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VY: Do you want to talk about Boyle Heights? It sounds like you spent your entire childhood in Boyle Heights.

NO: I'm probably one of the few people that says I was "born in East L.A.," so to speak, I'm very proud of it, I love Cheech and Chong and all that kind of stuff. My friends are muralists from the East Los, and I feel a deep love for the community. I drive down my old street and we're not there anymore, it's changed from being Jewish to Japanese to Hispanic, and it has changed over time, but we're buried at Evergreen, so we come here, we enjoy the food. But living in Boyle Heights was probably the best melting pot of all time because in high school there were people who were Russian, and all the people who were just beginning their lives here in America. We were all dreamers. I love Facebook because I see what they're doing today, and that we were in a unique time. I considered myself a Kennedy kid, and, "What could I do for this country?" was my mantra. Got a chance to march in a parade at the Coliseum during some of the campaigns. And so had a little bit of political awareness already. My mother would really fight for the rights of her neighbors, she said to Gloria Molina, who was one of the supervisors, "Why did they have good food in Encino where my older sister lived, and we have rotten food at the store down the street?" Because she would shop on First and Rowan, so now they have good supermarkets, but in neighborhoods like that, they did not have access to transportation or food like the other areas. So I did ride what was called the Red Car, the streetcar, and walk up the hill and kind of give myself a chance to have an ice cream, because it was a pretty tough hill. But my mother did complain to the city, and my father was involved with the "coroner to the stars," he was being politically challenged to be removed because we think that there was racism at the time. So they began to speak up for people who they felt were misunderstood or mistreated. And so growing up in an environment where they would donate money or time, write letters to people or ask me to write letters, I would think, "Really?" Because that was the hardest part about working on the diary because here I'm born in America, I'm having a good life, I couldn't understand this book. And so we would transcribe night after night and I'm confused, why would they ask an American citizen to repatriate? Is that legal? Our president at that time gave them the opportunity to go back, you could go back. You're a "troublemaker," go back. And that bothered me a lot, that this would happen.

So what I learned recently, when we came back to Folsom Street, that in 1947, two years after the war ended, that people from Crystal City, Texas, were being released one by one, and one of them was Hiroshi Shimizu's father. And they stayed with our family because they had no place to go. And he is currently the chairman of the Tule Lake Committee that holds a pilgrimage every two years, and they stayed with us, and the story is they moved a little further north for two weeks, and finally made it back to San Francisco where he opened, his father opened, Iwao Shimizu, his father, opened a newspaper, I believe it's the Hokubei Times. So there was the Nichi Bei Times, which is still in circulation, which is kind of a Christian-based newspaper, and his was more of a Buddhist-based writer, so different kind of approaches to the same topic. And so he was a writer, and when you read his writing versus my writing or my father's writing, it's gorgeous, it's poetic, it's on another level. This man wrote beautifully. He wrote about when my father was building the judo dojo in camp, he said, "Some people build buildings, but we are building men." And so when you just go once, and the next sentence, and how they look at things and they're different. They know how to use the language.

So my father was not a good speaker, my mother was very talkative, and yet, this experience silenced her, because she was afraid that she would be picked up again. So she says, "Dad, don't talk about this, don't talk about this." But I was very fortunate that he loved me so, because he really did not choose to share the diary for a long time. And so I said, "I need this for a grade at UCLA." I was taking a class, and the class topic was the camps, and I knew we had something, because we would talk about why I'm supposed to behave better, to study harder, because I'm overcoming something that I didn't understand. I was the new America for them, and I was healthy, I was educated, this was their hope. But indeed, they didn't want to burden me with this, but I wanted it. I wanted to know what happened. So finally we went to the Poston pilgrimage which was in its infancy, we went to Tule Lake with NHK, and I just kind of listened to my father. He didn't want to go, he didn't want to be interviewed by the Belvedere Citizen, but I said, "Dad, we have to do this, we have to do this. We have to tell the world what happened." So they had a picture of my mom and dad as a newlywed, and another picture in their older age, and he told the story. And, of course, I told them why I felt so strongly about the kids of color that I was working with, because by that time I was already a teacher.

So anyway, the relationships between the people in camp remained strong, and what happens is we need the descendants, and so we went on a kind of a teaching seminar for katari. Katari means to tell your story, with the kids from the Nikkei Student Union. And this little girl named Megan, very smart girl, she thinks she's going to be a doctor. So I pass out the introduction to my father's diary because I wanted to talk about the camp. And she says, "How do you know Tomiko Yabumoto?" I said, "She is my sister's best friend," 'cause her poem appears on the opening of the book, it's called "Wind Song." She goes, "That's my relative." She didn't expect that we would have these connections. And so she wrote a very beautiful essay as a follow-up, and she met Min Tonai, who was from Amache, Granada, Amache, who knew her uncles by name. So the community is trying to educate the young people, and I think that not all got the same message, 'cause I read a lot of the other essays, I mean, she took it really deep. And as a medical doctor or person who is going to have a platform in the future, it's going to be a good thing. We don't need a lot of leaders, we just need a few good ones. We need some people in politics, and I think this is why this happened to us, because we didn't have the political clout, and we were desperately trying to find leadership to have a voice in the legislature.

My nephew ran for office with the ABC Unified School District and wasn't supposed to win, he wasn't endorsed, and he ran against some really, incumbents and people who probably had more visibility, but he went door to door more than two times, door to door, house by house. And I'm very proud of him because he did win, and he won because he really felt he had a message. And his message was he thought the school should be the best schools ever for his daughter, especially, who is going to school in the district, but for all children. And so now he's the president of the board of trustees, and he says, "As long as I'm here, I'm going to take this opportunity to have a Day of Remembrance in that school district." So that's what we're doing this year in that district, going to five high schools, telling the story. And his vision is that this pilot that he's doing will be in all California high schools. So this is like the beginning, because we met with some of the Nisei who are on the panel, there's nine of them. And so they go, "When's the next meeting?" I said, "Well, you know, we're going," I said, "I felt a need that we needed to discuss, because we like to do things well, we like to be organized." Because they wanted to do a good job, too. But I said to Ernie, I said, "We need video, we need someone to have a parking space, we need to have someone walk us to the classroom, we need water, we need bathrooms, we need lunch, and we need to make sure that they are taken care of, because we're not going to be here forever." So he's a good kid. He's fifty-three, I don't know why I call him a kid. But I remember my father saying somebody was a boy, and they were fifty, and I'd look at him, and now I know why. Because when you're looking from a few steps above in the ladder, they look young, and you call them kids.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.