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TI: Yeah, so let's stay chronological and then just unfold. And if you don't mind, why don't we jump to that, in terms of, so you went to the same high school, and your little high school decided to have a reunion many years later.

JO: Fifty years later. We had had so much of each other, the same sixty people, and really it was more like thirty-five, because some of them were from out of town, so the inner circle. We had had quite enough of each other. But when we reached fifty years and still hadn't had a reunion. Someone contacted me, he was living on the West Coast, and said, "Don't you think that we should have it?" And I said, "Well, yeah, maybe." [Laughs]

TI: So this would be the fiftieth reunion of your high school graduating class.

JO: Of 1951.

TI: Okay, so this would be in 2001.

JO: It would have been a 2001 reunion, but something happened that year, so it was postponed. But it would have been that year. And I said, "I'd be willing to work on it, but how are we going to find anybody? It's fifty years." So a few of us started working with the internet and the telephone books, and with contacts. And in the midst of it all, I said, "Where is Ellen? Where do you think Ellen Yukawa is?" And everybody said, "Well, I don't know." Nobody knew where she was. And then one of our real gurus, our internet guru said, "I'm going to find her." And he couldn't turn up anybody with that name, and he lived in San Diego. [Laughs] But it wasn't Ellen's family, we found any Yukawas at all. And so I just said, "Well, I'm going to try one more path." I wrote an email to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to see if perhaps there was some way of finding Ellen. And one of her very closest friends said, "I think that she was in Arizona." So that gave me a hint. And I mentioned that in my email, and I got back an email that said, "Well, there are no lists. There could not be any lists." Well, maybe at that time there were no lists, or maybe they just felt that they... I don't know. Then I got another email from a curator who was in Japan at the time, for JANM, and she said that when she got back, she would try and help me. And lo and behold...

TI: And how did this curator when she was in Japan hear about your email?

JO: Somebody had passed it on.

TI: And do you recall her name?

JO: No. I haven't got that one... that's the one that I lost, and the email's so old I don't have it. And I wasn't yet a researcher, so I wasn't keeping things. I got an email saying that there was a Yukawa in Arizona, and her name was Elaine. I said, "I think that may be her sister," so we called that number, and sure enough, it was Ellen's younger sister who was so thrilled to hear from someone from that time, and by that afternoon I was speaking with Ellen herself. And she was thrilled that we were looking for her, and we did a lot of catching up, and she said she wouldn't miss our reunion for the world. So I felt content. But, oh, I'm missing the whole story. While I was online at the Japanese American National Museum, writing that email, I went poking around to see what kind of stories were there.

TI: So this is on their website.

JO: On their website. And, of course, by then, I did know what had happened because of redress. That was when many of us first learned about redress who didn't get it in school. And I found the story of Clara Breed the librarian in San Diego who had a whole, who actually had a group of children whom she had been the children's librarian for for many years, who felt attached in no uncertain terms, who went to the train station and gave the children postcards so that they could send her their address because they did not know where they were going. And in any case, without telling you all of Miss Breed's story, I read about the circumstances and about the letters that the children wrote to her, and how they didn't know that she was keeping those letters, and that there was a repository of letters, there were just a few samples online. And I said, "This is a children's book." By then I had written almost fifty children's books, picture books, never anything like this. I said, "How could that not be?" And I went to Amazon, and I said someone should have written this story. And I so I wrote back and asked, "How could I get the letters?" And I was told I would have to come to California, which was impossible since I was at that time having chemotherapy, and I had radiation ahead of me. And I do think this story... at that point I still didn't know enough about the incarceration, and so I started reading Roger Daniels, and I think Greg Robinson's book came out that year and I think I heard Greg doing his wonderful imitation of FDR. And I was just taken with the whole story, that how could this have happened? How did it happen? And living with a lawyer who was a great civil libertarian, he and I both began talking about this, and he helped me with the research. I was ill, but I began reading.

And in the course of events, I read Only What (We) Could Carry, and in it there was an excerpt written by Clara Breed's sister Estelle. And I said they had to be connected. And she at the time was working at Berkeley, and she was the person who was, she was so irate about the circumstances that she felt the least they could do was to give shelter while people were lining up and getting ready to go. So they arranged at the -- her father had been a minister -- and so she was very involved with the church, and they arranged for coffee and some comfort at the church as people were, one, registering, and then leaving. And I thought this had to be a relation of Clara Breed's because they were a breed apart. And indeed it was her sister.

TI: And so as a writer you're just uncovering this amazing story.

JO: Oh, one layer after another. And since I couldn't come (to California), I was given a gift. The letters were sent to me electronically on a disk.

TI: Yeah, tell me how that happened. So who took the time to digitize and send them to you?

JO: Well, the person who had digitized the letters... and I'm going blank, Snowden... Snowden is her first name and I'm going totally blank.

TI: But from the Japanese American National Museum?

JO: Yes, she was working at the Japanese American National Museum, and her project, in fact, was to digitize the letters. And so she sent me the letters, and I think I all but memorized the letters. I read them again and again. And then Steve, my husband, was a lawyer and a good researcher, showed me how I could identify what the topics of the letters were. So I started making notebooks of letters, whether they involved food or whether it involved school, or whether it involved leaving home. All of those events were then broken up so that when I began to write the book, I could find letters that spoke to various events.

TI: So it sounds like this became a really important project for you.

JO: I think that the project really gave me a will to live. I know that I wasn't sure I wanted to go through chemo and radiation, and one of the things I talked about with one of the doctors at Sloan-Kettering, which was where I was having the work done, I told him the story of this, and he said, "Well, this is a great story. You need to write it." And I think that the connection to that and my longevity are not accidental. As I worked through what people lived through, and the despair that they went through, and the hope that they held on to of a better future, it spoke to me in ways that I can hardly speak about.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.