<Begin Segment 44>

LH: Well, just to wrap up then, I want to actually go on a little bit of a sort side tangent to your career as an information specialist, particularly because I know now currently you're working with the museum, the Japanese American Museum here in Seattle, the effort to get that going with the -- is it the Nikkeijinkai who is or is the Japanese... Japanese Community Services, excuse me, is in charge of that or is that the...

FG: It's a combination, but right now I think it's... well, it's a combination of Japanese school and the Japanese American, Japanese Community Service.

LH: Japanese Community Service and the Japanese Language School. Well, using your background knowledge of that, why do you think it's important to preserve these things, and how did you get involved into preserving this kind of information for people?

FG: Might be because I got involved because of the people I know probably that they talked me into it, right? And I wouldn't hesitate to help because I felt that after my mother and father died, I did a lot of cleaning up at the house and I did a lot of saving. When I was first cleaning out their house, I worked with the University of Washington Archives, but many of the things that I had that have to do with Japanese Community Service, Hiroshima Kenjinkai, and Buddhist church were written in Japanese. And the university didn't really have the facilities to take those luckily and so I just kept them. And so I was kind of, I think I was kind of complaining to somebody I have all these things I don't know what to do with, right? And so they said, well, we're going to start the museum up and I says you want them? They would take them so that's how I got involved. But mostly though I think I've always thought that it's a very, very important project because we're losing the Issei -- and this is quoting my husband -- but the Issei phenomenon is a very special phenomenon just as the Nisei phenomenon is and it'll never happen again. The Isseis are kind of like the pioneers that came west. It's the same sort of thing. It will never happen again. The Nisei experience will never happen again. It would be a shame if nobody ever, if everybody forgot what had happened and how the people came to be, why the Sansei, Yonsei, are where they are. I mean, why they're here, period, is because way in the back they had ancestors that traveled from Japan and came here, but then if I were them, I think would want to know a little bit about my own roots, that sort of thing. And it would be a shame to lose, to lose it, and to lose the artifacts and memorabilia that we would have, we wouldn't have if we didn't have a museum.

LH: But you also mentioned, again, in a previous conversation that it was something that your father was also interested in, too, that he was interested in somehow preserving history.

FG: My father always has been very interested in history and so he always, my father always thought of... what is it? Going back and following the generations and things like that. And he always had my mother write it up. [Laughs] My mother did the writing; my father did the thinking. And so I ended up with all this written work that my father had thought of, and he even wrote kind of a personal history, his own personal history. It wasn't the family, it was just his own, that sort of thing. But my father always kind of looked, he always felt that this sort of thing was important. I think he would heartily support a museum today. In fact, I think he would insist on it. But these things sort of came up kind of after he passed away. Daddy and I had talked about it before and he thought that, he thought it was important too, but I don't know. I think there's also there's always, no matter what you do, there's a political factor. And I was telling my father I don't know how to, I don't know how to think of that and he said you must. [Laughs]

<End Segment 44> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.