Record 12/17 |
|
Description
|
| Sam and Gim Taguchi Compiled from Reiko (Taguchi) Sumada, The Juneau Empire and a 1990 interview by Ron Inouye, Alaska's Japanese Research Project After her husband, Seike, died, Matsuye Taguchi was left at age forty to support her family of five (Kimi, Sam, Susumu, Gim and Reiko) by selling vegetables at Pike Place Public Market. All the children pitched in and learned the meaning of hard work from her. Yet, Reiko said her mother was a "huge baseball fan and never missed her boys' games." When Sam was in his twenties, he came to Juneau to work at the Juneau Laundry with his friend, Ham Kumasaka. Ham said that Sam always sent part of his pay check to his mother. Sam said he heard the news about Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in a movie theater. "When I heard about it, I said, 'I don't believe any of those things.'" When the town learned that all the Japanese in Juneau would be evacuated in April, the high school arranged a special commencement service for John Tanaka. "Everybody was happy to see that." The night before evacuation, he and Ham visited friends who were sorry to see them go. "They were just about as much put out as we were." They were shipped out at 10:00 at night, stopping at Petersburg, Wrangell and Ketchikan to pick up other Japanese on the way to Seattle. After landing in Seattle, they were taken to Puyallup Fairgrounds barracks where Sam said he saw grass growing through the floor. Since he didn't like the Vienna sausages they served in the mess hall, he ate so much bread that his friends started calling him, "Bread." A few months later they were taken to Minidoka, a place Sam described as "a lot of sagebrush, flat and hot and pretty miserable." There he was able to join the rest of his family from Seattle, except for his sister, Kimi, a nurse working at a Catholic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. At first, Sam worked in the camp laundry; then with his brothers, Susumu and Gim, picked potatoes or topped sugar beets for farmers nearby. When some internees were allowed to leave the camps, Sam joined his sister, Kimi, in Rochester. Later he moved to Chicago and worked at a pinball factory. Although his brother Susumu and Gim were drafted in 1944, Sam was not called up. Gim joined the Military Intelligence Service and served in post-war Japan as an interpreter. After V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, Gim toured Japan on a goodwill baseball team that included some New York Yankees. Gim settled in Chicago with Sam. Sam came back to Juneau in 1949 when John Tanaka asked if he would join Katsutaro Komatsubara in partnership with his father, Shonosuke Tanaka, to run the City Cafe; then he would be able to leave for college. Sam took care of the books and worked as the day waiter. He got Gim to come up from Chicago in 1951 to work as a night cook and waiter. Gim fit right in with the sports crowd by playing for the Juneau Imperials and the City Cafe teams and was inducted into the 1955 Gold Medal Basketball Hall of Fame. The brothers combined their interest in sports and politics with work. They ran the City Cafe like a 24-hour talk show where games and politics were analyzed and argued over cups of coffee. Sam sometimes purposely overfilled cups as his test to see if people could take a joke. Rudy Ripley wrote, "Some customers actually felt slighted if they didn't receive an insult during their visit. It had become a badge of acceptance." After the City Cafe closed in the 1970's, customers convinced Sam and Gim to come out of retirement to open Taguchi's Fine Chow. Sam was appointed Grand Marshal for the 1989 Fourth of July Parade and as honorary Commissioner of Athletics for the State of Alaska by Governor Bill Egan. In his 1990 interview with Inouye, Sam said that when he came back to Juneau in 1949, "I thought I'd just stay a couple years, but I'm still here." In 1992 when Sam was undergoing cancer treatments, he wrote an open letter of appreciation to all who had written cards and letters to him. He wrote, "They must be the nicest people in the world and I love them all." Image Captions (All images courtesy of the Taguchi family.): Taguchi Family Portrait, 1944. Left to right: Reiko, Gim, Matsuye Taguchi, Sam, Kimi, Susumu Taguchi Family Portrait, 1928. Left to right, 3rd row: Kimi, Seike; 2nd row: Sam, Susumu; 1st row: Matsuye, Reiko, Gim Sam Taguchi, Alice (Tanaka) Hikido, Gim Taguchi Outside City Café, 1994 Sam at the (new) City Café, 1960, from Juneau Empire article written by Mark Kelly on March 9, 2005. Gim with Customers at Taguchi's Fine Chow, 1980 |
Sam and Gim Taguchi Panel
-The Empty Chair: The Forced Removal and Relocation of Juneau's Japanese, 1941-1951
-Permission to use this image may be obtained by contacting museum staff.
All images are the property of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. No image may be copied, downloaded or reproduced without the express permission of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.
All images are the property of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. No image may be copied, downloaded or reproduced without the express permission of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.