FS: Just one more, she was a girl. And what was very embarrassing for her was, in
P.E. class, we used to have to have partners to do different folk dances and that , and
the P.E. teacher always partnered me with her [chuckles]. I know she was
embarrassed, and I was embarrassed, but we laughed about it, years later, we met in
Toronto.
TY: Well, that’s nice. And did you go to high school in the same area?
FS: Yeah, I went to a junior high school in the east end.
TY: And was your high school the same ratio?
FS: In high school, there were quite a few of the Japanese students came, not a lot,
but, enough to you know, that I could socialize with. It was Britannia High School.
And so, in my class, I guess there were about – I remembered there was a girl, about
two others Japanese, but there were different Japanese sprinkled all over.
TY: And what type of social activities do you remember?
FS: All I did outside of school was sports [chuckles], any sports.

TY: Was there anything that really interested you?
FS: At lunch hour, we used to all get together and play hand ball, and then I played
for the school soccer team, and I played some basketball, you know with the kids
and that, all sports, outside of school.
TY: So, just moving towards your home life, did you speak mostly Japanese at home?
FS: Yes, to my mother and father, I spoke Japanese. But to my sisters, I spoke
English. Amongst the siblings, we spoke English. When I lived in Vancouver, it was
all Japanese, I spoke Japanese to my friends, all of my friends in that neighbourhood,they were all Japanese children in Cordova street. When I look back, it was theghetto in the Vancouver [area] but a lot of Japanese families lived there, and we
spoke to each other in Japanese.
TY: Did you find there was a lot more Japanese culture, since there were a lot offamilies, did you practice more Japanese traditions orFS: Oh yes, boys’ festival, girls’ festival, things like that, yes.
TY: And, as you grew older, you went to university, how did you make the decisionfrom being in high school to going to university?
FS: Well, what happened was that, [it] was very unusual. My father used to make all
the decisions, like in most Japanese families, and I was in my final year of highschool in B.C., it was grade twelve junior matriculation, not like senior year. I was inmy junior final year, and one day my teacher came to say “The principal wants to seeyou, Principal Monroe wants to see you,” you know, I thought, Oh boy, I was scared[chuckles], because, you know, you get called to the principal’s office, it’s somethingbad, and when I went there, my father was there. And Principal Monroe said to me,“I’m sorry to tell you, but your father wants to take you out of school, he wants you
to work at the Royal Bank.” In those days, there were two banks in Japanese
sections, and Mr. Kinoshita was the manager of the Japanese section of the RoyalBank in the east end, and he needed an assistant, but all I could do was look after
Japanese customers, I couldn’t do any other occidental customers at all, justJapanese customers. And then back in those days, we closed at 3:00, of course westarted earlier than that. Once they closed at three, the manager said, “I want you tohelp in different areas where they need help,” so, I was quite happy, because I reallylearned the banking business that way, I’d shuffle from here to there, and I learned
quite a bit, and I was at the bank for three years. And I realized that there was no
future there, because all I could do was serve Japanese customers, and all I wasdoing was savings accounts and a lot of people transferred money to Japan. I guessthey eventually wanted to go back to Japan. They were sending money back to Japanand I was doing Japanese transfers and I thought, “This is no future for me,” at night
I took the Manager’s Recommendation, the Banking Course, with Queen’s University,
I got my degree with the ACB, the Association of Canadian Bankers, and all that, but Ithought to myself, “There’s no future here,” so, I talked to my father and I decided togo back to university.
TY: And how did it make you feel that you couldn’t deal with the Anglo-Saxon
customers?
FS: In Vancouver, in those days, there was so much discrimination against theJapanese, there was so much discrimination. [unintelligible] - this is it. All on thepapers, everywhere was the “yellow peril”. I don’t know if you heard about them,
Alfred Wilson, Green and all those people, those politicians. We didn’t have afranchise; the Japanese didn’t have a franchise so they [unintelligible]. Tremendous
discrimination. I’ll give you an example, in university, Ken [full name redacted], hetook mining engineering, it was a 5 year course, got to his final year, to get his
degree during that final summer, he had to work in the mine, go underground, andthey didn’t let Japanese go underground, so he didn’t get his degree. It was a shame.
So, he went back to Japan.
TY: In what other ways in everyday life did you see discrimination against theJapanese?
FS: Well, what you saw in the papers and everything, you knew you couldn’t be alawyer, you couldn’t be any - all you could become as a professional was a dentist ora doctor. And even then you served the Japanese, you know when you graduated but
that’s all. Nothing. The people in the Japanese community said “You’re crazy, going
to university, all the graduates work in logging camps, sawmills, there’s no future foryou so why go.”TY: And why did you, if that was the climate of the time?
FS: Why did I go? Because my father was in business, so I thought I’d go intobusiness with him, the logging and lumber business.
TY: And what did you take at university?
FS: Commerce and finance.
TY: Why?
FS: Because that was the only course that I could take that would serve me when I
graduated. My real ambition was to- in those days, unemployment, we went throughthe Depression, the depression through the ‘30s, My ambition was to allay
unemployment among the people and my dream was that eventually I could – when
I was small, that I could become an economist, work with the Bank of Canada, then I
have some influence on the unemployment. That was my dream, but I had to givethat up, because- I’m kind of jumping, but when I came to Toronto, before I could
find any job, after I’d saved a little bit, I applied to the Graduate School at the
University of Toronto, the Department of Economics with that goal in mind, to one
day work with the Bank of Canada, but since I was enemy alien – [next line isunintelligible] finally got to the board of the University of Toronto, I got a letter fromthe President. They couldn’t take me in because of my “enemy alien” status. So I gavethat up.
TY: Going back to B.C., did you like UBC?
FS: Yes, because I studied hard, and I played soccer [chuckles]. I was captain of theuniversity soccer team.
TY: Did you feel discrimination at UBC?
FS: No, no discrimination from the professors or the fellow students. I played soccer
with them. No discrimination among the students or the faculty. It was Professor
Angus at UBC, in the Department of Economics, who really spoke out publicly for theJapanese Canadians, that they shouldn’t be discriminated against. And he was aprofessor at the University, I remember him.
TY: Did you ever meet him?
FS: Oh, yes.
TY: And have discussions with him?
FS: Oh, yeah. He was very, very good. He sympathized with us. But he was the only
one that spoke up. Among the few.
TY: Can you tell me what your social life was like around those university years?
FS: The only social life, we had a Japanese student’s club, it was about twenty five
students, we used to have dances there, and believe it or not, I didn’t know how todance, so I remember [chuckles] my sister, we used to practice it in the house[chuckles], we used to have annual dances and I remember dancing with my sisterto learn how to dance before I went to the dance. But all I remember was sitting
down and just [chuckles] didn’t have the courage to ask anybody.
TY: Did you finish your degree?
FS: Yes, well, as I mentioned, December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbour, January 1942, all
the enemy aliens had to get out of Vancouver area in a 100-mile radius, so, I was toldby the university I was no longer welcomed, I had to leave, so, fortunately I had inlaws in Calgary, so I went to Calgary, and before I left, I arranged with the professors
to send me courses by correspondence, and I studied at the local Calgary library, andI wrote my exams in Calgary- I was the only one in the room [chuckles], with one
person watching me. So, that’s how I got my degree, and I passed with first-classhonours.
TY: Were there others in your class, who were notified of the same thing?
FS: Yeah, there were three of us, 3 nisei students, in the final year.
TY: And, during this time, what was the rest of your family doing?
FS: The rest of the family, they were notified in April 19 - I just couldn’t describe thefeelings of my mother and my sisters, because my father was in prisoner of war
camp, I was in Calgary, the 2 oldest men, and they were left by themselves, to fend
for themselves. So, I was worried, my father was worried; we didn’t know where
they were, and we were really upset, you can just imagine, the war you know. So,

luckily the, uh Tom [full name redacted], I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not
but he was at “The New Canadian” [unintelligible]. I heard this from my sister, thathe [said], “If you leave in a few days, you can go to Kaslo, B.C., to the relocation campin Kaslo,” and he would advised them to go there, and so my sisters and my mother,
they were all sent to Kaslo, but they couldn’t take anything, just a few clothes andthat’s all, because they had to leave in such a hurry. So, we lost everything,photographs, you know family photographs, things like that.
TY: Now, in 1943, you decided to move to Toronto.
FS: Yeah, in April 1943, I wrote to the Mrs. C. V. Booth, B.C. Security Commission, to
ask permission if I could, relocate to Toronto, relocate east, because, I was very
anxious at the earliest possible moment to get my family together, my sisters andmy mother and my father. My father was released after about a little over a year anda half, from prisoner of war camp, Angler, he was the first internees to be released,because, fortunately, he worked for Nelson Spencer Limited before he went intobusiness for himself and through his influence, he was a Colonel in the First World
War, he said “You can go if you go to a lumber camp in northern Ontario, because it’s
short of labour because of war,” so he wanted to get out, so he went to Northern
Ontario, to a lumber company near Port Arthur. And my father was there, so I wrote
to the Security Commission that I would like to come east, because I knew that the
only - If I went east, I had a chance of getting the family together again. So, I applied
to the B.C. Security Commission, and through correspondence, eventually she gaveme permission to come. But, in the meantime, my father got sick in the logging camp,so they gave him permission to go to Kaslo, so in May, he went back to Kaslo, and in
April, I came to Toronto.
TY: What happened when you tried to get a job?
FS: In Kaslo, my mother - my older sister got married, but she remained in
Vancouver, after they left, but my mother and 5 sisters, and another family, because
they were good friends, with their three children, lived in one room. I was shocked
when I went, I visited them for one week once and the bunk beds, all those people
just living in one room.
TY: What was your first job to Toronto?
FS: When I first came to Toronto? I told you, I went to work for a farmer, they sentme to a farm in the Niagara peninsula, near St. Catherine’s, I didn’t get that, I cameback, and I remember, as I told you, I looked for some white-collar jobs
[unintelligible], I thought may as well to get a C.A. degree, no way, I went to Lower
Bank, no way, so the Mr. Truman, the B.C. Security Commission sent me to theToronto [unintelligible], I remember that very carefully because he said “Be there at
7 o’clock,” so I went there at 7:00, and I stood there and I stood there, and nobody
came. An hour later, a man came, and he says, “I’m the owner here. Sorry I can’t hireyou. If I hire you, a Jap -.”[End of part 1]