<Begin Segment 1>

VY: Okay. Today is Thursday, February 7, 2019, and we're here in Los Angeles, California, with Nancy Oda. Dana Hoshide is on the camera, and my name is Virginia Yamada. So, Nancy, thank you for joining us today for this interview.

NO: It's an honor, thank you.

VY: Thank you. Let's begin by having you tell us when you were born and what name you were given at birth.

NO: I was born in May 20, 1945, and my father named me Kyoko, which means "cooperation." And it's written with three chikara, the "strength" kanji. And his idea was that I would be born in a time of chaos, the future was unknown, but I would bring harmony to the family and to the world. So I'd like to be called Kyoko, but I'm known as Nancy Oda.

VY: That's beautiful. What were your parents' names?

NO: My mother's name was Lily Yuriko Inouye. My father was Tatsuo Ryusei Inouye.

VY: And what about your siblings, can you name them?

NO: Sure. My oldest sister is Sayuri Frances, and she married Takeda. And my second sister is Ernie Jane Masako Nishii, and she was married to Mr. Nishii.

VY: And how about their birth order? How old are they compared to you?

NO: Sayuri is ten years older than me, Masako, who was Ernie Jane Masako, is seven years older than me, and myself.

VY: Okay, and where were you born?

NO: I was born in the Tule Lake segregation center.

VY: So your life begins at about the time when your family is getting ready to leave camp, is that correct?

NO: That is correct.

VY: Okay, so let's pause there, and before we move forward, let's step back a little bit and let's talk about what you know about your family and their life and their history before you were born. So let's start off with your mother. Where was she born and what do you know about her life? What do you know, what her life was like before she met your father?

NO: My mother was born on Halloween, and so she's full of life and joy, and she was born on October 31st, I believe it was 1914, and it was in Montebello, California. The family moved to Lancaster where she grew up, went to Antelope Valley High School, and she and her siblings, there were seven all together, had a great time during the era of Judy Garland, who lived nearby. So they worked on an alfalfa farm, she had three brothers who were the worker bees, and her four sisters, including herself, were the singer, dancer, artist people in the family, so it was a very amazing time. No TV, but they really enjoyed life.

VY: How about your father, where was he from?

NO: My father, okay, my father is from Kumamoto, Japan, but he was born here on Halloween as well, in 1910, and he was born according to the passport, in Laguna, California, as opposed to what I thought it was, I did some research. And he and his two older brothers were born here in the United States, and the family went back to Japan, so he's Kibei. The father, my grandfather, farmed in an area near Montebello, and we have a photo of the family with my father as an infant. And there are horses, and it's a panorama picture that we treasure because it talks about our beginning. They returned to Japan with these three boys, three, five and seven, and my grandfather arranges for a parade to show his three sons. But the rumor, or the tale is that my father cried and the parade was stopped, but he said it's really his middle brother that cried. So there's a wonderful plaque at the temple that my grandfather donated in memory of that day that he brought three sons back home to Kumamoto, Japan.

VY: So both of your parents were actually born in the United States?

NO: That is correct.

VY: How about any other family members? Do you have any knowledge of experiences that they had in the early days, in the '30s, '20s or '30s?

NO: Okay. Fortunately we have the yearbook from my mother's family. We will be donating it to the Antelope Valley Rural Museum. My Auntie June was in the California Rose Parade in 1936 in a themed float called "The Melting Pot," and she was wearing a kimono. And in terms of the rest of the family, they would welcome me as a child every summer to spend my time there, and I never knew that it was so famous for poppy fields, because we would only go at Thanksgiving or Christmastime, but it was a big thrill to ride your bike as a city girl as fast as you ever wanted to go, and jump into the reservoir, whereas in L.A., you have to be a little more cautious. That's my mother's side of the family. We've had Thanksgiving there, and when you think about the marvelous food that they made, the turkeys and the pies, I ponder, how did they even get the materials? Because they did not have even one stoplight even when I was born.

VY: So that was your mother's farm or her property, that was in Lancaster?

NO: Lancaster, yes.

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<Begin Segment 2>

VY: Okay, then how about when your parents met? Do you know what their early life was like?

NO: Well, let me start with when they met. My father was a Japanese language school teacher and also a martial arts judo teacher. So he came on a Model T Ford, all the way to Lancaster, there were no freeways, to teach in a one-room schoolhouse on the weekends for the thirteen farmer families and their children. And so my mother was one of his students, and she was a rascal, she was very difficult to control. And I think that was very appealing to him that she had spirit, she was very funny, and her sisters were probably more obedient. I know they are because they continued to write diaries themselves and were very disciplined, but my mother was not like that. So they met as a teacher and student, and he married her at age seventeen. And they went on a six- or seven-month honeymoon, and they went to Japan to meet his parents, to Korea, and to the Great Wall of China and back. And they came back, and after that, my oldest sister was born. So one of the things I wanted to do in my life was to go to the Great Wall, and here I have all the technology and everything, and it wasn't that easy to get there, but we have photos of them on the Great Wall of China.

VY: So your mother was seventeen when they were married? How old was your father?

NO: He was about twenty-two.

VY: So once they got married, then what? Where did they live?

NO: They lived in Boyle Heights, and my father opened a grocery store called T. Inouye grocery store, which kind of indicates his self-confidence. It was basically a hilltop market, and my mother has this great personality, and people would come to shop there. And he was a great businessman, I have the stamp that she would use to go to the bank, this is Lily Inouye, and that store still remains today.

VY: Does is still have the same name?

NO: No, it's gone through several other owners after the war and thereafter.

VY: So both your parents worked in the store?

NO: That's right. The store work is, like, 24/7, because they have to buy the merchandise, sell the merchandise and so on and so forth. Just a little point of reference, they used to have little tablets, so people would buy on credit. And as a result of this way of doing business, that's how they picked the Gomez family to take care of their home during the war when everyone was evacuated, because they were very, very trustworthy.

VY: So they lived in Boyle Heights, so they owned a house.

NO: Yes, my father bought a house, and it was two thousand dollars. And the reason why it was so reasonable, is because the owner wanted to go back to Japan, and my father had cash, and no other buyer had cash, so he paid cash and it's a house that starts on Folsom Street and goes all the way down the hill to another street, and it's a beautiful place that I grew up at.

VY: Do you know how long they lived in Boyle Heights before the war started?

NO: Well, from the time that they got married, from about 1934 all the way to the day that EO 9066 was issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

VY: So when that happened, do you know what they did to prepare for that?

NO: Well, my father had to sell the equipment in the store for very little, and leave that. And he, as I said earlier, gave the responsibility to the Gomez family to pay the property tax. So they lived in that house from that period on. So when we came back, they were still there, and we lived together.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

VY: Okay, and then what camp did your parents go to? At that time, your two siblings were already born.

NO: Yes. My mother's family was in Lancaster, and my father got his bags and his Model T Ford and drove to the farm, and they waited. And then they went together to Poston, which is by the Colorado River Indian tribe area, and they were there for quite a while until the "loyalty question" came out. There, he found happiness, he said, because he got a routine going. He was teaching judo by day, and night, he was not having to work so hard.

VY: Okay, so your father was teaching judo when he was in Poston?

NO: Correct.

VY: And then what happened after that?

NO: Well, he answered "no-neutral." Originally "no-no," but my grandparents, Tatsu Katsutaro and Tami Sugimoto, wanted them to stay. They begged my father to change his mind, but my father is a Kibei, person born here but raised in Japan, and as you know, judo people are very disciplined with martial arts, and he wasn't going to change his mind. So I interviewed my Auntie July to ask if she and Auntie June were there when this occurred, and she said she had already relocated to Chicago, where many Japanese people went. So they became schoolgirls over there, so my grandfather and grandmother, my mom's two brothers, were at the train station, and my father left with my mother and my two sisters for a very, very long train trip to Tule Lake.

VY: Okay, so they all left at the same time?

NO: Correct.

VY: And then what happened when they got to Tule Lake?

NO: When they got to Tule Lake it was October, and there were people coming from all different camps, the people who either didn't answer the "loyalty question" or answered "yes-no," or "no-yes," or, like my father, "no-neutral." So they were all put there, and so the people who were in Tule Lake prior, not everybody wanted to leave, so there were two types of people at the camp, and there was a problem. So one day, there was an accident, a truck accident, and someone died. And so there's a lot of history at this moment, because they wanted to have a funeral service. And because of the agitation, the man in charge, Raymond Best, decided that they couldn't do this, and so there was a negotiating committee formed to discuss this issue that they wanted to have more safety for their workers, and food was already being sold outside of the camp, because this camp had a very good agricultural area, lots of potatoes and pigs and chickens. Anyway, one time an administrator was caught on the railroad tracks because his truck full of pigs were leaving the camp instead of feeding the people. As a result, there was a meeting, and my father was attending the meeting, not in particular as a protest, but as a leader because he was the highest ranking judo man in Tule Lake and he had a responsibility to know what's going on. And as a result of him signing this sign-in sheet, he was arrested on November the 13th and taken to the Tule Lake stockade.

VY: Can you talk a little bit about what the stockade was like, what it was like for him to be in prison?

NO: Okay, well, first of all, Tule Lake was very unique. It became a military compound from four watchtowers to about twenty-eight. And so it was really under guard, and he initially was taken to what looks like an Indian tent, and this is November 13th, very cold in that region, and there was no heat. But the food was good the first day, because they didn't have a plan. The administration did not have a plan for these people who were arrested. And so as the days went on and they were wondering why they were there, what rights did they have, and so he began to write a diary, the diary of what happened each day and what he ate each day, what the men were doing, because it was all men. And one day there was nine, and at the highest point, about two hundred eleven, with three toilets, or three ways to go to the bathroom, which two were stuck. So it got to be pretty unbearable, but the men had organized themselves, and they would get coffee cans and use that and then dump it outside. They'd take turns getting coal, because eventually they had coal, and they were able to create a kind of a system of cooking and cleaning and taking care of things. But it was very cold, food was very bad, and the greatest worry was what happening to the 16,000 people still in the other side of the fence. So the fence was there, but the military created another fence. So it was pretty dark, so to speak, a bullpen, they called it.

VY: They called the stockade a bullpen?

NO: Yes.

VY: How long was your father there?

NO: He was at the stockade for a hundred days, basically three months and one day.

VY: Was he allowed to see his family at all during that time?

NO: No, but the women would come around the fence, and, of course, they were pushed back. But in the letters that I have, my mother said, "I saw you but you didn't see me, you look thin." And people would say, "Inouye-san, I think that's your wife." Because my mother was different than the other ladies. The other ladies are probably saying, "Otosan, Ojiisan," calling out. She goes, "Anata," jumping up and down. She's young, she's very young, and she's very Americanized. And so she had a real adorable way about her. He goes, "Yeah, that's my wife." He was very tall, very stoic, very thoughtful person in the sense that a person who could manage to come to America, buy a house and do what he did, and be a teacher, find ways to promote the sport he loved, because it was very helpful to the farmers in Lancaster because they were bullied, a very small population of Japanese people in the school. But once they learned how to do the different kata, they were not the aggressor, but if someone would come towards them, they would find themselves on the ground. Eventually these farmers were respected for that, but that's judo the gentle way.

VY: Talk a little bit more about that. So your father actually taught judo in Lancaster, that was before the war?

NO: Yes. So he taught judo in Lancaster, and these were his language students. And then he also taught in Poston, and he also taught in Tule Lake. And so someone said to me, "So when he came out of the stockade, what did he do?" I said, "He taught judo, he taught judo." Judo was his heart. He had gone as a young person to train as a judoist in Kumamoto, he went to see Mitsuru Toyama, who he really admired, and he was turned away many times because he was a pretty important man with a lot of guards. And some people thought of him as the "Black Dragon," and my father kept coming back at about sixteen, seventeen years old, and finally got an audience. And he asked Toyama-san for the honor of naming his dojo. So Toyama-san thought deeply, had a brush, and he wrote, "Senshin," which I have a copy of. So people come to my house, and they can't read it anymore, but they'll ask me, "What is it?" and I said, "To explain it to you, it would be like having a letter from Abraham Lincoln. It's very important, he was a very big person in Japan." So my father came with that, so he had, in his mind, a plan to bring the principles of judo, which is not only physical, but also spiritual and a way of thinking, because you're not attacking your opponent, you're sizing them up, you're looking at them. So I am a judoist, too, and many times when I face difficulty, I think about the patterns and the grace and beauty, and if necessary, take someone to the mat. Not physically, but mentally. That's where it ends.

VY: I love that. Well, it sounds like your father's reputation preceded him.

NO: Correct.

VY: It also sounds like judo was a very important part of not only his life, but his family's life and your life.

NO: Right. So I know we're talking about camp right now, but when we came back to Boyle Heights, he made a mat in the garage and he started his judo school again.

VY: Okay, so I guess back to the stockade, are there any other things that he did while he was there? You talked about how he wrote letters to your mom, talk a little bit more about those letters. Did they write letters to each other?

NO: Well, this is a young couple, aged twenty-seven and thirty-three, and he's on one side talking to people who have a lot of time. And he never liked gambling or drinking per se. Well, he did drink, I'll take that back. But he always used his time wisely. And so the question was, what did the letters say? They were basically letters of love, because he would be concerned about the children. He would tell my sister to write to her grandmother, who was my mother's mother, in Japanese to let her know they're doing okay. He didn't really want them to know he was in the stockade because they would worry. And so my sisters would write to him, so basically November, Thanksgiving came, Christmas came, my sister's birthday came, New Year's came, and the family was separated. And this is why I'm so intent about today's separation issue, with children separated from their parents. And so my sisters were sick children, they were not well like me, I'm very healthy. And so the medical conditions in camp were extremely poor, and he spoke to the FBI about that. He said, "We really, really need to look at the food and the medical services here because this is inhumane." He said, "This is America," and they were American citizens, of course. And so my father would write to her in his own way -- pardon me -- "I need geta, I need more paper, I need more pens, I need my books, Saikonton," he would read. And he would tell her to thank the neighbors because the neighbors really surrounded her making sure she was okay. So there are many stories that I know these people, they've all passed away, that they would bathe me. Three little girls, and she's all alone, and they took care of us.

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<Begin Segment 4>

VY: Do you want to talk a little bit more about what it was like for the kids to be in camp and to have that experience of being separated from the family?

NO: Okay, very good question. So myself, although I'm given the opportunity to speak today, is very different from my two sisters. My eldest sister told her son on her deathbed, "I'm not going to tell you about camp, this is my burden." Because she really could not go to school because of her illness, and she was unhappy, very unhappy. Her dad was gone, but he would arrange for her to get toys for Christmas, all these little special things that kids think about. Then my middle sister was highly traumatized. She had nightmares, and she passed away two years ago. And we talked a lot about camp through the years, we've gone on pilgrimages together, and she always would, to the last time, she would have nightmares. She would be in her blue nightgown, running, and people would be chasing her. So she had been a ceramist for many years teaching at the Irvine Fine Arts Center making cups and teapots and bowls and things that most people do and like. And after she went to the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, her memories reawakened, and she was breathing the air and she says, "I feel disquieted." And so she began to... excuse me, she began to do her best art. She drew pictures of faces with, very grim faces, and she really was traumatized.

VY: Do you think that helped her work through it a little bit, her art?

NO: Definitely has helped her work through it. We've had several shows, and I think people who come to this show have responded to it. Because Tule Lake was different. There were not only a lot of searchlights, there were lots of bayonets, tanks, lot of people who were very rough, pushing people around, innocent people who really didn't know why they were there to begin with, and it only accelerated over time. So her artwork is named Endure, Gaman, and if you could picture this one has about a hundred faces, each one different, like Sanjusangendo in Japan, Kyoto, and so it was the faces she remembers, and it's wrapped in barbed wire. And another one is our family, my father's tall, my mother's about five feet tall, and the two little girls hanging on. And he's in the shadow because he's in the stockade, and my mother's carrying me, (an infant). I brought a picture of this for you because we take photographs of it. And the back side is the EO 9066 and soldiers with bayonets and watchtowers. So she was able to express herself.

VY: Well, you brought up family separation. When you hear people talk about that today, currently, how does it make you feel?

NO: First of all, it's wrong. We have laws, of course, which are important for order, but I also think that we are human beings, too, people of the world. And America is a place that is thought to be a place to come to, that's why my parents came here, or lived here. We remain here, we believe in the principles of America, and so when we see children separated, I'll just pick different things like just the anxiety of being separated and not knowing where you're going be next. They've been moved from different detention centers, very close to our own detention centers like Crystal City or where the Indians had their protest about three years ago, Where Water is Life, if you recall that protest. And so we really feel it's an important time for us to speak up for this separation. The kids are not getting educated, either in whatever language they come from or in English. And so my friend Kanji who was also interviewed by you, his mother put him back a year because she felt his education was not good. Then you'll hear in another seminar it was great, and they say it's great because in Tule Lake you learn Japanese and English, but that's because you're going to go back to Japan and see the elders, you realize you didn't know the language. So it just depends on your entry point into camp, like if you enjoyed it or if you're a parent or a baby like me, or different things, but the idea, your question was how I feel about the separation, you could see the longing and the people covering their fears. Because my mother will say, "Oh, so and so dropped by today, that was so kind, and brought these foods." And so this is why these people are so dear to us today, that I thought all these people are aunts and uncles, but they were part of our camp life. But the separations has to end, and there has to be a solution that's peaceful and not military. And right now I understand they're sending more troops to the border, and I think that's the wrong way to handle this problem. I'm sure that the pendulum will swing the other way, but hopefully we'll do the right thing.

[Interruption]

NO: My sister, Ernie Jane Masako, used to take cod liver oil, and she needed to do this because she was underweight. Maybe we were a little overweight, but she was underweight and always a little sickly. We thought she'd outlive us all because she took such good care of herself through her whole life. But no, we all have a date, and so she did pass away. But her time, her last few months, she stayed at my house, and we would talk about her memories. And she would tell me of the various nightmares of being lost and having to go in the cold and crying, and her tears would turn into snow, or to ice. And so that's the kind of things that children should not be bearing. It's cold and they should be warm, they should have their family around them, they'd have the best time. Because we depend on them to be the leaders of tomorrow, and what kind of adults would they be if they have this kind of trauma in their lives? And so she really, as an adult, finally found after, if you can imagine, seventy-plus years of living like that, finally found her outlet. That's a long time to carry that burden. And so hopefully people will learn that we should not be inhumane to children. I as an elementary school principal, probably unique, because my grandchildren said when I retired, "Why do you have so many toys? You're the disciplinarian of the school." And I said to them, "Because you make your point, then you have to wait for the parents." I said, "I need to talk to the parents more than the kids. So we let them play. It sounded like they did something that can't be fixed or corrected or improved. And it's beautiful because I have six years to make a little dent. I don't want to change them, I love kids, I like them the way they are, full of joy, energy, but I think you want them to be successful and get along with the greater society. So I think kids come today with a lot of baggage because of the increased poverty. And I say increased because it doesn't go away. I thought things would get better, but the school that I worked at mostly were Title I, the majority of kids really didn't have food outside of school. I took a child home, the parents weren't here, they went back to Mexico from some reason, and there was a dried up cabbage in the refrigerator. So my husband said, "How many chickens did you give away today?" [Laughs] So I said, well, they needed it, so we have to think like that.

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<Begin Segment 5>

VY: Okay, so let's talk about what your family did when it was time to leave camp, and this sort of coincides with when you were born, doesn't it? So talk about what happened when you were born.

NO: Well, first of all, my father was disappointed because I was the third daughter of a judo sensei. And I said on his deathbed, I said, "Thank you, Dad, for being such a good dad, but I'm very sorry." And he says, "No, you did good. You did real good, my three daughters are wonderful." But he had to grow up, too, in a way, I suppose. So I was born, and the family had to pack up and come back on a train. And I've seen that track, it's those tracks from Tule Lake coming back to Los Angeles. And I don't know how my father brought all these artifacts home. He brought a kamidan, which is a form of Shinto Buddhism. It's not a butsudan, it's a kamidan. And we have the big sign from the dojo, and I'm in a kori, which is a wicker basket, and my sister used to talk about how my mother would be holding me and all these things. I mean, it was a difficult passage, but they never talked about it how difficult it was. Because it was about October, and they arrived in Lancaster, my maternal grandmother's home. And I think this is how it worked, because I'm always trying to put the pieces together. So my father and my mother's brothers went about digging the Model T Ford out of the hole that they hid it in. So originally they dug a hole, and my sister told me this. They put the car in there, they wrapped it up, and they covered it so no one would steal their car. So they started digging it out, so I said, "How do you take it out without equipment?" They said they put a brick under each tire and kept building it up, and then they were big strong farmer boys, and they pulled the car out, cleaned it off, got it working. They used to be very mechanical in those days, they didn't spend their time watching TV, they had radio, of course. But the car got to running, and my father came back to the house while my sisters and myself were probably at the farm for a while. So he gets back to Los Angeles in the car. The Gomez family is there, he doesn't ask them to leave. There's a tremendous housing shortage. So he proceeds to the basement, and in the basement are judo gis, Japanese flags, pictures, albums, he was different than the other people who burned everything, he's kept everything as much as possible. And so we have his diaries from the day he began to learn how to write, they were in beautiful shape. And so, of course, when he was in the stockade, he chose to write his diary, that's his way of, just the way he'd wake up every morning and write your thoughts and observations. So he stayed underneath, and it was nice because he had his privacy, and as I said earlier, he eventually moved upstairs with the five of us, my mother's two sisters, and my two grandparents came every once in a while to visit.

So he had his judo club in the garage, and eventually moved his judo practice to the Konko church on First and Evergreen. The Konko church, still there, they're having their ninetieth anniversary this year. Reverend Tsuyuki, who is in charge, was my father's student, and so they would practice in one of the empty rooms by the church. And every time they would throw somebody, the shoes would fall off at the store that was in front of the building. There was a shoe repair shop, so the man would be kind of upset 'cause the building shakes when you throw somebody. And so that's kind of a fun story, but not fun for the shoe man. And eventually my father built a dojo on New Jersey Street, and all this is across the street from the Evergreen Cemetery where he is at rest today. My mother, my two sisters, and everybody's there, including my son, because we didn't mention my own children, I had two children and four grandchildren. So everybody's there, they're happy, and so we'd get to visit them together. So Reverend Tsuyuki always says a prayer for our family, because he's very close to us. So judo is the thread through our lives. My father, in the '50s and '60s had the opportunity to introduce girls' judo, and Fukuda-sensei came to Los Angeles, and this isn't in her life story movie, but she came to L.A., and the Nanka Yudansha-Kai, some of the members, of course, it was a controversy, and, "a girl should not be doing judo." But she was trained by Jigoro Kano and several of the masters. My father had, of course, three daughters, and so we learned judo. And I saw a judoist just last week at the San Fernando Kohaku Tournament, Osugi family, their daughters are old like me, and we still love judo. But judo kept him healthy and also fed his soul. He knew that this was good for the young people in the camp, that he always took care himself, he was always a good weight and always exercising. But that's the return.

So we come back, and I'm trying to patch together the years that, in between, because I go to school, I have an accident at Malabar Street school, and my grandparents are waiting for me at the house. The school nurse brings me back with basically a broken nose, and they can't communicate. And so my father decides to send me to Maryknoll School, which is like a mission school, not too far from where we're sitting. And it's a school that picks you up at dusk and brings you back, or dawn and dusk. They keep you all day, so that gives the parents also an opportunity to work while you're getting a good education, and the nuns were very strict, I was not the best kid in the class. They would seat us every week by achievement, I was always in the middle. And the reason why you're in the middle -- and I have to say this -- is I was not Catholic, and they favored the kids that probably were more Catholic. But nevertheless, I always respected authority, and my father was authoritarian. And when I became a teacher I was very, I don't want to use the word "obedient," but I would follow the rules. But when I became principal, after meeting all these other people and thinking about all the people who were stagnant, I said, "Oh my god, let me give it a try." I don't want to say no to new ideas, and I decided to do my own path. I really like music, art and dance, so my mother's influence is always there. And so the schools, I always had that kind of a program, because it reaches the soul of a different learner. Some kids won't go to school on their own but they'll come because they know something like that is waiting for them. And as a result, there's a lot of healing to the arts, it's very critical in our society today. So it concerns me when we put so much emphasis on other things, and we have to be humans first. My father said during the Olympics that no matter how bad things are, we have to rise up, we have to think on hope and don't look at things as they are but what they could be.

So judo is very important to us, and he sent me to this school, which is the school where we learned Japanese and Latin. And we do construction of sentences, which is really good for people who are not native born, per se. Because we're still learning the language as a generation. So I have many of those friends today, and I'm probably the only one that enjoyed my time there, but I like everything, but I don't like kids to suffer. So as a principal, I thought, we make the rules, I could break the rules. If it's good for the kids, we're gonna go a different path. And so that has been just, kids have to come first.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

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.

<Begin Segment 7>

VY: Let's see. Back to Boyle Heights, is there anything else you want to talk about, just about the neighborhood, what you remember growing up there, what that was like, the different experiences you had, what your neighbors were like, the languages you heard around you all the time, the stores?

NO: So next door was Hazel, who bought the store later. She was Japanese, and next-next door was Vera, Richard, Dickie, and Carol Hernandez, and they were Mexican American and they were Catholic. And since you're close, you go to each other's family birthday parties or weddings or events, things of that nature. But below their house were the Kanes, who were from Oklahoma, and they came to Boyle Heights. And we all got together on Halloween, it's big in our family, of course, because my parents' birthdays, and we would have barbecues. We really didn't have a lot of food or things, but we had a lot of, I guess, community spirit or integration. I mean, we didn't see color, we were just neighbors, and we could call upon each other for any kind of emergency. But we're kind of peculiar, we eat fish from the fish man, raw, and we eat gobo, which is a root, and so people had to see different kinds of foods. And so it was a great time because Carol Ann, who was younger than me, loved rice, but she would put milk and sugar in it, which I couldn't quite understand. But rice is rice, and I liked enchiladas, tacos, burritos, tamales, and my mother loved it, and my father loved it, too. And so we had potato soup from the Russian people, and it goes far, you could serve a lot of people. So food is kind of a binding way to get to know people, break bread.

But down the street was Zuckerman's, which they had clothing stores. And for special occasions, my mother would take me there, but most of my clothes were hand-sewn by my mother, because those days, the ladies would sew, and she sewed my wedding dress, even. So we would go there and meet the Jewish people, and my father, it was called Brooklyn Avenue, because there were all the stores up and down the street. But eventually, as time goes, people move. And unfortunately, when I was ready to buy a house, my mother didn't want me to come back to buy a house there. Because the Sakatas were moving, they were the cleaners, dry cleaners, and they didn't want me to move there, they wanted me to move out. But I would keep coming back, I would come back for judo, bring my children, take them to eat at the same places, go to Garfield High School reunions where I was a student. My husband is also from the area and his family lived right by East L.A. College. So for us, it's home. So probably after this interview I'll go there to pick up some things, and I think when I see some of the old cooks at the El Tepeyac, we recognize each other because my father's house is just around the corner from there, and we're still going. But now that there's a whole group of new customers, but when they see us older folks, they know we're from way back.

But Boyle Heights is experiencing gentrification, and it's good and bad. My father said, "Hold on to the property because this is close to Los Angeles and it's going to be very significant in the future." But I just had too much to do. Whenever I do something, I'm a hundred ten percent in it, and the house was sold to the Mexican family, very nice family. And so I don't own any property there anymore, but it's fun to see the houses with the little Japanese shrubs, still. And to see a rock placed in a way that when you go to Japan, you see it the same way. So there's kind of things left there that symbolize that we were there.

VY: Why do you think your mom didn't want you to move back to the neighborhood?

NO: I know, it really troubled me, it really troubled me. I think part of it was, here I am, I'm the one that got to go to private school, got to travel a little more with the drum and bugle corps, went to UCLA, which she didn't want me to do that either, by the way. She said, "It's too big, too far, too many people. Go to an East L.A. college," and I did. So I got married very young, because I wanted more than what the neighborhood could offer at the time. So my husband literally paid for my education, everything I am today. So I do want to give him a nod, because he's the guy that I've been with for fifty-five years, and it's all the life experiences we've shared through the years. And his camp story is different. His parents became sharecroppers after the war in Watsonville and Reedley, and finally came south to Los Angeles and they opened a mom and pop store with four children living in the back, and then finally bought a house on Roscommon. But that family, I have to thank them for their support because they put up... I'm like drama, stockade diary, and they didn't have that feeling towards camp like our family did. But I think the stockade was a very severe situation, and it was an important story to be told. And so when I have events with Tuna Canyon or Tule Lake, they all come, they're pretty wonderful. And because their point of view was it happened, and we are okay. So I bought a brick in honor of my husband's parents and proposed it. His sister came to see it, and I think it really meant a lot to them, because it's not all about me, it's about all of us. And I think she was... it was important for her to see the reunion. They had a lot of pictures, and she got to be with her cousin, so to speak, they were people who helped them after the war, stored their belongings in the barn, the Kiyomoto family, and I think that everyone has a different story. There's a mug at Manzanar that says, "Ten thousand people, ten thousand stories."

So although my resettlement story is not as difficult as the members of our community center where I reside now, the San Fernando Valley community center was born from the war, because people lived in a trailer camp, three hundred families, and they decided that their youth were probably falling by the wayside. There were a lot of clubs, car clubs, and probably a need for a social place, a gathering place that was safe. We were still kind of timid to go out into the world. And so anyway, the community center still stands today, we'll be having its sixtieth anniversary this year. And currently, people from the camps, the trailer camps, come and they enjoy their retirement. They play mahjong and hanafuda, and bridge, they do tai chi, they do line dancing, they love ping pong. So shin Issei, the new Issei who have no camp background, have gone from one table to maybe, I don't know, there are so many tables, ping pong tables, and they really enjoy the center. So it has evolved from being built from the farmers, they donated the first $150,000. This is blood money, they worked really hard. And so that's our main building, so today, the shin Issei come and they don't have a real connection to the camp. We have Hawaiians, we have people who are not Japanese, and most of the grandchildren are half and half. My grandchildren are half black and half Mexican, so I needed one more son so I could have one more color, but that's okay. But my daughter-in-laws are wonderful mothers, they're really raising the kids beautifully, education is still important in our family. So just to give it juxtaposition, all these ping pong tables, and then the cases for my exhibit are side by side, and the community center has been kind enough to house both of us and their storage area because I have to have a place for it, it's too big, thirty-six panels.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

NO: Anyway, we've been on the road for two years and ten locations, and the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition is literally a coalition. It's not Friends Of, it's not a club, it's not a committee, it's a political group, per se. But in the group are people who have a lot of talent. We have lawyers, we have communicators, graphic artists, we have scholars, they have engineers to design this exhibit. So my role is very minimal, I am the least important person on this committee because I don't do any of those things. But I represent the group because I probably... this is what happened. They wanted a president, or needed one because we were incorporated, became a nonprofit, you have to elect officers. And everybody's sitting on their hands in a big circle. These are very busy people. And I thought about it and I said, you know the word giri, duty? Okay, I'm busy, too, but not... this is our story. It's about the Japanese, German and Italians, this is our story. I can't shy away from it. And some people said, "Well, you're so busy with the diary," which was very difficult. I told my sister, because I didn't finish it when she passed, I said, "It will be done, I promise you that." So it's done.

So Tuna Canyon is here, Tule Lake is here, but it intersects, because I am going to do a talk. Because a lot of these people who were aliens, Japanese aliens, were moved from camp to DOJ camp, to all these places, and eventually landed in Tule Lake, and many of them went back to Japan, because they had given up on America, not many but some. So you think about it, everything is interconnected. So the project is bigger than me, it fulfills my puzzlement, I'm thinking, so what happened? How did I get from Tule Lake to L.A.? What did people do between the bombing of Pearl Harbor to February 19, 1942? So now we found Tuna Canyon, but where did they go, how long did they stay, two weeks? And then they moved to Santa Fe or these other locations, but Tuna Canyon has -- according to my doctor, he says it's great, keep my brain moving. He says, "You're on autopilot because you're always organizing," and he says, "It's good for your brain to keep busy." Because I did have a very serious car accident and I had a brain injury. And he says, "This is good," 'cause you have to think about it and you have to prepare these PowerPoints and make the exhibit and do these things, which we finished on time, because part of our reputation was to get the trust of the National Parks that we were legitimate. If you can imagine, we only started five years ago, and we're nobody. When we go to the bank, people say, "Well, Manzanar has been here for many, many years," they'll tell me that. So I said, "Okay, here's my first hundred dollars." We got started, they gave us a free account, thank you Union Bank. And we were able to get it going, so we've had two National Park grants. We have a Reissa Foundation donation, very nice one, and we have a third one coming up.

And the purpose is to interview the descendants, and a lot of these descendants know a lot, but yesterday we interviewed someone who never met his grandfather, who was a musician. But in one of the diaries we shared with him, he learned that his grandfather would sing at the farewell parties, and he always knew all the songs. And so he says, "I walk in his footsteps." And so this is what's so great about living this long, is recycling your friends that you met before and seeing them later. In a way, going outside of yourself, don't say, "Oh, I gained weight, I got old," well, that's good. We want to live a long time. I met a lady a hundred ten years old two days ago named Mamie. She's the bright star. She made us feel good, she remembered us. And I thought that's something to aspire to. I have to be careful going home from this interview because the L.A. freeways are dangerous. [Laughs]

But I'm very cognizant of the purpose of why I'm here. Because when I went to Tule Lake, there's one activity where we go to the grave site, and we have a ceremony where all the people have passed. And so we went to one cemetery, they haven't gone back for a long time, they've been doing it at another location closer to the jail. The jail's different from the stockade, though, just to be clear. But I was looking down and they were all these graves for babies that died, and I thought, "I have to speak for them, I have to do for them. They didn't get the chance I got." Because I have this scar on my neck that I got at Tule Lake, and I believe... I was a little baby and it's a very big scar, that I had probably a cyst of some kind. And you know, these doctors were racist in some cases, and so I could have not have made it. But my father was the healer, and if you broke something, he knows how to fix it, 'cause judo people, they break their fingers, their ankles, their shoulders, they pop it back in. So I'm sure they took very good care of me to bring me back. But not everybody made it. So you see these graves marked with young babies, and you think, "You are saved for a reason."

So whether it's to bring harmony to the world, to speak up on behalf of those who can't speak, I didn't have the trauma, and I used to think reading books was enough. But every interview that I experience, you see how important this moment in time, this huge disruption of normal life, but we're not alone, this is still happening today. So we have to be like the Quakers, they were not afraid to support us. And if you look at the site called 50 Objects, I just love the one with Satsuki Ina's mother's quilt, that somebody cared for us, and so we need to care for others. So I'm very honored to be part of Densho because I know you tell the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts, but we have to do that because otherwise we will leave this earth and not have done our job. I think this happened to us for a reason, Greg Robinson said, the Jewish people write a lot and we're number two in writing. So I didn't know that, and I thought, "Well, that makes sense." And we have to keep writing because a lot of things are lost. But this diary is here forever, it's online, and the Suyama Project. And so I'll be gone, and I have fulfilled my promise to my family. It took them a long time to let it go because it's very private. And one time, Yuji Ichioka wanted to take possession of it, and I said, "We can't keep it, we have to let it go," and they didn't want to let it go. But we're ready now to share with the world. And it put a good light on some people and a bad light on others, so it's a real story, it's not just all good, and it's not all bad. So my father's disappointment in the failure of the hunger strike hopefully, by this interview, that we didn't give up.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

VY: Well, thank you so much. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we end today?

NO: Do you have any questions on your list?

VY: You answered so many of my questions. I'm just wondering if there... well, we talked about Tuna Canyon, do you want to talk a little bit about the historical significance of that site and the history of it?

NO: Okay. Tuna Canyon was unknown to me, and I got a phone call to testify at the Land Use Committee. So I went to Densho and I wrote my talk. I said, I didn't want to come and just be a bobbing head, I wanted to know what I was talking about. I was a history major, so I thought, I've got to do this right, so thank you. So we went through this process, and that's already five years ago. But Tuna Canyon is important because it's the flashpoint. It's a world history event, because Pearl Harbor happens, and by nightfall in Los Angeles, people are being arrested by the FBI. In Hawaii they were arrested right away, taken to Sand Island immediately, and there were seventeen sites in Hawaii, one of which is now a national park, Honouliuli, which I visited. And the guard stopped us, but he knew who we were, because he figured we were pilgrims. And he said, "I can't let you in," and I said, "I understand," as I kept walking forward. [Laughs] It was great. It said, "Do not enter," I said, "Okay," keep going, so he has to follow us, right? But anyway, so Honouliuli... so anyway, by nightfall, Sigrid Toye, who is now a board member was at home and she heard sirens, and this is her story. But now she's free to tell the universe what happened. Her father was arrested, her mother was in the living room weeping, and she says, "Where's Daddy?" And this is on our website, we captured it, and this next part is not on their website, she did write a little biography and it says her mother had a hard time because, like all the Japanese mothers and Italian and all this, their bank accounts were frozen, she came from a very prosperous family, and people would spit on her, she wasn't used to that. And there's a lot of people, German people at San Marino and other areas, they were more established than the Japanese because they were here for World War I, even, and incarcerated for that. But she's on our board, and we have many stories that we're still seeking. One very interesting one is Fritz Caspari, he became eventually a diplomat between Germany and other countries. But Yehudi Menuhin, a noted violinist, was a friend of his family. And Yehudi wrote a telegram that he would like to come and play for Fritz and his comrades in the tank. But this came through email, and the son wrote me a letter, Hans, I believe, and he said, "I found you on the website, and my sister lives in Denver, and I have a few things that might be of interest," and he sends this telegram. Well, my son's a violin player, so we knew who this was right away. And the two families involved lived in Los Gatos, and the day that Yehudi supposedly came, there were twenty-seven men in Tuna Canyon. The Japanese were already removed to the camps, or to other Department of Justice locations. We were not able to find any record of him being there. Because usually you have ins and outs, you sign in and out, but it's an amazing story, we found his son in Germany when Sigrid went to Germany, she goes often, she interviewed him there. But the point is that we want to get the story about the Japanese Peruvians, for example, they didn't all come to Tuna Canyon, but some did, like Kiyoshi Hayashi, and so we just have just a little information on him. But there's Marianna Gatto of the Italian Museum of L.A. not too far from here, who has befriended us, and she helps us to find people, it's very difficult because in a book written by Larry DiStasi, it says that we want to take this story to the grave. But we were able to get him to speak when I was in San Francisco, and he found a new name and he shared it with me, the documents.

And in San Francisco there's a place called Sharp Park, and no one knows that that was the detention station, too. Tuna Canyon is not the most important, it's not the biggest, it's just near L.A. And so it's a great opportunity to tell the story, the beginning of the unjust incarceration, Japanese, German and Italians. So what happens next is that we believe that if we grow our exhibit -- and we've done that at ten locations from San Diego all the way to Portland, Oregon, we are educating the public because we do not have access to the land. And so we don't have a home, the San Fernando Japanese community center is our address, and we have our exhibit there, and they supported us wholeheartedly. So the goal is to have a place for people to come to pay their respects in memory of the two thousand people incarcerated there. And to be a point for the camps, because all the camps are very far and they're very distant. We're fourteen miles from City Hall here, it's manageable and it's beautiful. The oak trees never give up their... you know, our exhibit's called "Only the Oaks Remain," because they withstood the fires of last summer, last winter, the floods, they're strong. They have, according to the park rangers for Manzanar, they said they have grown from the tears of the Issei. And at this point they're seventy-seven years plus years old. And so they made shade for the prisoners there. And so Tuna Canyon is a beautiful place. It's not like Poston, which is a desert, it's not like Tule Lake, which is permafrost, it's not like Amache. I've been to many of these places. It's not like Arkansas where the mosquitoes have dinner on people. But it's the location closest to a major city that could tell the story that should never happen again. Germany has been good about telling the things that went wrong, and so it's our opportunity to do something right. And so people could go there and sit under these massive oak trees, they're gorgeous, they don't give up either. And so in our exhibit we have a photograph that I actually took myself with my phone, and so the exhibit has a canopy of trees. So you walk through the exhibit, but you look up and you see the trees. Because one thing I wanted was it would be beautiful, but it's very happy, the exhibit's about 250 pounds per a-frame, which my beloved husband drives a U-Haul and we go with it. And so we've been very fortunate to have a great exhibit company, and they make our brochures. And they also are children of the war because they're from England and they have a story. So you could see how this thing just ripples and ripples and ripples. Because we're really not alone. So what else about Tuna Canyon? So I made my plea, we really want to get as many interviews, it's a healing story because we have a play that's been written about it, done the The Grateful Crane, and it hits all the main points, the knock on the door by the FBI, and the Yehudi Menuhin violin, because he was a great believer in world peace, too. So I think we're good.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

VY: I do have a question about Boyle Heights again. I'm just wondering, when you were growing up there, or even later, as you ventured out into other neighborhoods or other parts of the city, do you have a sense of how other people perceived Boyle Heights? Do you feel like there's any kind of stigma or what the outsider perception of Boyle Heights was like?

NO: I'm going to answer kind of complexly, but help me remember your question. Being from Tule Lake, to this day, I get wrinkled noses. There's a stigma for being a daughter of a "no-no" or "no-yes," that starts with that. And I come to openings here, like they have a theater on, I guess it's called Cesar Chavez now, it's like a beginning of something great. And I support Boyle Heights, our family is here, as I said. And I think they embrace me, too, in the sense that they know the history. This city, this cemetery has Mulholland, who brought water to California, and Van Nuys where I reside now, and so in the mix are the Japanese and the Mexican families and Chinese, people who were buried where the Metro is now. And to move all these graves stopped construction. And so I know people from my high school days don't tell people they're from Boyle Heights. I know that, but I'm very proud to be from Boyle Heights. It has taken me a long time to say I'm from the valley, and I've been there in the same house since 1978, which would make it legitimate. Took me a long time to say I'm an Oda. Because my father was such a strong figure in my life, and he said, "But you are wrong." He said, "You take the family crest of the Odas now." My husband even asked me if I wanted to change my name, I said, "No. This is the way it's supposed to be," and I love what Boyle Heights is trying to save. And I am dealing with the development at Tuna Canyon, which the Sunland-Tujunga community is vehemently against. They do not like development, and so Boyle Heights has a feeling of that, too. The change will come, the change has to come, and that's part of life. My father and I would drive on the streets, and I said, "You know, Dad, there's a freeway, you know." And change does come, and it's not all bad.

But I think as long as they make sure that they save their history, there's a lot of kids today that are scholars in Chicano history, and people like that. So as far as having a stigma, even yesterday I said, "I'm from East Los," I'm very proud of that. Because it give me, it's the earth we touch, where we started, and it doesn't matter if you become a CEO of some company or some great person, you have to always remember where you started. So when I studied at UCLA, my son said, "Why would you study East Asian Studies?" I said, "You have to know where you came from first before you can do anything." He's a businessman, he's an executive with American Honda. So he went straight and I went this way, which is fine because you pick up new friends and ideas along the way. So when he was sixteen, I took him personally, I drove two boys across the United States to see our country first showing them the Amish, all these different locations, different things. And then on our fiftieth anniversary, took them to Japan so they could see our other country, so our adopted country and our other country. But they love Mexican food, they love coming back. They don't have fear, I know some people fear, but they're fearing something they don't know. And I give teachers a lot of credit because, for example, I don't have a lot of experience with black people, and there are people who really work wonders with the community. So my comfort zone is with the Latino community, so that's what I tried my best to help them rise up, but never forget the... I think they're amazing, they keep their language. But we lost a lot during the war, we lost our language. We tried to be Americans. My dad said, "A good American is a good Japanese," he's pro-Japan. So if you keep your culture, you're going to be fine. But it's in jeopardy today, everybody wants to be the same, but I enjoy being different.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

VY: Speaking of changes, I'm wondering if you have seen, what kind of changes you've seen around your mother's family's farm in Lancaster. Has that area changed over time?

NO: Oh, my goodness. The story is that there were no stoplights going from Los Angeles to Lancaster for Thanksgiving. And today it's a bustling city. We go there to the cemetery, and we need our GPS because we don't know where we're at. And we go to see the farm, and the barn is down in... it's kind of sad, but we have our memories at the Antelope Valley Rural Museum, we have pictures of the horses and the sheep and the barn in the snow, my dad making a snowman, pictures in front of the barn, everybody standing in their overalls. My dad is a foot taller than everybody in a white hat, kind of a city boy kind of look. And he fortunately was accepted by the community, but I think they wanted their kids to know their culture, so he brought it with him with the language and the sports. But the farm is a great memory, we call it the country cousin and the city cousin. My cousins don't especially have an affection for it, but I think because it was hard to live there. We went for the summer when it was fun, go to the county fair, go to church. So they live in San Jose and Santa Ana and other cities, and they're very sophisticated. I'm kind of like, I went backwards and they went forwards, that's okay. Because I think that was my best summers, to just have time to eat fresh apples and strawberries and asparagus. So that was fun.

VY: Yeah, what would you do on the farm during the summer? Did you work on the farm?

NO: Well, two things. I would sit by the... it's not an air conditioner, it's some kind of a, I don't know the word, it's some kind of a pump, there's a word for it. (Narr. note: Swamp cooler.) So the water would drip, and then it would make, like, a little river. Then I'd make a boat, and then around this were, you're traveling in your mind. It's like how books help you travel? So I'm just kind of watching versus going and recirculate it, moving it this way. And you could ride your bike and ride it, turn your wheels as fast as you could, and there was no danger because there was no cars, there's no people, and you'd go all the way to the reservoir and you'd jump in, 'cause you're hot and you could scream and come out and just have fun. Because in the city we used to go swimming at the Evergreen Plunge, and my mother wanted me to take swimming lessons but she stopped it because people would touch me. So that was the end of my swimming there, and so it's just city life, it was crowded, so she wanted me to not have any lessons there. But I prevailed, I have a swimming pool at my house. [Laughs] And I wasn't the best child, but I was their child, and they love me, and I didn't always listen. She would say, "Leave that rock," and I still have that rock at my house, I brought it home, big rock from a beach party or something. But you carve your own way in life, and like I said, you make the rules, you could break the rules if you have to.

VY: How about the terrain of that area, how has that changed over time?

NO: It's flat, it's flat. But they do have the poppy festival, and I said I never knew they had poppies, 'cause I'd only go during the summer and Thanksgiving. So when I'd go there, I thought, "Oh, this is what they used to see," but I really, really... it's like a respite, a place to go to be close to our grandparents. So they're there, and we go see them, go see the obelisk with all the names of the thirteen farmers. And the story -- and I'm going to briefly touch that -- is that in 1936, the farmers were losing some of their family members that they built this obelisk and donated money, and when the war started, it was knocked down for seventy years. And so the junior high school kids in the Avid class raised money and contacted people that were still in town and others, and made it their project. Found out what names were on there, and they'd get it carved, put down flower vessels for the Japanese, and my sister was contacted, my oldest sister was alive still, and they were having an event to, a ceremony to bless it and to appreciate it when it was rebuilt. And she, her husband was very ill, so they started off, and then she turned the car around, and she called me up and said, "I want you to go and represent the family." Of course, I knew all the farmers, 'cause my mother had kept all her friends, and so whether they moved to the city or stayed there, we knew them. I didn't know they were not relatives, I thought they were really close to us. So I saw their good work, and it really meant a lot to us. So my sister donated quite a bit of money to rebuild it, but she didn't want any credit, so her name isn't on the program. She did that a lot, she did that for the San Fernando Valley Japanese Community Center bought their refrigeration for the kitchen, those are pretty expensive, and very generous. But just like I described, I'm not really good at protesting real loud. My middle sister didn't want to ride a float, to be that outspoken. So it's time for us to break our silence, we have something to say now.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

VY: So zooming forward to your professional career, I'm wondering, you worked in the public school system for how many years?

NO: Thirty-two years.

VY: Thirty-two years. I'm wondering, during that time, if you feel like you faced any hurdles or attitudes just because you were a woman or an Asian American woman? Any particular challenges?

NO: Good question. So I really was a very happy teacher. But Kay Oda, my husband, said, "Give it a try, give it a try." And he's been my mentor my whole life, he'd wake up in the morning, tell me what the news is, give me suggestions, 'cause I'm a little hot tempered, actually. But I have really matured and improved over fifty-five years, because I have my own mind. And so anyway, I got in a program called Sex Equity, because there were not enough women in administration. And so it was intentional to develop this new corps of women. And it was pretty interesting, we would go to conferences, and there would be all these white men around us, and there I am. But I went to a leadership program at UCLA, and it was very exciting. It was early morning to late at night, and then I'd watch David Letterman and fall asleep. That was the time, and you have to remember, I'm an older student, I'm older and everything, and I got married, had two kids, then I went to college, then I became a teacher. So everywhere I am, I'm a little older than everyone else, and actually, my father's similar, too. Because in camp, he was thirty-three, so either you're young enough to go to the army, join the 442, or you're so old you can't start a new career, so he's kind of like in the middle territory, still pretty able to write and speak. So I knew what I was getting into, and most of the Japanese American girls, to this day, do not want to do this kind of work that I did. So there are some people ahead of me, she's (Shizuko) Akasaki who just wrote a book about her experience as an administrator. And she was my kids' principal. And because I was going to school, I would be late to pick them up. But I was very strict, I said, "You sit right there and you'd better be there when my car pulls up, you better be there." So one day I must have been very late, and she brought them home to our house. And the door is open, you could leave the door open those days, and just walked in the house and parked the kids inside. So we come home and there she is, the principal with my two kids. So we still see her to this day, wonderful, wonderful person. She went through a lot of criticism, because she was bright and so the district would pull her a lot for special projects, and so we'd have substitutes and we were in Toluca Lake Elementary, so there was a lot of criticism of her, but to me, you do what you're told to a point, and especially when you're working for someone, it's not your turn. I always held my principles, like when I worked for Tangee Mason, it's her day, my day will come. And when it's my turn, I expect the same respect.

So anyway, I would be in situations like my first school was Riverside Drive, it was very... and everyone made more money than I did, and I was brought in to take the place of a very beloved person, but I never knew it. I just knew it was my first assignment, I thought it was a joke, they called me on Labor Day weekend, and they said, "You have a job," and it was like walking distance from my house. Everybody was either going to downtown if you were white, or if you were black, you were coming to the valley, so I thought, "Where do I fit into this picture?" Right by my house. So I was there for six years and the very first year, so September, by Christmas, my class was picked to do the Christmas show, not knowing the whole school was in turmoil. And I'm just in my little world with my students telling them that, "We're going to have a great year this is the best class ever," so on and so forth, and we did the Nutcracker Prince with Japanese shadow puppets, and the orchestra playing "The Nutcracker" real slow, so we had to do it slow, and music, and Rat King and it was very creative. So I survived that, and I thought, well, I am going to transfer, because people didn't like people who stood out. And I still have students from that era who came on a bus from Dayton Heights, and couldn't speak English. So I used theater a lot, because you repeat your line, you repeat your lines, you get your sentence structure, repeat your line. I was taught that way at Maryknoll, too, and that's why I'm not afraid to talk in front of people. And I thought, that's a good method, so I kind of stuck out. So I said, "I'll go to a magnet school where everybody is flashy." Oh, no, my class made boats and we'd do plays, it was called "What's New," because I was new, and we'd sing and dance across the stage. And I learned that I have to stand closer to the stage, 'cause when you yell, the kids think you're mad, but I couldn't talk very loud. And I'm learning all the time, constantly learning, whether I'm in school, Maryknoll, or go to UCLA or a teacher, I'm learning all the time, oh, don't do that, do it this way.

And so I was at the magnet school, and I just got reacquainted with some of my students yesterday. And I said, "Oh, I remember you, I just loved you," he's just all grown up now. And anyway, I took administrative classes at that time, and they asked me asked me to be coordinator, then vice principal. I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't even know how to order a bus or anything, and I still don't, but I managed. [Laughs] And then I got to Haddon Avenue school, which is all Mexican kids. Everybody's a free lunch, and I was in my element. And so we brought in my friends from East Los Angeles to do a mural called "Past, Present and Future," and it shows four ethnicities, each column, and then between it shows your Mayan past, your current present with your family, love of your family, playing soccer, and the last panel is you with a graduation cap or with a tool, successful. And I loved it, I loved it so much. But I got a desire to get my own school, because all this time I'm working for somebody else, and learning how to do this job that I had studied for.

So I got to Hubbard Street school, which they picked their principal, but I actually picked them because it was near a church, and it had a park, they had Mission College, and it was very rural. It was like the book, kind of a storybook school, you read about, "Oh, I went to a school that was in the country, and we went to church, everybody knew each other." Well, it was mostly white, poor white. And the earthquake was very severe, many times up there. In fact the one time, it was so bad that the radio station said, "Principals, go check your schools." Well, all the other schools, they didn't live close to their school, I always lived close to my schools, so lucky. So I would get my flashlight and my lipstick, because I'm going to go, just in case the radio and TV's there, have to be presentable. But the challenges would be, we had celebrated Mexican independence day, and for the little Mexican kids at the school, September 16th, we would talk about what it meant, that it was more important than Cinco de Mayo, because everybody thought Cinco de Mayo was important. No, no, no, September 16th and thereabouts, 'cause the news of the independence reached the different villages at different times. So, of course, they got some flak for that, and there'd be scuffles, kids get into tumbles and all that stuff. And I come from kind of a more boy's... I see people scuffling all the time. So anyway, I'd have to talk to the parents, and they would say racist things against the minority group, and of course I'd have to stand up for them. I'm thinking, "Can't they see me?" And I thought, maybe they just see me today in my suit and my nice car, and I look untroubled. I thought, no, this troubles me, this is not okay. So what I was fighting for was children's rights, not specific group. And so I would talk to them. And maybe not change their minds, but that's the way I see it, and that's the way it's got to go. And we don't bring a switch to school to beat your kid, we don't do that. Because we've had people come to the office, we've had divorced parents, and I said, "Oh, no, we're closing right now, because we're not going to do this." So parents sometimes need help growing up, too.

So my next school, Sendak, brand new school from the ground up -- excuse me -- and they are a little rougher than my last school. So I said, okay, I want you to bring all your brothers and sisters to the school, older brother and sisters, and I'm going to ask them, I'm going to deputize them to protect the school. It has never been tagged, everywhere around there is... but it's a gentrified area, it's moving towards the school. The division of the school is a beacon, literally, for that community of what life could be. So it's a performing arts school. And it's different than most L.A. schools because most schools spend maybe four hours on reading, but we brought in a violin teacher, artist, people like that, and people wanted to name the school and give me money for it, and my sister did, too. She wanted to name it after our dad, and I said, "That's unethical. No, no, no, I can't be bought. I need money, but no." And so that was bad, but she came to the opening. The opening finally become everything that we didn't play, because we wanted a woman, we wanted an author, and we wanted local. Well, each person had something wrong with their background, they check all this stuff out. We just submit the names and we vote, there's a whole process. So it became Maruice Sendak, the author of Where the Wild Things Are, 'cause he's from New York, he's gay, he's kind of dark in his writing, and of course the kids go crazy because Where the Wild Things... and maybe that was a mistake. But the school is really a fun place to be, it's just great. You just go there and it has energy, but then cherry blossoms 'cause I was there, they have an Australian willow tree, 'cause one of our members from Tonga, so it's kind of a diverse community. But it's getting, there's encroachment, because the NoHo district, North Hollywood district, is gentrifying block by block by block. They won't see it today from here, but these people lived in garages, many of my students did come from garages, and they're very poor. And the grandparents have tattoos all over. So age was good, because I was older than everybody. At my other schools, age was bad because I was younger than the teachers, but I knew I would outlast them, because good teachers have to be what we deliver, I have to have good teachers. I can't allow people who are cruel to students or yelling. No yelling, no, no. And so this last school, it's beautiful, absolutely top notch, we had electric plugs. You can imagine teaching in L.A., I mean, the schools are so old, they didn't even have plugs for internet. So this school had everything, and it was just beautiful.

And I just recently went back for a parent education class, because one my friends is teaching English there, and love their cooking, it's really good. But the challenges you face are, I always say, every problem has a solution, every person deserves respect. So my office staff would say, "She walked in screaming and she walks out smiling." But then the next day, that lady brings you food or flowers, they go, "What do you do in there?" And I said, "Well, just talk about what happened." Because everybody wants to be right... not everyone, but people want to fight, and I'm not going there, just going to say, "It's really not okay if we allow this to continue. There's a reason why..." and I don't shout at them, it's just like we're doing now, we just kind of let it sink in a bit. But I think the most important thing is to give people hope and give them a future, so they're frustrated. They're not yelling at me, they're yelling at the world. And I'm thinking, okay, I can't be that important that they're going to give up a whole day's work. Somebody said, oh, because these kids run and walk through the neighborhood, they said, "You do that?" I go, "Yeah, that's how you meet people." And I know he'll come back, because we're the best thing that ever happened to this kid. They do come back, but they like to run a little, and I understand that, 'cause I was not perfect.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

NO: But challenges as administrator is probably working with the district, but I feel strongly that this last strike was important, that I sided with the teachers, I never went on strike myself, 'cause I was a different person there. But my tax man can't believe how much money I used to spend. And I said, "It's true, I have a receipt for every single teacher, spend their own money." Every hour you teach, you spend an hour preparing, no one really realizes that, a good teacher does. Everything you do, you preview before it happens. So I believe that there were challenges, so the challenges continue. Because when I interview some of the new teachers, they come in my office and they're in jeans, and they cross their legs, and they're almost like a yoga position, I go, "Hmm, very interesting, Gretchen. Tell me about yourself." Because I'm literally a generation from the Depression, the camps, survival, we made it. And you're coming in your shorts, okay, uh-oh, there's a problem here. So I did hold the line on that, we had to wear uniforms, I asked the kids to do that, because I thought it'd erase class. There's not people above you and people below you, everybody had something to wear. And the teachers kind of knew, parents knew that I'm the one in the suit. But the first thing I did when I retired, got rid of all those suits, 'cause I didn't need 'em anymore. But you're trying to create an environment of order and also, regardless of what's happening in the outside world, this was the last bastion of democracy, because it's going to be shaken like mine was shaken, and I thought, we have to believe in this country. My girlfriend wanted me to go to China with her when Obama was inaugurated, I said, "I can't go. I have to have the whole school in the auditorium, we're going to watch this." And the kids said, "Who's this?" and I could identify all the people on the screen, and then I realized how old I was, because they did not know anybody. And I thought, oh, they're really young. Because you get your manipulatives and you put out your little numbers and group to counting, "I'm five," so you put five, and some people put six, and I used all the little beans and all the characters. I said, no wonder I'm so smart. I better be, because I've had more time on planet Earth, so I better be gentle with these little creatures, be gentle. They need to have the childhood I had, which was a wonderful childhood.

So what happened is a lot of the people at the Japanese community center, teachers, because that's kind of the job of choice for our generation, so we put together a program called Susume no Gakko, the Sparrow School. And since we had one man, I let him be the principal, because it's old school, right? He's the principal, figurehead, and basically I run the program and put everybody in their little spaces, it was a very diverse program. But we've been replaced -- and I'm going to talk about change -- by a program called Kizuna, which is about fun. We were about culture, I mentioned I picked the book, the theme of the year, whether it's about loyalty or identity or whatever it might be. But we have to let go, we have to let the new generation take their place. Because I said, "What's your theme?" and they said, "Theme?" Okay, all right, I have to trust them, that they've seen how we work. And we had to quit because we're half day, and a lot of the parents, I would run a two-layer program, we would be educating the parents, too. But this program, the Kizuna, the parents can leave, because it ends at five, they can work. But our people have to take a week off, so we have them learning how to do origami, how to make books, how to follow up at home, how to take that story and help them write something or plant that sunflower seed. So it was multigenerational. But it was the year that I had my car accident, and I'm coming in in a wheelchair and people are all like, it was time for us to let go, but we held on as long as we possibly could, and we support the new program. They have it onsite at our place, doesn't look like the old school for sure, but the kids are happy, and that's okay. I just want them to be happy and smart. [Laughs] I always want to give them that edge. And so even a lot of things I'm doing today, I tell these kids, "Use this information for your college application. This will set you apart that you have a sense of civil rights, justice, you have a sense of history. Use this to your advantage, because other people will write, I mean, they're going to write great things, too, because they read a lot, but this becomes personal.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

VY: What would you like people to understand, kind of, in general about teachers and some of the challenges they face?

NO: I don't know. In a sentence? Well, my grandmother was a teacher, and when they came back to Japan, she had the three boys. There was a fourth son, but my grandparents got divorced, and we didn't know this for many years, she was too smart in an era when men were king. So that's another day. And so the teachers and their challenges today, my father is a judo teacher. So we come from working with people, not against people, and showing them, not telling them. I have asked many teachers, "Are you having fun?" Because I always had fun, and I'd like to do new things. And they look so tired, they're half my age, they're tired. And they burn out, they go, "I'm burned out," I'm looking at them like, "You're kind of young." I went to the Teach for America to speak and they said, they wanted to talk to me about retirement. I said, "Oh, you're like, just beginning." They wanted to know what they were going to get. And it's great, but it's getting less because money's getting tighter. So I have a health benefit, this sounds great, but it's really Medicare plus the addendum is covered. So the district isn't paying the big one, they're paying the small one, but that's still a blessing, 'cause it was three, four hundred dollars a month. But that worries me that they're asking questions, "When can I retire?" "I feel burned out," "I'm doing something else," "I left the charter school." I said, "You left a charter school? They are really loose. Come on." They're kind of lost in a way, the Japanese American people that I have met. And are teaching, they're young, they are looking for something. So this generation, they are challenged, it's not teachers are challenging, they are challenged because parents still have high expectations.

My grandson lives with me, and I didn't have him for his first eighteen years, he wants to be a teacher. I smile because I'm thinking, wow, I could help him, but they don't want too much help. But what he learned in the last two years is he can get very good grades. He got a very good job because of my connections, he's working with L.A.'s Best after school, he likes to do basketball, so he's having fun. But I wonder, and I explained to him, "These kids need you. The reason why they're in this program is because their parents are working, that's how they qualify. Because when you were a baby, your mother said, 'Why do you have free preschool?'" She has to pay Montessori prices. I said, "Because they need this help, this step up." So we can't water the program down, because what I discovered is they don't know how to hold scissors, how to hold a pen. So the teacher's job, especially with bilingual children, or monolingual, whatever country they're from, Armenia now and other countries, the job is very difficult, they have to understand their culture, their economic status, what their parents' expectations are, because they're not all equal. Sometimes they're higher than what we are offering and we have to meet that. But I want the teachers and the kids to be happy, and that bothers me that they're not joyful because we only have one life. And you go to school, and you put in all this time, and you should be treated as professionals. And I know that one complaint I get is sometimes they're not appreciated enough. So I spend a lot of time, myself, on that.

I felt I didn't have anything special to offer, I'm just one person. I'd be there every morning, and I didn't bring you flowers, I thought about it, because I grow a garden for two reasons. One is to take flowers to school so that your birthday you get a whole plate of flowers. I don't want to spend any money on it, and I had teas at my house, come for tea under a wisteria tree. And my teacher said she kept all my notes, and I thought, wow, she had a bunch of them, just have a good day, or they come in late and they're expecting you to scream, and I said, "I'm glad you made it." So I think the administrators have to think of how they look at it, and later on say, "What's bothering you, what's going on?" privately, not in front of the children to embarrass them. So my best friend's tough, and I'm soft, but we're really good together, because I tell them why I do it this way, and she'll tell me why I'm wrong. And maybe I was wrong a little bit, so I learned a little bit from her, be a little stronger. But she says, "I can't read your mind, you know." And I said, "Okay," so I have to tell people. Because you're guiding them, you're teaching the teacher, teaching the parents, so you have to think about that. But I'm sad when they're not happy. I think that they have the most important job ever, and every day, I was pretty happy.

Even the day that, oh, my god, challenge, somebody was accused of cheating on a test, that means the whole school's scores are going to be wiped out, that's my report card, oh, my god. It was my birthday. It's okay, I'm strong, I told myself, "I'm strong, we'll get through this." But we will tell the truth, because you never have to change your story if it's the truth, just bear down and get through it, and we did. And this teacher sends me all these cards every day, and I'm thinking, "She doesn't know how much turmoil she caused me, maybe I'll tell her one day." But I finally wrote back to her that I'm glad that she's retired and she's happy. But that was scary because -- excuse me -- it would have erased all of our good work. We worked pretty hard all year long, we analyzed what's missing, how can we pump up vocabulary, these kids are not getting their equations, how do we explain it so they get it. I put them in competitions like Mathnasium does today, it was called something else. And I'd walk them up the street to play the mandolins for the private school up there. The things that... I think that it's their community, and it'd be part of it, and it's how I meet people who still know how to do this. And so that's nice because what it is, is as you get older, we can't learn how to dance without being self-conscious when you're older. Like I used to dance, but my husband doesn't dance. So I just lost a lot of that. But I think you have to expose children to everything early on, and then when they get to middle school, they might join chorus, maybe not, but they're not going to get braver in middle school and our high schools, you have to expose them early. So even though they turn into teenage monsters, they do come back and redeem themselves. But it's a challenging job because you're creating the world, literally.

My grandson wasn't going to vote, because he said Hilary won already. I said, "You get in the car, we're going to vote. We're gonna vote." It's part of a discipline, my father always voted. We vote, we take the driver's test, we get a hundred, this is the expectation. But he was pretty shocked, he was pretty shocked. So I keep my ballot all the time to remind me to vote. You better vote or you're going to get what you get. But anyway, this too shall pass, and maybe our president... there's a cute Chinese comedian, he was on, and he says, "You know, Mr. Trump has done a lot for this country. Before, people sit on the couch and watch TV, now they all go on marches, the women's march the LGBTQ march, we had this march, and everybody's all up exercising, isn't that great?" So that was maybe, you have to kind of look at it from different points of view. I don't remember his whole skit, but I get a kick out of these things, 'cause I think it's funny. It's true, you know, a lot of us were just sitting down and not participating. So poor Alexander will come back from his work and I said, "Get in the car, we're going to go vote." But you've got to do that. Are you good? Are you done? More?

VY: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for doing this today. Is there anything, one more thing that you want to talk about, or is there one thing that you feel like you would like people to come away from this with? I think you've done a really good job of telling your story.

NO: I know hoping for world peace is too big, but I will think about that. Make your life a masterpiece, which is starting within. Because we have choices, and we have to... it's like my name says, to have a cooperative spirit to work together as a team, and we'll make it that way. We'll make it our goal. If you don't set goals and you don't care about anything, it's a life wasted. You really need to care about other people, especially our family. Sometimes you worry too much about other people, so I'm always evaluating how much my kids are missing, because I'm busy. (Not so) we need to care, and show we care.

VY: Well said. Thank you so much.

NO: Thank you.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.