Interviews

1. Parents were willing to send her to medical school

2. Differences in discrimination

3. Getting good guidance

4. Unable to work when the war broke out

5. Traumatic experiences before camp

6. Joining the hospital unit in Santa Anita Race Track

7. Lost respect for the flag after incarceration

8. No use in having citizenship

9. Never married

10. “Everybody went in like sheep”

Shigekawa,Sakaye

(1913-2013) Doctor specializing in obstetrics in Southern California

“Everybody went in like sheep”

Well I said - it was the bitterest experience I ever had. And I think that we should have protested. But I guess that’s why they treated us so good is because we didn’t. Everybody went in like sheep, you know, you didn’t have any…the government had no problem. And I’m sure if they’d have any other ethnic group, they’d really have a fight. I mean - I’m sure that the citizens today would not stand for being in a concentration camp. They’d stand for their rights, but our folks, if…I know…when I told my folks I was so upset that I said I was gonna stand up on the soapbox and I’m gonna do this and…it was all talk, you know. And so, my father told my mother – tell her not to raise, you know, cause trouble. So they, I guess most of the Japanese thought, if the government tells you, you do certain thing, you just do it.

discrimination imprisonment incarceration interpersonal relations racism World War II

Date: March 31, 2005

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Gwenn M. Jensen

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

Interviewee Bio

Dr. Sakaye Shigekawa was born January 6, 1913 in South Pasadena, California. When she was a child, her father was hospitalized from double pneumonia and while visiting him, she got acquainted with the doctors and nurses and decided then to become a doctor. After studying premed at USC, she was accepted to Stritch Loyola Medical School and was only 1 of 4 women in her class. She persevered through medical school despite sex discrimination from instructors and fellow students and began practicing medicine in the Los Angeles area.

She was one of the first to be incarcerated at the Santa Anita Race Track on March 1, 1942. She was invited to join Dr. Norman Kobayashi and Dr. Fred Fujikawa treating patients while there which helped her overcome the bitterness and depression she was in. At first she was only allowed to treat skin conditions, but after a while she asked to be able to do other things and began to do obstetrics and other parts of medicine.

After the war she continued to practice medicine and eventually opened up her own practice, which she continues. In her thirty-nine years of obstetrics practice, she calculates that she delivered over twenty thousand babies and never lost a mother. She passed away on October 18, 2013 at age 100. (April 2020)