Yo Shinoda: My mother, Grace Kuniye Umezawa, was born on August 1, 1902, the first Japanese girl born in Alameda. She was also the first Nisei girl to graduate from Alameda High School. She attended UC Berkeley for two years until she became ill with pleurisy. She married my father Kay Yokouchi, in 1924. They moved to New York City for my father's work, and she went to work for Elizabeth Arden until 1932. They then moved back to Southern California where my sister and I were born. Despite living away from Alameda for those years, she had a strong connection with the city. The Alameda Japanese baseball team needed a chaperone for their trip to Japan in the late 1930s. My parents agreed to help them, taking their two young children along.

When the war started, we were interned in Amache, Colorado. In late 1943, my mother went to teach at the navy language school in Boulder. It was a chance for our family to be released from camp life. The only time I recall that she was insecure about a job was when she heard of the caliber of navy students. The students were graduates of prime universities, virtually all had Phi Beta Kappas, or they were born in Japan and already spoke the language. She ended up finding her calling as her students did very well. Her reading and writing in both Japanese and English was exceptional. When she finished teaching, the navy asked her to do some translations at Columbia University in New York City. It was another move for us, and she never did disclose what she translated. After one year, we moved back to Denver where my father was still doing broadcasting for the Office of War Information. When that office was transferred so San Francisco, we moved back to California. Postwar, she worked for the Allied translators in Tokyo where she was team captain overseeing the work of ten to twelve translators. We spent four years in Japan until she went for a relatively short assignment in Okinawa. At that point, she retired from military work. She took small groups of people on tours to Japan until she was in a serious accident while riding a taxi there in a rainstorm. She never fully recovered as arthritis stalled her energy. She was still studying and reading until she passed away at age sixty-five, but her biggest thrill in all was to have seen her four grandchildren.