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BY: Okay. So I'm just going to begin by saying, for our sake, good morning, Tom. It's February 20, 2020, I'm Bob Young, historian with Legacy Washington. We're interviewing Tom Ikeda, founding director of Densho here in Densho's Seattle office. Tom grew up in Seattle, he's a chemist and engineer by training, he worked at Microsoft as a manager of multimedia before founding Densho in 1996, if I've got that date right.

As a way of setting a little context before diving into more Densho-style questions, Tom, I'd like to ask, did you ever think that, twenty-five years or twenty-four-plus years after starting Densho, you'd be protesting outside Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and having military police yell at you, "What don't you understand? It's English!"?

TI: Wow, good question. No, I had no clue. I mean, especially when I think of the origins of Densho and where I was in my life... I mean, I had recently left Microsoft, thought of myself, back then, more as a technologist. Oh, there's this incredible technology, we can do some community service. And in those twenty-four years, this position, this work, has just transformed me. I know you're kind of like a historian -- and I now call myself a historian -- and that's because it's so much about the stories. And I think, like you, the stories change you. As you listen and hear and connect with people, you can't help but get changed, and the stories change.

And so, in particular, went to Fort Sill, it was about ten years ago when I did an interview in Kona, Hawaii, and there was this elderly man, eighty years old. He was a community leader in Kona, and he told me about his father, who, during World War II, was picked up by the FBI and went to Fort Sill. In Kona, his dad was also a community leader, had three businesses, thirteen children. The community looked up to him to help do things with the Japanese consulate and things like that. And so because of that leadership, the FBI came and said, well, this person is really well-connected, so the FBI picked him up. But the story that stuck with me -- because when you're doing these interviews you just really connect with people -- and you could see this elderly man just starting to get emotional. Because he told this horrendous story about his father, who was so stressed at Fort Sill, this military base where, oh, I can't remember the exact number, but I think it was a couple hundred primarily Japanese immigrants being held, how he just stressed out and sort of lost his mind, and starting climbing a fence yelling, "I need to go home to my family." And as he was climbing the fence, a guard came up and shot his father in the back of the head and killed him. And when this man told me this, I could see how he became this little boy again when he told this story. And it was a story that sort of, I remembered, it's kind of haunting, and then last year, when the Trump administration announced that they were going to open a child refugee camp -- these are children that are being separated from their families on the southern border -- and bringing them to Fort Sill, I, like other Japanese Americans said, "We can't let this happen." So up to that point, I would write about what was going on in the country, I would talk about the similarities between the Japanese American incarceration and what's happening today and speak about it, but that story that I heard changed me to the point when I heard about this place and what they were going to do with children, I just had to be there.

So yeah, I went to this place, protested. We were willing to be arrested if he didn't allow us to speak, and that was, again, the first time where I was clearly, intentionally willing to do civil disobedience to stand up for things. So it was a very powerful -- and you can tell I'm getting emotional now thinking about it, very emotional.

BY: That was really your first instance of civil disobedience?

TI: Yeah, of that type. I would do, in Seattle we'd do protest marches, immigration marches, but to actually say we're going to be on government land, and we're not blocking anything, we're in front of the base, but technically we were on government property, and they could remove us or arrest us. And we said, "We are going to speak out about what's happening, and we will stay there until we finish talking. And if we are arrested, we will be arrested." And so I, along with about five or six other people, had that discussion beforehand that we would do that.

BY: So this has been a journey that's really been transformative for you, hasn't it?

TI: Oh, it really has. And so your first question just sort of really got me present to that in terms of how much I've changed over the years. Or grown or evolved, I'm not sure, maybe it was all there. I think about my roots growing up in the Rainier Valley in the '60s, and there was a lot going on. I think my older brothers saw more of it because they were drafted, had to deal with the Vietnam War issue, and there was a lot of racial unrest in Seattle during that time. And I was a little bit younger, I was aware of it, but not so much in the thick of things.

BY: Okay. Thank you, Tom.

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