Ruth Sasaki | Interview 2 | January 20, 2022

FARRELL: This is Shanna Farrell back with Ruth Sasaki on Thursday, January 20, 2022. This is our second interview for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project and we are back talking over Zoom. When we left off last time, Ruth, we were starting to talk about your education. When you were in grade school you started off at Cabrillo Elementary. You were there from 1957 to 1960. Roughly what grades were those?

SASAKI: I went to Cabrillo from kindergarten through third grade and that's when my family moved and I had to change schools.

FARRELL: Okay, so that's when you went from 23rd Ave 00:01:00to 38th Ave?

SASAKI: Right.

FARRELL: Okay, and then after that you were at Lafayette from 1961 to 1964?

SASAKI: Yes.

FARRELL: Okay. Between those two elementary schools, do you have any memories that stand out for you of your time in elementary school or maybe any hobbies or things, interests that you were developing?

SASAKI: Well, Cabrillo, that was so long ago. It was right up the hill from where we lived and I had a best friend who was a Japanese American girl. I guess the main thing I remember is that when I was in second grade, the teacher, I don't know, she must have thought I was advanced or something because she called my mother in for a conference and said that she thought I should be accelerated to 00:02:00-- we were on sort of staggered school years and so we had the low second and the high second. I was in the low second and she wanted to move me to the high second grade, so I changed classes there. Let's see. So then I had a new set of friends there. At the end of the third grade we moved. I kind of met up again with those friends in junior high because they streamed the elementary schools together. I have much clearer memories of Lafayette, maybe because I was older. I made friends there who I'm still friends with. I had a teacher there who was really exceptional. Whenever people 00:03:00ask about influential teachers, his name always comes to mind. It's Mr. Adam.

There was just something different about him. First of all, we didn't have a whole lot of male teachers at that time. Even among male teachers he was kind of different. He was more formal. He wore a suit or like a blazer, so he dressed more formally. He had a neat little mustache. He was very strict in a way and kind of demanding in terms of academic standards. But I remember things like he taught us Russian, which was very unusual at that time. We were in the Cold 00:04:00War and there were just some lessons that I still remember. Like he taught us about all the different systems in the body, like the circulatory, the respiratory. I still remember drawing them out and learning all these words like "ventricle" and "alveoli." It was just really interesting. We also did art things, like ceramics. He would hold talent shows so that we could display our talent or lack thereof.

But it's interesting because I hooked up again with a fellow who I knew in Lafayette just a couple of years ago. We both flew to Oklahoma to protest [the impending transfer of migrant children from the border to the military prison at Ft. Sill]. It was like, "Clinton?" It was so weird because I hadn't seen him since the sixth grade. He has vivid memories of Mr. Adam and sixth grade, so it wasn't just 00:05:00me. He really was kind of an unusual teacher. Clinton remembered doing science experiments, which I don't remember at all. Anyway, so Mr. Adam was really kind of an influential teacher and a bunch of us stayed in touch with him for many years after we graduated from elementary school.

FARRELL: What did you like about him or his teaching style?

SASAKI: I guess he had high standards. Because I had had teachers throughout school at Cabrillo, Lafayette who I just felt didn't get me at all. I have this memory of writing something that was a satire. I don't know why satire has always appealed to me. I can't remember, it was either in the third or the fourth grade maybe. It was a short thing but it was a satire. There was a character who was a very 00:06:00pompous, overblown guy who thought he was like God's gift. He made these pronouncements and he said something that was obviously wrong. That's my way of sort of poking the hot air. The teacher corrected it because she didn't understand that I was being ironic. And I thought, "Wow." That kind of a thing. There was none of that with Mr. Adam. He seemed to recognize what kids -- who they were. I appreciated that.

FARRELL: Yeah, and sort of meeting you where you are but it also, it sounds like, seeing you as a person and not as a kid.

SASAKI: It's also --

FARRELL: Oh, sorry. Go ahead, please.

SASAKI: I was going to say the interesting thing is many years later I found out more about 00:07:00him. It was so weird because I just thought he was American. He was ethnically Polish and he had been born in a Russian community in China when it was occupied by Japan. He spoke all of those languages. Didn't come to the US until he was a young man and he didn't speak any English at that time. That's just a really interesting background.

FARRELL: Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. It's also interesting, too, thinking about the Richmond neighborhood. I think there's Little Russia in the neighborhood too, so I wonder if speaking Russian, teaching you Russian, that was also part of the neighborhood, too. It's also interesting to hear that there was a lot of creativity that he involved in his classroom. I feel like now we just hear about math and science, are really pushed, but if you're drawing the 00:08:00circulatory system or you're doing hands-on science experiments, I think that that also is a good way for a kid to learn and explore. Yeah. That's great.

SASAKI: It was the variety, I think, and the fact that he didn't just stick to the textbook. I still remember a field trip where we went around to different places in San Francisco to look at the architecture. That's where we learned the terms Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Stuff like that is still in my brain.

FARRELL: That's great, yeah. From there you went to George Washington High School and then you had graduated in 1970. Can you tell me a little bit about your time in high school? What was that experience like for you?

SASAKI: Sure. Well, in between there I went to Presidio Junior High, from seventh, eighth and ninth 00:09:00grade. Washington, I really enjoyed my high school years. I was not one of the popular kids. But there was a bunch of us who were kind of similar and we became really good friends. I had a good English teacher that I really liked. We read The Grapes of Wrath in his class. I was sort of active in things like -- there was a tradition where we did a junior day and a senior day performance for the whole school when we were juniors and seniors. My friends and I got together and wrote the script for both. We got involved in staging that and acting in it. Very much enjoyed that. What 00:10:00else? I can't think of anything else at the minute. Of course, by the time we were in high school the Vietnam War was becoming a really hot topic. I just remember in like the eleventh and twelfth grade thinking about my friends possibly getting drafted in the future. They were about to implement the lottery system, the number system. Yeah. And then, of course, we were at Washington during the summer of love. As far as we were concerned -- we grew up in these kind of strict, sheltered Asian families -- that could have happened in Tahiti for all we knew.

FARRELL: Yeah. Haight-Ashbury is across Golden Gate Park so it's a different part of the city.

SASAKI: It is, yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah. Thinking about 1968, 00:11:001969, the Vietnam War, were these historical moments, these things that were going on very locally, were they something you discussed at home with your family or at school with friends or teachers?

SASAKI: We didn't really talk about it much at home. My family was never the type that has political conversation. I didn't grow up very political at all. Let's see. I know there was a group of kids at school who were anti-war. There are all these little cliques in high school. But I wasn't involved with that that much. Although by 1969 I do remember my sisters Kathy and Susan and I participating in an anti-war march, one that kind of ended up in Golden Gate Park. By that time I was more into it.

FARRELL: 00:12:00What compelled you to participate in that march?

SASAKI: Nixon. It was just kind of similar to the Trump years, where it's just that -- what year was it that Cambodia was bombed? Was that 1970?

FARRELL: I'm actually not sure. I can check.

SASAKI: Because I'm getting ahead of a story here but I remember my first quarter at UC, everybody was responding to that and there was a reconstitution and a strike and tear gas on campus and stuff, so it ramped up really quickly.

FARRELL: In high school were you starting to think about politics?

SASAKI: Not really. [I did have one teacher, Richard Castile, who probably awakened my social conscience by getting us involved in collecting toys and canned food for the Delano grape strike workers.] It's just the war was 00:13:00unavoidable. It was everywhere and the photos that were coming out of Vietnam. I felt that it was wrong to be there.

FARRELL: Yeah. And I mean even not too far away, in the Presidio you've got an Army base and you've got the Presidio Twenty-Seven happening. It's just all around. When you were in high school did you have any early career aspirations?

SASAKI: I went from one thing to another. At one point I thought, "Oh, I want to be an architect," and then I wanted to be a photojournalist. Of course, I think I've always wanted to write the Great American Novel. But I didn't really think practically in any way about what I wanted to be. I had friends who, even as early as high school, they thought, "I want to be a doctor," so they were 00:14:00going to major in pre-med in college. I wasn't like that at all.

FARRELL: What made you decide to go to UC Berkeley?

SASAKI: Probably the biggest factor was that my mom had graduated from Berkeley and I never really considered any other school. My sisters had all gone there, so it felt like our university. It was fairly close to home, which I liked, too.

FARRELL: Yeah, so it was sort of natural for you to go there as opposed to UCLA or something?

SASAKI: Yeah. I didn't really want to go to Los Angeles. [Lifelong Giants fan--]

FARRELL: You started at UC Berkeley in 1970 as an English major. Were you living on campus then?

SASAKI: My first, gee, was it one or two 00:15:00quarters? I can't remember. Possibly the first quarter I was living in a dorm, which I hated. I hated it. I just had this roommate who was constantly hanging around with her boyfriend and her other friend. It was like I didn't feel like I could even go back to my room kind of thing. After that I shared a studio apartment with my sister Susan on the north side of campus, which I liked.

FARRELL: Okay. So yeah, you were a little bit north. I know we had just talked about the protest and the tear gassing and things. This is also a few years after the Free Speech Movement. What was the campus climate or culture like for you at your time 00:16:00 there?

SASAKI: Well, first of all, I have to say personally when I got to UC there were a couple of things going on. One is that my sister Kathy had just died in March of 1970 and so I started UC about two weeks after that happened. I think really for the first couple of years I was just in this kind of gray zone. I actually remember the precise morning in 1972, March 1972. I woke up and I thought, "Okay, I can go on now. I can move on." But it was like for two years I was sort of suspended. I think that colors my experience at Cal, the first part of it.

The second thing is since I had such a stable childhood with the same friends almost all the way through, going to 00:17:00Berkeley, even though it was like, what, twenty-one miles or something from where I grew up, it was a real culture shock because when I decided to be an English major. I think in all the years I was there, I remember probably only one other Asian that was in my English classes. There must have been about seven or eight of us or maybe more who went to UC Berkeley from my high school, my high school class. But they were all in pre-med and business and other things. I never saw them in classes. There was one friend who was a fellow humanity major but she was in history.

It was like suddenly I was meeting all these mainly white people who came from all over the place, all over the 00:18:00country, other countries, who looked at me like I was the foreigner. One person actually complimented me on my English. That kind of thing. It was just very weird for me. That's the first time I'd ever felt like a minority.

FARRELL: Did you find that there was an Asian American community on campus?

SASAKI: There probably was but I didn't have any connection with it. I know when my sister Joan went to college, she went from '64 to '68. The Free Speech Movement was kind of happening while she was there but she wasn't really involved in it. She was very active with the Nisei Students Club. I don't even know if that still existed when I was there. I certainly never knew of it.

FARRELL: 00:19:00Yeah. It's a big shift where people are coming in from other countries and looking at you differently coupled with Kathy's death, as well. Is that something that you want to talk about or would you prefer not to?

SASAKI: I don't know that I have to say much about it except that we all felt very close to her, so it was a huge shock. We fought a lot when we were kids and I think it's because I wanted her respect possibly the most. She was the most outgoing of us and made friends very easily so I always thought she'd grow up and have some kind of international job, join the Peace Corps. She was very 00:20:00adventurous, too.

FARRELL: Did it help living with your sister?

SASAKI: I think it did, yeah, because she'd gone through it, too. Even though we didn't talk about it very much, I think it was a good thing to do.

FARRELL: Yeah. There's a tacit understanding between the two of you. You had mentioned that kind of the fog lifted in 1972. Was there anything that sparked that or you just sort of time had passed?

SASAKI: I think the time had passed. I've actually heard other people who suffered the death of a loved one and they said the same thing. I guess a certain amount of time passes and then suddenly you feel like, "Okay, I can pick up 00:21:00again and I'm back in my life." I can't explain it.

FARRELL: Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the classes you were taking in the English department, I think it's really interesting hearing about the demographics and this is also indicative of some of the larger issues within the publishing world, where it's homogenous. Do you remember what kind of books they were assigning you or the writers they were holding up as a gold standard at that point? And you may not remember.

SASAKI: No, I did take a class, I can't remember the guy's name, the teacher. He was a young Black guy and in his 00:22:00class we got to read a lot of the African American classics, which was really great. But it's like there's a special class for that. They're not woven into the canon, right? It was all Chaucer and Shakespeare and George Eliot, all of those people.

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah, so all the standard classics. You spent your junior year in England, is that right?

SASAKI: I did. Yeah. I guess I reached a point where I felt that, as an undergraduate, the classes were very large and very impersonal and all this stuff was going on in the real world. I just felt like if I don't do something I'm going to end up dropping out because I feel like this is really irrelevant. What am I doing here? 00:23:00Then I thought, "Well, maybe I'll try to get into the study abroad program." So I did that. It was between Japan and England. I chose England because they speak English. I thought, "I don't speak Japanese. How am I going to survive over there?" I'd also grown up on English literature so I'd always wanted to go there. I ended up going to the University of Kent in Canterbury. Unfortunately, it was maybe a year or two before Kazuo Ishiguro was there, so I didn't get to meet him.

FARRELL: Oh, yeah. That had to be, probably when you heard he was coming, like, man, why couldn't this have been a couple of years later. What was your experience like in Kent? Or in Canterbury?

SASAKI: It 00:24:00was my first time I'd been abroad. In fact, I think that was my first plane trip. I'd never been on a plane until then. I had a friend in Oxford from UC and another UC friend who was in University of Edinburgh, so we tried to get together on breaks. Oh, it was kind of strange because there was another Chinese American woman from a different -- was she from UC Berkeley? She might have been from UC Berkeley -- we didn't know each other -- who was also there on the program and it was funny because I went over to her college. We were in different living arrangements. Knocked on her door and she wasn't there so I was like standing there writing a note. Her neighbor, an English woman, came back and said, "Oh, what's wrong?" She called 00:25:00me her name. "Can't you get in?" I just kind of looked at her and I said, "I'm not her." It was so weird.

FARRELL: Yeah.

SASAKI: I also had a lot of people ask me if I was an Oriental. I said, "Well, I'm American." They would say, "Oh, you look Oriental." It was like the "Twilight Zone" -- and then, of course, a lot of people would see me and assume I was from Hong Kong because there were a lot of Chinese from Hong Kong there because it used to belong to Britain.

FARRELL: That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that the United States had been going through some of the cultural things but England didn't 00:26:00necessarily go through the same thing so it's interesting the experiences there.

SASAKI: My first day in London I had eaten breakfast in the cafeteria where we were staying and I didn't know if I was supposed to bus my tray or not. I approached a young Englishwoman and asked her where I should put my tray. She looked like startled that I had even addressed her. She kind of looked at me like in panic and she said, "Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I can't understand you." And I thought --

FARRELL: Even though you were speaking English?

SASAKI: I spoke English. It was just weird.

FARRELL: Very strange.

SASAKI: I think the expectation of the visual I was providing just kind of overwhelmed people. [The only friend I made that year was an Englishwoman who had an Italian mother. She knew what it was like to be "different."]

FARRELL: Yeah. Unfortunately, 00:27:00yeah. So you were there for a semester and then you returned?

SASAKI: Right.

FARRELL: Okay. Were you there at the beginning of your junior year or at the end of your junior year?

SASAKI: It was my junior year so I was there from September through June.

FARRELL: Oh, the entire year, okay. I see. That's a long time.

SASAKI: It is, yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah. Did you experience any reverse culture shock when you came back to Berkeley?

SASAKI: I didn't. I didn't. Not like when I came back from Japan years later.

FARRELL: Yeah. It's interesting. I know that you audited Ronald --

SASAKI: Takaki.

FARRELL: -- Takaki's Japanese American history. Oh, this was after -- sorry, I'm looking at the outline now and realizing it was after graduation. But when you were there, I know this is sort of the beginning of Asian American studies at maybe San Francisco State and not necessarily Cal. But were there 00:28:00any history classes or anything aside from what you later audited that you were finding were available?

SASAKI: I don't recall and I don't think there were anything like that. I can't remember if it was my final semester or second to last semester I took a creative writing class, which was unusual because at that time UC didn't have very much in the way of creative writing at all. It was very much English literature. It was taught by a Korean American writer Kim Yong-Ik. It was kind of neat. It was when I was taking that class that I wrote the very first story as an adult that was based on Japanese American experience, which was later included in my book.

FARRELL: Which story from The Loom was that?

SASAKI: In the The Loom it's called "Ohaka-mairi."

FARRELL: 00:29:00Okay, and that was another question that I had: During your time as an undergraduate, were you writing then? Were you doing any creative writing?

SASAKI: I was the kind of person who always carried a notebook around and would sit down like between classes and scribble in it. I think at one point I tried writing poetry and that was like a real bust. But I was always writing. I was always writing. Just not formally like stories or anything.

FARRELL: What was that like for you to take the creative writing class your senior year? I'll leave it open for you to answer. But yeah, what was that like for you to take 00:30:00that class?

SASAKI: It was fun. That's also the class where I met the second Asian American that I ever had in a class. That was interesting, too, because she was also trying to write based on her experiences. She was Chinese American. But no, I enjoyed that. Of course, that teacher Kim told me, "You have to say more. Your writing is like the bone but you need some flesh." Because my stories tend to be really spare and really short. And he was right. I learned over the years ways to open them up.

FARRELL: Yeah, that's interesting. And always with writing, at least in journalism, is like show, don't tell, and I think that's getting flipped a little bit 00:31:00now. But interesting, to learn those components or elements. At that point what were your career aspirations? What were you hoping to do after you graduated?

SASAKI: I didn't really have specific career aspirations. I didn't go to any counselors to get job counseling. I guess I was kind of a dreamer. I remember seeing one person and she was saying, "You have all these -- " I guess I did have ambitions and aspirations. She said, "You have all these ambitions," but she didn't see me like doing anything to like achieve them. I graduated in, what was it -- I can't remember when it was. March. Was it March? March or June of 1974. And was kind of coasting. I had two part-time jobs. One was teaching 00:32:00ESL [English as a Second Language] to visiting Japanese tourists. The other was a typing job on campus. I had the idea that I just want to take some time and try to write, so I was doing that. I was working two part-time jobs and starting to write some fiction and things like that. To back up a little bit, I think the whole experience of being in England for a year and being immersed in DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Shakespeare and all the white men, it made me really want to know more about Japan and it made me really want to go to Japan at some point.

I remember that Christmas when I was in England, a friend of my sister's sent me a little book of haiku and they were illustrated with these simple 00:33:00Zen watercolors. It appealed to me so much. I think I was starved for Asian culture. That's why when I came back I just started in -- oh, and I had also -- I can't remember exactly when I read this but I read the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I don't remember when it was published but it was somewhere in the early '70s when I read it. That really had an impact on me because I had never thought about the way that history is presented and it made me question everything. That's when I became really interested in just knowing more of the facts about Asian American history and so I audited Ron Takaki's Japanese American history class.

Oh, and also the summer of 1974. Maybe I'm getting ahead of the curve 00:34:00here. There was this big call for young Asian American actors because the Asian American Theater workshop was starting up and they had this agreement with ACT in San Francisco that there would be all these classes. I went over to the enrollment and it was like hundreds of young Asians buzzing with energy signing up for these classes. It was kind of a really exciting time. That's actually how I met Nancy Ukai. I think you know her? Yeah, because she was taking some of those classes with some of her friends from UC Santa Cruz. We all started hanging out together.

FARRELL: What was it about the theater that appealed to you?

SASAKI: Well, I'd always kind of dabbled in drama, doing script writing and being in 00:35:00like -- I wouldn't call them plays but productions -- actually, in elementary through high school. I think I had the acting bug, partly because I was shy and if you're an actor you have the license to let it all out, right? Plus I had always really been disturbed by the way Asians are portrayed in popular culture. And I guess part of my wish as a writer was to write stuff that was more authentic. Anyway, it all sort of tied together.

FARRELL: Yeah. I was going to ask if, given your involvement with theater throughout 00:36:00grade school, high school, and then with the Asian American theater workshop, were you experimenting with screenwriting or playwriting at all?

SASAKI: When you said playwriting I remembered that in the fourth grade I did write a play about Christopher Columbus and the class put it on with the rest of the school. I wrote those short little plays or skits throughout school but not seriously as an adult. Later, when I came back from Japan, I did take a playwriting course at City College at night while I was working and I had Ed Bullins, who recently passed away. His assignment was to write a scene. I wrote a scene for these two Nisei women meeting in the 00:37:00supermarket and knowing that they know each other but not remembering who the other person is and that became "American Fish," which appears in my book.

FARRELL: That's actually my favorite story in The Loom. I really loved it. I thought that was great. Sorry, I'm now thinking about that story.

SASAKI: I'm skipping all over the place.

FARRELL: No, no.

SASAKI: I'm just making it harder for you.

FARRELL: No, no. This is great. These were lots of questions I was going to ask anyway, so this is great. Let me see. When you took Ronald Takaki's Japanese American history class, you had mentioned that you were starved for Asian culture. You read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and really thinking about wanting to learn the facts and how things are presented, coming at writing from an authentic -- authentic to yourself and your experience. Two-part question 00:38:00here: first, was it hard to convince him to let you audit the class and then the second part is what was it like for you to take that class?

SASAKI: I don't remember it being hard at all. What was it like for me to take the class? It was kind of nice because we did read things. I actually can't remember if we read Nisei: The Quiet American by Bill Hosokawa for that class or if I read that on my own. I do a lot of reading on my own so it's hard to remember sometimes. But it was very interesting for me to read that. I mean I think it's probably a little outdated now because it was written way back in -- must be the '70s. It's very much kind of one-sided. It was 00:39:00on the Nisei JACL [Japanese American Citizens League] sort of side. But it filled this huge vacuum because I knew very little. He went back and he talked about the Exclusion Act and the Alien Land Law and all that stuff. It was a good foundation for me. I also remember going with two of my classmates to meet Toshio Mori, who was living in San Leandro then. I don't remember if he had just written or he was writing or going to write his novel about his mother, Woman from Hiroshima. But that was kind of a memorable experience, just going over and having donuts there.

FARRELL: Who was in the class? What does the class makeup look 00:40:00like, if you remember?

SASAKI: I don't remember. I think it was mostly Asians. The two women I went with to visit Toshio Mori were Japanese American, but I don't remember too well.

FARRELL: Did being involved in this class, having these experiences, did that further interest you in visiting Japan?

SASAKI: Absolutely, yeah. I was determined to go there but I didn't want to just visit as a tourist. I looked for a teaching job there and interviewed with a couple of people who were coming to California and was hired by the school The Language Institute of Japan in Odawara. That's how I ended up going to Japan.

FARRELL: 00:41:00Where in Japan? What region of Japan is that?

SASAKI: If you take the Kodama, the slow bullet train from Tokyo Station, it was the second stop after Yokohoma. It's called the Gateway to Hakone, because that's where you get off and switch to a local train to go to the Hakone National Park.

FARRELL: Okay. Was it maybe like an hour outside of Tokyo or farther?

SASAKI: By bullet train forty minutes.

FARRELL: Okay, so sort of suburb -- a little farther past the suburbs then.

SASAKI: Yeah and it was perfect because it's not Tokyo, which I think would be exhausting to live in. But close enough that you could run up there on weekends and experience it.

FARRELL: Yeah. That's true. Were your parents supportive of you going to Japan?

SASAKI: They were but they weren't supportive of me going with 00:42:00the boyfriend that I was living with, not being married. Because we were going together. We went to the courthouse and got the license just to satisfy them.

FARRELL: So that was the only part of the situation that they were -- they were happy that you were going to Japan, just not under the circumstances?

SASAKI: Yeah. I mean they weren't that happy about the fact that we were living together here. But going to Japan was worse because I'd be meeting their relatives and what would the relatives think, you know?

FARRELL: Oh, yeah. When you were there did you end up meeting the relatives with him?

SASAKI: I did, yeah. I had an aunt who was my dad's youngest sister. She was living in Tokyo. I also traveled down to Wakayama and met my mom's cousins and their families, their sons and daughters and children.

FARRELL: What was their response or 00:43:00what was their reaction?

SASAKI: To?

FARRELL: To you introducing your boyfriend to them.

SASAKI: Oh, he didn't go.

FARRELL: Oh, okay.

SASAKI: Oh, wait. Did he go? I can't remember. I think I went by myself. Yeah, I think I went by myself.

FARRELL: Okay.

SASAKI: They were thrilled because they knew my mom and she had visited in the '30s and had a very memorable visit with them. They didn't speak a lot of English. And then also their Japanese was Wakayama-ben, which was interesting. But I don't know what to call him, my mom's cousin's son, whatever that is, he just had this comfortable style. Nothing could faze him so he would 00:44:00just continue talking in Japanese. I eventually started to understand him. He didn't freak out if I was speaking English. It was a good visit.

FARRELL: That's good, yeah. You were there for two years and you were working as an English teacher. Who were you teaching? What was that experience like?

SASAKI: This was an intensive residential program and so businesspeople would be sent by their companies all over Japan to stay there for one month. They would be in class basically from 8:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night and it was like an English only environment, which wasn't great for me learning Japanese. But it was great in terms of like learning about Japanese companies and Japanese business 00:45:00life. I loved it. it was really interesting. It was kind of like a teaching lab because there were people there from lots of different places, some from the School for International Training. Everybody was trying these different teaching techniques. It was fun.

FARRELL: So it was an immersion school for them while you were also being immersed in Japanese?

SASAKI: I never felt like I was immersed in Japanese because we spent so much time at work that we were speaking English. On weekends or vacations we would get to go to Japan.

FARRELL: Oh, okay. That's interesting.

SASAKI: Because we were all living pretty near the school. We had to eat some of our meals with the students, too.

FARRELL: Oh, okay. Yeah, I can see what you're saying. It wasn't so great for your trying to learn Japanese.

SASAKI: Right. Because they were trying to create this 00:46:00English island.

FARRELL: Yeah, like a bubble. Having had all these experiences leading up to your time in Japan when you're auditing this class, you're taking the Asian American theater workshop, really piquing your interest in going to Japan, what was it like for you to finally be there? Did you feel like you were getting closer to your family, to who you are, to your identity, that kind of thing?

SASAKI: That's got many, many answers. Well, in a sense I always kind of kid that when I'm in America I feel more Japanese than American and when I'm in Japan I feel more American than Japanese. I got over there and there were some things that were so familiar to 00:47:00me that I had this emotional connection. I guess I had memories of my dad coming back from his business trips to Japan and some of the things he brought us and some of that kind of thing. Also, I had really gotten into Japanese films in university and liked the films of Yasujirō Ozu, which were mainly made in the late '50s and the early '60s. So even seeing the department store wrapping paper just brought back all these memories. In a way it felt very familiar. But at the same time, because I have a Japanese last name and I look Japanese sometimes -- not the Japanese people I worked with or knew, or the students, but people on the street or people you encounter -- didn't know what to make of 00:48:00me. Or they would think something was wrong up here or that I was really rude because I didn't speak politely enough or that kind of thing. I didn't know all of the nuances of being Japanese.

FARRELL: So again, there's some assumptions being made by other people just by looking at you. Yeah, that's interesting. Did your parents ever come visit you while you were in Japan?

SASAKI: They did. Separately. In 1976 my dad came and that was really a special trip because he and I went to Hiroshima together and he took me to the cemetery in Miyajimaguchi, which is where the ferry departs for Miyajima Island, which was the 00:49:00ancestral home, to my grandparents' tomb there. He took me to, what's it called, Hondori, the sort of shopping area in downtown Hiroshima where his sister -- my aunt -- had a sweet shop there. We couldn't find it. It was probably gone. He told me about his mother bringing him to the department store there and going up to the top floor and having like one of those boxed lunches. So he had memories. These are things he never told me before but since we were there, they were starting to come 00:50:00out. My mom visited me, I think, later. I think it was 1980, maybe 1980. That was nice because we went to Wakayama and visited the relatives again together.

FARRELL: I see. So your dad came to visit you the first time you were there. Because I know you returned to the US for a couple of years, is that right?

SASAKI: Yeah, okay.

FARRELL: And then your mom came to visit you the second time.

SASAKI: Right.

FARRELL: Got it. Okay, okay. Do you feel like those visits with your parents in Japan brought you closer to them or made you understand them a little bit better?

SASAKI: I think so. I guess with my dad, I don't remember if I discussed this last time or not, because he was Kibei and because of his military experience in the US Army during the war, he had always kept his whole past under 00:51:00wraps. Our whole family, the influence of it was always primarily my mom. The college educated, the English speaking, the Nisei experience. I felt that because I went to Japan and lived there and started to really like it, that gave my dad permission to share things that he had kept to himself before. It definitely made us closer.

FARRELL: What was the reason that you returned for a couple of years during that interlude? Or you returned to the US?

SASAKI: Yeah. At that time the school where we were working, they liked turnover because they always wanted fresh blood. Because the director, it 00:52:00was a non-profit, the director of the school, part of his theory was, "We want the Japanese businesspeople to be exposed to Americans but we also want the Americans to be exposed to Japan." If you keep the same Americans all the time you're limiting. He liked constant turnover and the contract was only for a year but it was possible to extend for the second year and there was an understanding that then you'd have to leave. That's why we came back.

FARRELL: What were you doing from '77 to '79, for those two years?

SASAKI: Okay. Came back to Berkeley, starting teaching ESL for UC Extension. My ex-husband and I published an ESL textbook based on some of 00:53:00the, what do you call it, strategies, teaching techniques that we learned in Japan. We self-published it and UC Extension program bought it and used it. They had like a huge program. Also in 1978 I decided I was going to go back to school to get my master's degree. I started going to San Francisco State because they had a creative writing program.

FARRELL: Were you getting your MFA then?

SASAKI: No, it was an MA with an emphasis in creative writing.

FARRELL: Okay, so were you getting your master's from '78 to '79?

SASAKI: Well, I enrolled and took classes 00:54:00'78 and '79 but then the opportunity came up to go back to LIOJ in Odawara. That was the school in Japan. My husband, ex-husband was offered the directorship of the school and I would be a teacher. We liked it there so we decided to go back so I had to interrupt my master's program. When I came back to the U.S., a couple of years passed, and then in 1986 I decided to just try to finish my master's degree, so I did.

FARRELL: Okay, so you were starting those classes and then you went back. You returned to Japan I believe for five years? Is that right?

SASAKI: I was there for five years, yeah. My ex-husband stayed there longer. We split up there.

FARRELL: Oh, I see. Okay. When you returned were you working at the same school teaching again?

SASAKI: Let's see. Well, I came back 00:55:00on short notice because -- I had just started a new job in Tokyo in a company's English language program. I got the call from my sister's that my dad had been diagnosed with lymphoma and they weren't sure what the prognosis was. I made the decision that I was going to just go back because I could not imagine staying in Japan and planning lessons while my family was going through that. So I had to resign. I felt kind of bad because I'd only been there for two weeks. And packed everything up and then I came back and I think it was February or March of '84. Actually, I didn't have a job lined up or anything because it was so unexpected. 00:56:00This friend, the mother of one of my sister's friends, was an administrator for the San Francisco Community College district. She heard about what was going on and thought it was great of me to come back and support the family so she actually found ten hours at the community college for me to teach, so that's what I did.

FARRELL: Oh, great. So you were able to get a part-time job when you came back?

SASAKI: Part-time job, yeah.

FARRELL: When you came back were you living with your family?

SASAKI: Yeah. I lived with my mom and dad for a few months and then my sister Susan was moving out of her apartment in Berkeley so I took over her apartment.

FARRELL: Okay, okay. What was it like for you to have to leave Japan so suddenly and now here you are back in the Bay Area, to return, especially under these circumstances?

SASAKI: Yeah. I don't 00:57:00know if it was the suddenness of the return or if it would have happened regardless of how I returned. But the culture shock was like horrendous. I knew about culture shock. I had talked to people about it. I knew what to expect. But still, it was just awful because I came back and everybody here had been here the whole time and I hadn't been. It's like the last five years of my life didn't exist because nobody was very much interested in knowing about it. It was like there was no support for my life that I had had there so it was pretty bad. There were other things that were hard to adjust to, like having to drive everywhere. In Japan we walked. We took public transportation. Also the level of violence 00:58:00in just everyday interactions. It just got me in the gut. Really bothered me. Like somebody opens the car door and it touches the car next to them and the drivers start shouting at each other. It was like horrible to me because Japanese, they bury conflict. They don't show it. So anyway, it took a while to readjust.

FARRELL: What do you feel like your time in Japan -- I know there's an interlude -- but those seven years in total, how do you feel like that impacted you both personally and professionally?

SASAKI: Well, professionally it basically determined the rest of my career. I ended up switching from ESL to intercultural training and working for consulting companies that specialized in 00:59:00Japan/US communication and then all of my subsequent jobs come from the fact that I lived in Japan. Personally, it was also really important because, as I mentioned, I grew up in the Richmond district, which was this sort of paradise and it was sort of like a bubble. We grew up in this sheltered bubble. It was deliberate. My parents created this little Eden to protect us from some of the realities that they had experienced. The result of it, though, is that you grow up and you don't have any sense of who you are or where you came from. One of the reasons I wanted to go to Japan was to find out what it was that my grandparents had come from and where it was that they had wanted to return to. It felt in a sense like I only knew one side of the 01:00:00coin and by living in Japan I felt like I was whole again.

FARRELL: Did that wholeness stay with you when you returned?

SASAKI: It did. Yeah, yeah.

FARRELL: You had started working as an ESL teacher at community college, as you mentioned. I think when we talked earlier you mentioned that you didn't feel like you had very much job security and it was a little bit less than ideal. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

SASAKI: Well, I was a part-timer. We were limited to ten hours a week except in the summer when the full-time teachers wanted to take a break. We could teach twenty, maybe twenty hours. But at the time most of the teachers there were white 01:01:00women. And because the population of San Francisco was so Asian I think the district was trying to hire more people of color and more men just to balance it out a little. This was very threatening to the people who were there full-time and the people who were there part-time hoping to become full-timers. People like me who got in there -- and given that they wanted to improve the demographics, I was a likely person to advance and get one of these plum jobs -- they would give all of us the worst assignments. Like hours split morning and late at 01:02:00night and different locations on opposite sides of the city and all that kind of stuff. There was no job security. You could be laid off at any time. I thought this isn't very rewarding and it's just barely like a survival--giving me a level of being able to survive, pay the rent. I was in a rent controlled apartment. I was really happy when I had the opportunity to move into the corporate sector and work with businesspeople who were doing US/Japan business and needed to communicate with each other better.

FARRELL: How did that role come up? How did that opportunity arise?

SASAKI: Well, let's see. This is kind of a 01:03:00long story. One of the previous directors of LIOJ, like maybe the director right before my ex, when he left Japan he started working for this company called Clarke Consulting Group, which was just starting up in the early '80s. They had a contract to train a bunch of managers from a very well-known US company who were coming to the US to learn about the factory there so they could go back to Japan and build a factory in Japan. He was in on this pilot program of intercultural training. Because the intercultural field, there's a strong belief that knowing the language and being fluent isn't enough. You also have to understand the 01:04:00culture, communication style, the business style and all of these other things. So he was there. He had worked there. I had that connection. Although he was not there when I was hired -- he was long gone -- I knew that they existed so I was able to put my name in. I was kind of surprised when they called and said that they were looking for someone. It was a long commute because I didn't want to move down there.

FARRELL: Yeah. It was based on the peninsula, right?

SASAKI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Where on the peninsula?

SASAKI: Redwood City.

FARRELL: Oh, in Redwood City. Okay, so were you commuting from Berkeley down to Redwood City?

SASAKI: Yes.

FARRELL: How long was that taking you then?

SASAKI: When I first started, it would take forty-five minutes. It moved later, a few years 01:05:00later. But it could take anywhere from, at minimum, an hour-and-a-half. I remember once driving home on Halloween night in the rain. It took about three hours. Really awful.

FARRELL: Nothing like Bay Area traffic.

SASAKI: Yeah.

FARRELL: It's interesting. Working for a place where they felt that knowing the language wasn't enough. Were you working with people and businesses from all different parts of Japan?

SASAKI: You mean when I was at Clarke or when I was in Japan?

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah. Sorry. When you were at Clarke.

SASAKI: Actually, both places, yes. People all over Japan.

FARRELL: Did that require you to learn about the regional cultures from different parts of Japan?

SASAKI: Not really 01:06:00because we were very much focused on business. Usually it was a matter of understanding the corporate culture. Most of our clients were large American companies. Trying to help the Japanese managers understand what the corporate culture was and what the values that underlying communication style and business style are and then specific strategies so that they could learn how to style switch. So, for example, just in listening, the Japanese tended to listen very well and not interrupt because interrupting someone is considered rude. But if they weren't understanding what the person said they would 01:07:00just continue to listen and then the American would be really frustrated that the person didn't understand what they were saying and say, "Why didn't you interrupt me? Why didn't you ask?" It's understanding what the differences are, what the expectations are, and then trying to help them learn how to do those things. You can repeat and summarize. There's all these different ways of clarifying in a way that is appropriate and not considered rude.

FARRELL: How was your Japanese at this point?

SASAKI: Well, when I left Japan I was able to have conversations, limited conversations. I'm sure I was nowhere near -- stylistically not speaking in a Japanese way at all. I was never 01:08:00fluent. The longer I was away from Japan the less I could do. Almost completely forgotten now.

FARRELL: Yeah. It's hard if you don't keep practicing. You were at Clarke Consulting for twelve years, from '87 to '99. After that you went to an e-learning company. What was the impetus for your move from Clarke Consulting to the e-learning company?

SASAKI: Well, it wasn't a direct move. The recession hit both sides of the Pacific in the '90s so business started getting really tight. Of course, when there's a recession the first thing that goes is training, right? That's the first thing to get cut from the budget. Clarke was not doing well and I continued to do this kind of training for a 01:09:00couple of years as an independent contractor. But I'm not the kind of person who likes to sell myself and market myself. When the opportunity came up to -- well, one of the things I did while I was an independent contractor was I learned how to conduct an online class. Because I thought personally that e-learning was going to be the future. Whenever there was a recession, face-to-face training would be the first thing to go but they might continue to invest in e-learning because it's so much cheaper. There's no travel involved, right. I had done that. This opportunity came up to join this company that was an e-learning development company in the area of ESL. They were producing this product that taught English to international employees all over the world. In a way I was like the perfect fit. Although I wasn't all that 01:10:00excited about going back to ESL but I thought, well, I need to survive so this will be like a full-time job. I took that and I thought I can learn more about e-learning, even more than just by teaching an asynchronous online class.

But it was a culture shock because I had always worked for companies that were founded and run by educators. Most of the people were teachers, trainers, teachers. And this one, it was a business. It was a real company. They developed a big flagship product in 1999, had a huge content team and then they laid the whole content team off. Most of the company -- and it was the biggest company I had worked for -- but most of them were like engineers, 01:11:00salespeople, marketing people. Very, very tiny content team. It was a culture shock for me. I learned how to actually communicate kind of with engineers.

FARRELL: Another style of communication. Sometimes it's not always --

SASAKI: Really. Really. Yeah. A lot of the content people stayed in their little niche and turned out content and then passed it off. It was very much sort of a conveyor belt sort of process. But I'm not like that. I can't work that way. I had to like know what happened before and know where it's going so that I can do what I'm doing better. Over the three and a half years that I was there I gradually expanded what I understood and how to do things. I got to know the engineers. By the time I left I had 01:12:00designed two new products, I mean big products, and I was like bug fixing and doing all that stuff.

FARRELL: Yeah. What were the programs that you developed?

SASAKI: One was like a business skills center. Their flagship product was very traditional in some ways. The templates were cool. They were like e-learning templates but the pedagogy was really traditional. It was grammar based. They were teaching vocabulary lists. I looked at it and I went, "Oooh." They had been talking for years about creating some kind of thing that would be more suitable for businesspeople. I thought, "That's right up my alley," because that's what I'd been doing for the past twelve years. I kind of put together not a 01:13:00proposal but I just talked about -- this took a while, too, because it was a very male dominated company and content people were like at the bottom of the totem pole. But I kind of invited myself to one of the meetings once and when they were talking about the business skill center I just sort of pitched. I said, "Well, you can do it like this," and then I sort of talked about how they could do this simulation. The production guy, the product manager and the marketing guy and the chief engineer, their eyes just kind of lit up and they went, "Wow." They got really excited about it. We ended up doing that. We did a prototype and then we launched like six modules. The other one was a pronunciation center that had Flash movies and things in it and it focused more on 01:14:00intonation and all that kind of stuff, not just R and L.

FARRELL: That's really interesting. You were there for about three-and-a-half years. Does that mean that around 2003 is when you went to Aperian?

SASAKI: 2005 actually.

FARRELL: 2005. Okay, so from there you moved to -- I could be saying this wrong, too -- Aperian Global?

SASAKI: Yeah. Aperian Global.

FARRELL: Aperian Global. You were consulting and you were working on cultural products and did a lot of diversity, equity and inclusion work. Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like to transition into that company and then maybe what some of your roles were there?

SASAKI: The transition was really easy because it wasn't -- well, I guess it was still technical but in a different way. Also a lot of the people there were people who had been associated with 01:15:00Clarke Consulting Group, so I knew them. The timing just worked out because they also had a flagship product that was kind of like an online encyclopedia, cultures around the world. But the guy who was in charge of the web tools really wanted to do more e-learning. I actually saw him at a wedding and he asked me, "Oh, what have you been up to?" Then I told him about the business skills center. He got really excited and said, "You should come by the office and talk." So we talked. Yeah. So I started working there. Sorry, somebody's texting me. It's kind of distracting.

One of the most interesting 01:16:00projects I did there in the time I was there was we got a government contract from the Army Research Labs to develop a website to train on the ground soldiers, American soldiers who were going to Iraq. Because this was 2006. That was just a great project. We had nine months to do it. We managed to get interviews with, I don't know, twenty Iraqis who had flown out to Amman, Jordan for a conference. We talked to soldiers who had come back from Iraq to find out what kind of training they got before it and what kind of training they wished they'd had and then we developed this website. For me the most rewarding parts were the branching scenarios where they have to like -- it's a 01:17:00situational judgment kind of thing, where they're in the situation and they get these options and they have to pick one. Based on what they pick they go on a different course, depending. They could end up with a really terrible result or a really good one or something kind of in between.

Also there was this interactive -- we called it "witnesses to history" as a way of teaching people about the recent history of Iraq. I had this cast of, I don't know, six or eight characters, Iraqi and American mostly, and a timeline. Users could click on a year and find out what each person was doing that year. It was kind of history through a very personal filter.

FARRELL: As an oral historian, that sounds right up my alley.

SASAKI: Sorry?

FARRELL: As an oral historian, that sounds right up my 01:18:00alley. The recent history through personal narrative, you're interviewing people. Also interesting that you're doing sort of a learning based create your own adventure program, as well.

SASAKI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah. That's really interesting.

SASAKI: The feedback from our Army contact was really good. She said it was the best one that they had ever gotten in their small business innovation project or something.

FARRELL: Yeah, so you were working on that project -- you had nine months to develop it but then were you working on it for a little longer after or did you move to something new?

SASAKI: Oh, I moved to something new. There's always new stuff. There was a lot of requests for country specific e-learning, for companies that were doing a lot of work in a certain country. The diversity stuff started happening a little later, like 01:19:00around 2011, '12, all the way through to when I retired in 2016.

FARRELL: Yeah. What did you like most about that role at Aperian?

SASAKI: I always loved learning new things. Otherwise I get bored with a job. I did so much research on so many different cultures and it usually involved like interviewing people from those cultures. That part was really rewarding. The military project we did was traditional e-learning where we had to hire a designer to design all the templates and all the backend. But later we started moving to rapid authoring software. I could just create the whole thing 01:20:00myself and I loved that. I loved having like the blank screen and then creating this fun kind of thing that actually teaches people something.

FARRELL: Yeah. It sounds like some of the things that stuck with you from your whole careers, learning and then language and creating. I don't know if there's a question here, just more of an observation.

SASAKI: No, that's definitely true. I can't be bored at a job. Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah, and what went in to your decision to retire in 2016?

SASAKI: Well, I had just finished a year of work on another really fun project. It was for kids. It was on these, I can't remember, six different countries. 01:21:00But that was really fun. The company was making the decision to focus on upgrading its flagship product and making it available on mobile devices, which had nothing to do with content. I foresaw a lot of boring work ahead, like maintenance and nothing much interesting. I had been thinking for a couple of years about when I was going to retire. Anyway, I thought maybe I'll go halftime, so I went halftime. Then after a couple of months of that I said, "Nah. I'm just going to throw it in." So I retired. But then I continued contracting because there were a couple of projects I needed to finish for clients.

FARRELL: Yeah, okay. I'm also thinking for our next session we can pick up 01:22:00with your MA and then go into writing and then we'll talk about Tsuru for Solidarity and the Topaz stories and things like that. Because we're about at an hour-and-a-half right now. Does that work for you?

SASAKI: That's fine, yeah.

FARRELL: Okay. Before we wrap up today, I do want to ask you a couple of reflective questions on what we had discussed today.. I'm wondering what it meant to you to have your experience in college, getting more interested in going to Japan and then being there, considering that you carried a lot of those experiences with you throughout your life and your career really. Yeah. What did it mean to you to visit Japan and spend so much time there?

SASAKI: What did it mean to me? I don't think I'd be the same 01:23:00person if I hadn't gone. In some respects I guess my whole life I felt sort of a duality. Like I have one foot in two different worlds, of course Japan and America. Also later I felt like I had one foot in the corporate world and another foot in the writing world because I got my master's degree while I was working full-time. Part of the reason I went back to school is because I was starved for the opportunity to just be around other writers and to talk about writing. Going to Japan was important because, as I said, before that I didn't know who I was. It felt like I couldn't speak up for myself because I didn't 01:24:00know. When I understood that my values that I had been raised with were majority culture values in Japan and were valued, it just changes the whole way you feel about yourself. Because in the US those values, people kind of look down on them or they make you seem weak or they make you seem whatever. They're not the mainstream values. Then you're just kind of a loser. I think in terms of self-confidence it was really important. I don't take guff from anybody. I mean really it gives you ground to stand on and to defend yourself really.

FARRELL: Yeah. It sounds like it really helped you be comfortable with who you are.

SASAKI: Exactly. Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah. That's great. Well, I think that's probably a 01:25:00great place to leave it for today unless there's anything else you want to add to this section?

SASAKI: I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

FARRELL: Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. This was really wonderful and it was really great to hear about your education, your career, your time in Japan. That was really great. So yeah. Looking forward to the next session.