Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Bob Y. Sakata Interview
Narrator: Bob Y. Sakata
Interviewer: Daryl Maeda
Location: Denver, Colorado
Date: May 14, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-sbob-01-0019

BS: One of the big setbacks on the farm was where my late brother Harry passed away at a young age of thirty-five, and everything fell on my shoulder. Then naturally my two sisters were marrying well and left. So then my father passed away in a terrible auto accident that, where I was driving the automobile, and that was disastrous. That was one of the toughest things for me to bear. Then during that time, as we were getting ahead, I remember my father giving me so much wisdom. And when we started the farm and work, he became a little worried, and he called me in one winter day in the pot-bellied stove, and he said, "Yoshiharu, I want to talk to you." And in Japanese I asked him, I said, "Gee, what happened, Dad? What did I do wrong?" He said, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about." He said, "Everything you do, you do right. Everything you do you do right, and you work hard. And not only that whatever you do you do right," he said, "everything you touch turns to gold." So he said, "I'm worried about you," and he said, "I want to let you know that the real true test of a man is that someday he may fall. And when you fall, the true test of a man is to be able to bring yourself up." And I remembered those words. And it was soon after those words where I was driving and was involved in an accident and my father was killed, and I was survived. Then I got involved in this explosion in the shop and I was burnt and in the hospital for over a year. So those little things that Dad had the wisdom of explaining to me, his thinking, had a lot to do with where I'm at today.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.