<Begin Segment 35>

LH: So for yourself, what was it that got you going and starting to look into your own background?

FK: Again, I think it was because of my concern for him. And also the concern for other kids, that are kids of color. And especially, specifically Japanese who, I feel, felt were going to be going through the same stuff that I did when I was in school... not knowing about their background and so forth. I mean, no one told me that on Bainbridge Island that we had been here since 1883. If there was a cleared piece of land on the Island, it was probably cleared by a Japanese American farmer, who did cutting down the trees and pulling out the stumps with his horses, or blowing it up with dynamite. Heck, I can remember Kay Sakai saying that it used to be embarrassing to her, because her father was clearing land right next to the high school here and she, every time she heard the dynamite go off, she knew it was her father. And that, it's true... almost every piece of land on the Island that was cleared at that time, was cleared by the Japanese American farmer. And, and all the cherry trees that were around the school, no one ever told me that the Japanese planted those.

So I had no sense of, of the history of the Japanese here on the Island. I remember once... they were gonna' -- not that long ago, maybe 10-15 years ago -- they were going to have a Strawberry Festival parade, and they contacted me because they wanted all the ethnic groups to have floats in the parade. And so they wanted the Native-Americans to have a Native-American float, and they wanted the Japanese to have a Japanese American float and so on and so forth. And then the Caucasians were going to do this float, and they were going to call theirs the pioneers. And I thought, "Gee, you know, our fathers, grandfathers were pioneers too..." and, they don't see things that way. So, no one ever told me that we'd been here that long and had done all this stuff on the Island, and so forth. So it became obvious to me after a while, that unless something was done differently in this community, our kids would have the same problems of not knowing who they were and not feeling that good about themselves, and so forth. So, it became really important to me to do that.

LH: So, at what point in your life did you decide to do this?

FK: After I got out of college, after I was a dentist. Maybe after I'd been in practice, after I got married maybe about three years. Actually we started the project in 1983... so, that would have been a hundred years after the first Japanese on the Island and it would have been... gosh, so I, I started dental practice in '65, so that's quite a few years, almost, almost twenty years before I really got interested in this stuff.

LH: And so this was not just a personal interest, but a group activity?

FK: Yeah. But I think a lot of it was probably was driven by, by... the two or three of us, who really felt like it was something that was really important.

LH: Oh, I see. Who were, who was the group?

FK: Oh, it was me and it was Ron Nakata, who's a Sansei about twenty years younger than I am and, and John Sakai, who was about the same age as Ron. John dropped out after awhile, but Ron and I just kept after him. And then Don Nakata, who is Ron's cousin and five years older than I am and Junkoh Harui is about six years older than I am, became the driving forces for us to gather this stuff, so...

LH: And you, you said earlier that there was some reaction in the community?

FK: Oh yeah. Yeah. No one, you could just feel the tension when we brought it up. People just didn't want to do it. They just really didn't want to do it.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.