Densho Digital Repository - Kay Yatabe Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-9-25)

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KY: And then the other thing we did was one of the projects that the Sansei Legacy Project did was, do you know who Nobu Miyoshi is?

PW: Tell me about Nobu Miyoshi.

KY: It's this. She wrote this, and it was in the Pacific Citizen at some point. I probably have that article, but Michael Yoshii had found this, and he realized that it was, like expressing a lot of the ideas that he was having independently.

PW: You should say what the title is for the...

KY: Oh, okay. It's The Identity Crisis of the Sansei and the Concentration Camp. And Nobu is a family therapist in Philadelphia. She worked at, I think, University of Pennsylvania, and part of the whole family therapy. Family therapy was a big thing in, I guess, '70s, '80s. So he actually got her out here, Michael invited her out. She is the same age as... no, she's older than my parents. She was born in 1911. So this is all going on in the '90s, so she's in her eighties, so she's pretty old. And she and Michael, they got this idea to have this project called Exploring Family Legacies where she would meet with family, all generations if possible, and she would conduct maybe six interviews about the effect of camp on them. But what she found out, or what they found out was that all these families had too many issues. And so she spent many, many sessions, because there were too many family issues to go over. Now, I actually a number of the tapes just because -- did I pull on this? -- because when we closed out Buena Vista, the stuff had to go someplace. So I have some of the tapes, not all of them. I've got to talk to Michael and Jill about what to do with these things, because it's all real private. So I had a number of sessions with my family, and really, another one of these really important things for me. I knew about this happening, and I think I mentioned it to my parents. And, of course, my family, if you say something they don't want to hear, they just turn around and walk away, so I got nothing. And then, I don't know, maybe a couple years later, after she's been doing this a while, I really wanted to do it. And Michael suggested that the way to do it is to ask them to do it for me. So I did, and there was no problem. So my parents would meet with, we'd do it at my parents' house. My brother, of course, he's in Pennsylvania, so he can't do it. It was a good... it was good. Because she really felt like my family, on the spectrum of Japanese American families, we were way over on one side of being not verbal, not communicative. Way over. She said we did mind reading. She could tell that we were very connected, but we did it by mind reading. And that my mother, who's normally effusive, loves people, in the house she was really subdued because my father gave a really, I don't want to say he was a damper, because he was so quiet himself that my mother really couldn't, she was pretty quiet around him, too.