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TI: So let's talk about your mother then. Did your grandfather that you knew, your jiichan that you talked about, did he ever talk about your mother, his daughter-in-law's family in terms of who they were?

JT: No. We know very little about our lineage. I know some of it because my grandfather used to tell these stories. I never knew if these were actual real stories, or if they were kind of like a story he was telling me to get me sleepy. But he would talk a lot to me, so I knew the family had some kind of lineage. I found out later that our family goes back, I think it was traced back to the sixteenth century, but it's all very vague to me.

TI: This is, like, through a koseki type of thing?

JT: Yeah, yeah. In fact, it was when I went to Japan as part of the JACL delegation to meet with the...

TI: Nakasone?

JT: Yeah, Nakasone and Takeshita and the ministers, I think it was Takeshita who said to me -- he was number two at the time -- and he said to me, when we sat down, "Ah, Tateishi-san, you're an Arashidani." I was shocked. And he said... you know how the Japanese really do research? I mean, they really study. So they had files on all six of us in our delegation. Mike Honda was part of the delegation, Debra Nakatomi was part of it, Mike Mitoma. So anyway, there were six of us -- oh, Beth Renge, I don't know if you know of her. But they had files on every one of us, and I think the others were like me, learned something from what they told me about by lineage. And, in fact, Takeshita said to me, "Do you want to go see the ancestral graves?" Stupid me, I'm so Americanized, "Nah, I don't have time for that stuff."

TI: Wow.

JT: I mean, I realized later, boy what at faux pax that was.

TI: Because he probably had made arrangements and everything.

JT: I'm sure he did.

TI: Things you would do there, and have people there to meet you.

JT: Yeah. But, you know, to me, we were there to tell them, to give them a message that, "Your policies are screwing things up for us," the trade war and all of that. But that's where I realized that the stories my grandfather told me were probably all his way of saying, "This is where you come from," without saying that to me. And I think what he realized is, I would remember the stories more than if he just gave me this lecture, "This is your family's history." So I had these stories in my head, or I had, as I was growing up, and that's kind of what I would fall back on. When things got kind of tough, I'd remember some of that, I'd remember my father always saying, "But don't ever forget, you're Japanese, that makes you better than them," and I've always felt that. But it's part of my defiance, too.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.