<Begin Segment 21>

BN: There's much too much to cover here, between all the educational public awareness things, the exhibits, the curriculum projects, the book publications, the films. But of all of these things, was there any one or two things that stood out for you or that were kind of your favorite, or your pet projects, of all of those things? What, to you, were the one or two most meaningful things?

JK: You know, I think the one that immediately comes to mind is our 2004 exhibit. And this was... because an internee, former internee, Jack Tasaka, said, "If you will do it, I will help you." And so we did it, and that, Betsy Young thought about giving a little rosebud pin to every internee that showed up. And Dick Kosaki was the interim president then. He says, "You can do the exhibit, but you got to come up with the money, the designer and everything." And we did, and because people were very willing to. And Tats went and did it bilingual, everything. And so we have that, we were expecting about 175 RSVPs, and four hundred more showed up. And some, like the Nishimura family, sixteen of them showed up. And then the next day, the son of one of the internees who was working in this building, came and told us, "You know, for the first time, last night, my father talked about his experience." And that's where I was in my learning curve. I had no idea how much hurt there was buried inside of people, and they didn't dare talk about it. And to hear that, everything was becoming much more human. And I realized that, unknowingly, we had helped to heal that person, and that this happens to anyone who was with something very traumatic, and can't get it out. That we have to understand and listen, and help them heal. And so for me, it was a huge learning. That was huge learning. Another person that, from that same period, was Ron Tsuchiya. He called as soon as he heard we were going to do that exhibit, and he said, "Do you know any of the internees who might have known my father?" And he says, "I was only five years old. My mother died, my father was interned, I don't know anything." And I said, "Oh, we'll try our best." But then again, when I hung up and I called Harry Urata, because he speaks English and I can't speak Japanese, I said, "Harry, please help me. I have to find someone that knows Ron Tsuchiya's father," and he says, "I know." And so later I found out they went to, Harry and Ron went to lunch together, and they spoke. And then Ron told me later, "Now I have something to pass on to my daughter." And I said that's when it became a human story for me. And I said, "We've got to do this." I mean, people have to know this. Doesn't matter if it's thirteen hundred or 120,000, they have to know what it does to people that are treated this way. So that was one.

BN: That was the dark cloud in paradise.

JK: Dark clouds.

BN: Now in the gallery.

JK: In the gallery.

BN: Then later with the traveling exhibit?

JK: Yes, right. So you were here then.

BN: Yeah, for the traveling part, but not for the gallery part.

JK: And people, like I said, really wanted to help because when I called Tom Klobe and I said, "Tom, I don't know who else to call. But do you know anyone who would do this exhibit cheap?" [Laughs] And he said, "Let me think about it." He called right back later and said, "I'm giving you my finest student." And he worked for cheap, and he was double cheap because his wife was a graphic designer. [Laughs]

BN: Who was that?

JK: John Ikegami. I bet he went back to Seattle, yeah. And he did twice as much work as he should have. Because the first thing he said when he sat down with us is, "Show me the script." We didn't know that you were supposed to have a script. [Laughs] And so the best we would come up with was an outline, and we filled it in. And it was a five... who, what, when, where, why, how. And so all he said was, at that point, "Show me the books about Hawaii internment." And he borrowed those, he read them, he made his own script. And then Tats followed him all around. And as soon as he made a label, Tats would make a Japanese label under it. That was the only bilingual exhibit we had here. And that must have helped those internees who couldn't have read the English.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.