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Frank M.: Okay, that's the north end of Beacon Hill and the south end, you might say at that time, was Jefferson Park, the golf course down there. And everything going down towards the Rainier Valley on the one side and towards the industrial section on the other. So that's the Beacon Hill that I'm talking about. That's the grade school district. And kids were drawn from all over that hill. So in a sense, geographically, it was fairly (widely) distributed. But, the Japanese churches drew from all over the city also. And the Japanese community organizations, Language School for example, drew kids from West Seattle, from the north end, etc. So the geographic thing was by no means an explanation of why the Japanese communities hung together as it did, in contrast to, let's say, Beacon Hill Caucasians. So then the question is, what was it that was special about this? And somehow I think Japanese Americans, the Japanese community, had a capacity or had a sense of belonging together in a very special way and I'd have to go into considerable analysis to try to tease out what it was, but yeah, it's true. We all had a sense of belonging together in a very special way.

Now, one of the clues perhaps is to be drawn from the question of how did people get drawn into this organization. In the first place, my family got involved in the Japanese Congregational Church very early because our cousin -- my cousin, my mother's cousin were members. So our relatives were members of the church and they had drawn some other Miyazaki people in, and so we had this prefectural and kinship bond as a basis. Then there were in the church, people who came over from Bainbridge Island, or from Everett and other places and they get drawn in, and how does that happen? Well initially there's a certain sense of strangeness about these people who were coming from the outside country, countryside, getting drawn into our organization, but very soon we're functioning in an organized fashion and there's no sense of barrier any longer between this kid who comes from Bainbridge Island, or this kid who comes from Kent down in the valley; we're all functioning together and you know, enjoying each other lo and behold. Therefore we're, we, we're a team in a sense.

I think it's a little like a question of what is, what is it that draws the students together under the rubric of the Huskies, you know. If you get a team of people organized and they're playing effectively against other teams, you then have a common identity with that entity that's very difficult to explain, but nevertheless exists in a very real sense. So, I would say that it was the capacity of these Japanese Americans to come together and then function in an organized setting, effectively function, that made it possible to get the sense of belonging together.

Now in the Caucasian community where I grew up, I never got the sense of being able to organize these people into something that, you know, would naturally hang together. I became a member of the Boy Scouts in that area and we had fifteen boys drawn together under a man named (Mr.) Williams as I remember it. He was the scout master. And he and his sons were some of the big cheeses of this organization, and they were running this organization within the context of the people at Beacon Hill Congregational Church. So I joined because my friend, Roy Gustafson was a member, so we would go there, and we went on hikes and what not. But again, I never got the sense of this group functioning in an organized fashion very effectively. We did a few things together, but the hikes were more the hikes of a small group within the Boy Scout entity among a few friends rather than that the Boy Scout organization pulled this thing together. And even among friends of the kind who, with whom I'd go on hikes, there wasn't the sense of any long term identity. We'd have our individual interests and go off and do that separately, but nothing that held us together over a long term as seemed to be the case in the Japanese community.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.