Densho Digital Repository - Stanley N. Shikuma Interview II

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Stanley N. Shikuma Interview II
Narrator: Stanley N. Shikuma
Interviewer: Barbara Yasui
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 25, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-520

<Begin Segment 1>

BY: Today is October 25, 2022, and I am here doing part two of an interview with Stan Shikuma. We are located in the Densho studio in Seattle, Washington. I'm Barbara Yasui, the interviewer, and our videographer is Dana Hoshide. So, Stan, we're going to kind of pick up where we left off. And you mentioned, right at the end, that there had been -- I'm going to pick up with this -- the firebombing of the Buddhist temple in 1945. So do you want to relate what you know about that?

SS: Sure. So what my uncles told me is that after the war when people started coming back -- of course, many people had lost their homes as well as their farms and businesses -- so a lot of people were staying, and Japanese Americans were staying at the Buddhist temple and basically just camping out there. It basically became a homeless shelter. And early on one night, there was an attempted firebombing. Someone threw a bottle of gas or flammable liquid at the building, and fortunately hit a wall, bounced off, and just burned a circle in the grass. But what my uncle said was that it hit the wall about four feet away from a window and that was the window of the room where all the children were sleeping. So there were a lot of vets among the Watsonville Nisei guys, and so a bunch of them went down to the sheriff's office the next morning and told them, "We just came back from the war, we know how to defend ourselves, and if you won't defend us, we will do it ourselves." So the sheriff ended up having a cruiser around or parking one outside for the next week or so, and there weren't any more incidents like that.

BY: So that was then an isolated incident?

SS: Yeah.

BY: And do you know, did your uncle characterize that as being kind of, the kind of reception that returning Japanese Americans got, or was that sort of like just a one-off, do you feel like?

SS: I don't think it was a one-off, because Watsonville has this history of racism against people of color. In the '30s there had been basically race riots against Filipino workers mainly because there was a dance hall and some Filipinos were dancing with white women. And a riot ensued, and one guy, one Filipino got shot and killed. And there had been other incidents of racism, I never got any of the particulars. But I think that was one of the reasons why my family decided to split up Grandpa and Uncle Heek moving back to the farm in Watsonville, and Dad and Uncle Mack, the two ones with little kids, went out to Oregon.

BY: Right. And so for your dad and your uncle then, did they ever tell stories of any sort of racism or discrimination that they encountered after the war when they went back to Watsonville?

SS: No. Our two families didn't return to Watsonville 'til the mid-'50s when I was about two, so it was about 1955 when they went back.

<Begin Segment 2>

BY: Which reminds me. So was Mr. Tomisello then taking care of the farm that whole time?

SS: Yeah. So Tony Tomisello was this Italian immigrant who must have come over in the late 1800s and started an apple orchard farm. Anyway, my grandfather, one of his first jobs when he first came over as a teenager was to plant apple trees for Mr. Tomisello. So when we were driving around the country, my dad would always point out at this one corner, he said, "Your grandfather planted those apple trees." And then if we went even further out in the country, then we'd go by the Tomisello cold storage, a big warehouse with 'Tomisello' printed across the side. And he said, "Tony Tomisello's the reason we have our farm." So I don't know. I'm pretty sure Tony Tomisello didn't speak much English, and I know my grandfather didn't speak any at that time. But they must have hit it off because this was, like, thirty years later, forty years later, when it became clear that the Japanese were going to be cleared out, Tony Tomisello approached my grandfather and offered to take care of the farm.

BY: Do you think the fact that -- I'm assuming he was an Italian American -- the fact that he was of Italian ancestry made him realize or take it more to heart?

SS: Yeah. Because I think both he and my grandfather immigrated around the same time, at the very end of the 1800s, early 1900s. And I'm pretty sure he realized that if they were to treat the Italians the same way they were treating the Japanese, that he would get taken away as well from his family. So I think that's one of the reasons he had maybe more sympathy or felt better about helping out the Japanese.

BY: And he took care of the farm that whole time?

SS: He took care of the farm through the whole war. Even when my uncles got out and moved to Colorado, they got out of Poston and moved to Colorado to a place called Longmont and started farming there, Tony Tomisello put one of the tractors on a train and sent it out to them. So they don't have to buy one or go without a truck.

BY: So he really went out of his way to help the family.

SS: Yeah.

<Begin Segment 3>

BY: All right. So where we left off in the first part of this interview was talking about your involvement in Japanese American groups and organizations, and you listed off a number of them. And I want to go back and talk about each one. And if you can tell me, for each one of the groups that you mentioned, how you became involved in that group, how long you've been affiliated with that group, and what roles you've played. Okay, so I'll list, we'll go one at a time.

SS: Okay.

BY: So the first one -- and I don't know if these are in chronological order, but I'm going to just start with taiko. So Seattle Kokon Taiko, and then you've become involved with other groups as well.

SS: Yeah. So when I moved to Seattle in 1981 in the fall, I moved here in August, and in fall, September or October, what was then called Seattle Taiko Group, the first taiko group in the city, was having workshops, beginners workshops. So the guy I was staying with was a founding member of Seattle Taiko Group, Bill Blauvelt, so he invited me to come to the workshop which I did. And I really enjoyed it. I had always loved watching taiko, but I had never thought about actually being a performer or playing taiko myself. So ended up joining the group, they had auditions the following month and so I joined the group in I think it was November of '81, and I've been playing taiko ever since. The group has since renamed itself as Seattle Kokon Taiko. In the late '80s, three of us sort of left Seattle Taiko Group to form a smaller group. We were kind of encouraged, inspired by a Vancouver group called Humdrums, now called Uzume Taiko, one of the first professional taiko groups in Canada. And thought we would try to do something similar with a smaller ensemble and doing hopefully more intricate pieces or different types of things with taiko. And we found out that it was really hard. [Laughs] That you had to have a lot more expertise as musicians, and a bigger repertoire in order to make it as a small group. Because when you have a larger group, there's something about having, even if not everyone's a superb player, just having ten, fifteen people on big drums playing together, kind of like a marching band versus four trumpets. Just something impressive about the numbers and the choreography. So we merged with Seattle Taiko Group. Our small group was called Kokon Taiko Ensemble, and the original group was Seattle Taiko Group. So then in 1991, we did a joint season together, and in '92 we merged to form Seattle Kokon Taiko, and I've been part of that ever since.

BY: And then next came Kaze Daiko then?

SS: So, well, chronologically the next thing was the North American Taiko Conference occurred in 1997. And it was sponsored by the Japanese American Community Cultural Center down in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. Duane Ibata, who was the director at the time, said that this was only planned as a one-off thing. But it was really successful, so he said, "Well, if all the taiko groups promise to get together in the meantime, we'll do another one in two years." So I was really inspired by that as were a number of people from Seattle. So I started calling around to the other taiko groups in town, and I think there were six at that point, and said, "Well, we should do a regional taiko gathering. So we started planning that and invited people, groups from Oregon, mainly Portland area and British Columbia, mainly Vancouver groups. And so there were maybe a total of ten or twelve groups, and we had our first regional taiko gathering in 1998. And I became kind of a... the organizing committee in Seattle then continued to meet after that. And we hosted another one in 2000, and then we started rotating between the three cities, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. But the Seattle group continued to meet on a fairly regular basis and named ourselves Regional Taiko Groups Seattle, so RTG Seattle. So that was the second thing. I also, at about the same time, was invited to become a member of the advisory board of the North American Taiko Conference. So it was basically a committee of taiko players who would advise the JACCC on mainly content for North American Taiko Conference. They joined that in '98 or '99, probably '99, around the time of the second NATC. And then in 2000, one of the groups in Seattle was, Tsunami Taiko was one of the first children's taiko groups in North America, formed in '87, I believe. And the leader was Scott Kamimae, and folks like Tyrone and Garrett Nakawatase and Tiffany Furuta and Kelsey Furuta were among the founding members. So anyway, they had been playing for ten, fifteen years by that time, and by 2000, by twelve years, by 2000. And Scott was having a baby, and so he decided to stop teaching and leading the group. So they had also recruited... Tsunami Taiko had recently recruited a bunch of new members who had only been playing for a year or two. And the senior members of the group, who had been playing for ten or twelve years, figured that they could continue and wanted to continue as their own group and create new material and do things, but they didn't feel qualified or that they had enough energy to sustain a beginners group as well. So the parents wanted them to continue, the kids wanted to continue, so they started looking around for someone else to teach and lead the group. And that group became Kaze Daiko and I got invited to be the leader. So that was in January of 2000 when we officially formed Kaze Daiko.

BY: And then TCA?

SS: And then TCA. So somewhere around 2010, give or take a few years, the JACCC was having difficulty sustaining all their programs and they had to cut back on some of them. And one of them was the NATC, they felt like they couldn't sustain being the fiscal sponsor and providing staffing and a lot of logistical support for the NATC anymore. And so the choice was, well, either we just fold up because you no longer have a fiscal and administrative partner to run it, or we form our own organization to continue the North American Taiko Conference. So we chose the latter thing and formed the Taiko Community Alliance, or TCA. I think that was in 2013 give or take a year. And primarily our goal was to continue the North American Taiko Conference and long term goal was to become a really national or international, because we include Canada, U.S. and Canada. Center for support and development of taiko as an art form, and continued to build community among taiko groups. So I was on the original board, we had developed a board and had a three-year rotating membership, so I was on for three years.

<Begin Segment 4>

BY: So you've been involved with taiko for a very long time. So what keeps you involved and inspired? What is it about taiko that is so meaningful to you?

SS: There's a number of things. So taiko, one of the original draws is taiko is an art form, music, and it's more than just music. Like in Seattle Kokon Taiko we say that taiko is a synthesis of rhythm, movement and spirit. So the rhythm is a musical element, the patterns we play, the movement is the choreography we do, because unlike a lot of other instrumentation type arts, we actually move around a lot while we play. Between drums, around drums, and sometimes we incorporate dance into what we do. And then the spirit part is, I think, more culturally related. So we look at it from sort of two points of view. One is that the spirit is the energy that we develop as individuals and as a group that we transmit to our audiences, so we share that energy between each other and the audience and the instruments that we're playing. And so all of that energy is bouncing around. The other aspect that is, I think, even more culturally based, is the feeling that the drum is, in a sense, a sacred instrument, that it incorporates elements of earth, meaning the metal that goes into the tacks and "kan" rings. The vegetation, the wood that the drum is made out of, there's animals, the hide that it comes from, and there's the people, the person who plays it. And so one of the other views of taiko is that there's all these voices from the earth, from animals, from humans, from the trees, that are embodied in a drum, and when we hit it, we give voice to those elements. And so we're not just responsible for what we're doing, we're responsible for giving voice to all these different elements of nature and earth. And so that kind of appeals to me, that feeling that there's a connection to something bigger and in some cases more ancient that we're doing.

It's also culturally relevant because of the heritage behind taiko, where the music comes from. Drums are used all over the world, but taiko are kind of unique in their size and the size of the sticks we use, and the style of playing that we do. And it relates directly back to the style we play in particular, relates directly back to the festival and music of old Japan where people, peasants, fishermen, villagers, would gather around, like Obon is a prime example, or Oshogatsu, New Year celebration, is a prime example of where people would gather together and as a community, do things, and it would be to the beat of the drums. Of course, in the old days, the drums were always there to be a support element to what was going on either at the shrine or the temple where blessings were going on and the drum would be keeping a bass beat for the chanting or background for the service that was going on, or the festivals where there was dancing going on, the drum would be keeping the bass beat and there might be other instruments that were providing the melodic element, so people would be dancing. But people didn't go to look at drums, they went to dance or they went to pray or they went to get purified. And then even in, when it became part of the theatrical elements, kabuki, noh, bunraku, there's always taiko involved in the orchestra. But you don't go to the theater to listen to the taiko, you go to see the play. So taiko in the old days was essential for all of these things, but it also was not a central focus of attention. So that changed postwar with Daihachi Oguchi in Osuwa Daiko in Japan and Sukeroku Daiko in Tokyo, one of the first professional taiko groups in Japan in the '50s. So taiko as a modern performing art really comes in the postwar period, post-World War II period, and then it travels to the U.S. via Seiichi Tanaka who is the earliest leader in North American taiko, shortly followed by Kinnara Taiko in L.A. and San Jose Taiko.

<Begin Segment 5>

BY: So what connection, if any, does taiko have with the incarceration or the history of Japanese Americans in the U.S.?

SS: Well, because taiko is so central to a lot of cultural practices, including religious practices, we know that there were drums in the camps. They were able to bring in, or get shipped in, or maybe built themselves, I'm not sure. I just was at the Japanese American National Museum, JANM, a few weeks ago. And one of their displays there was a drum, hirado daiko was only about a foot and a half in diameter and only about eight inches deep. But it was inscribed with Buddhist sutras, and was used in ceremonies and services that the Buddhist priests were conducting inside the camps. So I think, too, as an essential part of maintaining the culture and heritage within the camps, taiko was a part of that. And we know that they did hold Obon within the camps, and usually there were drums. I'm not sure they were taiko drums, but generally there would be drums and music that was played.

BY: And so I guess what I'm getting at is the connection for how North American taiko came to be around the same time as the Civil Rights Movement and the sort of recognition of what had happened to Japanese Americans during the war, what's that connection?

SS: Okay. So the first taiko groups in North America were San Francisco Taiko Dojo, started in '68, Kinnara Taiko in L.A. in '69, San Jose Taiko in San Jose, California, in '73, those are kind of the first three, the primary groups. And all the early groups were started with, came out of Japanese American communities. And it was... towards the, it was in that period of the Civil Rights Movement, so the '60s, Black Power movements, which inspired Yellow Power movements and Chicano movements, so there were all these ethnic identity questions floating around. And for Japanese Americans, Asian Americans in general, but Japanese Americans in particular, taiko was seen as something that could help create a link to our heritage, which had been suppressed, and in any case was lost, like a lot of Japantowns were just totally wiped out by the war. But it was a link to our cultural heritage, and it also defied what was then becoming what was then known as the "model minority" myth, where Asians and Japanese Americans specifically were known as quiet, cooperative, some might say subservient or submissive. "Don't rock the boat" type people who worked hard and didn't make a lot of noise. So when we played taiko, we're up making a lot of noise, and we're jumping around on stage and we're acting kind of crazy sometimes. And in a way it really broke a lot of the stereotypes people had of Japanese, because even their picture of Japanese culture was more sedate. Ikebana, arrange flowers, tea ceremony, which is very quiet and small movements, very significant and beautiful movements, but generally small and reserved is how you would characterize it. Whereas taiko was not that way at all. Taiko was loud and really out there. So I think it was a way to, for Sansei to reclaim some of the cultural heritage that had been lost or severely damaged by the war, to express pride in that heritage and establish an identity that was in many ways at odds with what the dominant society, white society, wanted or expected of us. So in that sense, it was kind of a revolutionary undertaking.

BY: Okay, great.

<Begin Segment 6>

BY: Let's talk a little bit now about JACL. So JACL has been around for a very long time. It sounds like you became involved when you were working in their regional office. Was that your first involvement, or had you been involved with JACL before that?

SS: Yeah, that was my first official involvement. The Japanese American Citizens League formed in 1929. The chapter in Seattle actually traces its lineage back to 1921, because there were a lot of similar Nisei organizations that formed all over up and down the West Coast. And they coalesced into one national organization in 1929, which is the Japanese American Citizens League. My dad was a member of JACL, so as a little kid, I remember that occasionally there would be these JACL meetings at our house. It was all guys, and Mom would be serving coffee and dessert, and we'd be peeking out from the back until someone saw us and shooed us away. But that was my only... and then there was the JACL picnics that we would go to as a family. But that was my only real exposure to JACL until I moved to Seattle. When I arrived and the commission hearings, Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, was holding their hearings, like, the week after I arrived. So I went and I attended every day of it and took photos, mainly for Unity newspaper and got to know some of the people who were involved in redress locally, including Karen Seriguchi. So I started dropping by the JACL regional office down on Jackson Street and asking questions, and then Karen offered me a part-time position and said, "Hey, we need someone to work here like ten hours a week. You want to do that?" So I said, "Yeah, sure." And through that, and Karen's mentorship, I became much more active within JACL and the Japanese American community. But I met a bunch of people like Cherry Kinoshita, Chuck Kato, Sam Shoji, Mako Nakagawa, all these big names.

BY: So you've been involved, essentially, ever since then?

SS: Well, not really. So I was also a member of NCRR, National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, and working with them, although there weren't that many members up here, so it was mainly working with Washington Coalition on Redress through JACL. But I was actively involved in the redress movement, and then when we won and the payment checks started going out, I was no longer, I only worked at the regional office for two or three years mainly while I was still in school. I kind of dropped out. I maintained my membership, but I wasn't active, I wasn't going to meetings or participating in any committees until 2010 when the Power of Words movement was initiated by Mako Nakagawa and others.

<Begin Segment 7>

BY: Can you talk about that a minute? We'll digress a little bit here.

SS: Sure. Power of Words was the idea that was really spearheaded by Mako Nakagawa, that we needed to change the terminology. She got sick and tired of hearing the camps referred to as "relocation centers" and "assembly centers" and "evacuation," because those all are indicative of... you "evacuate" in an emergency and it's in order to help the people who are in danger, you evacuate them to a safe place. You relocate people, you assemble people... if there's a fire or an earthquake, there's an assembly center where you move people to a temporary holding spot where they can be safe from the danger and then you can move them to a relocation center where, you know, "relocation," you think of, well, like Boeing left Seattle and moved to Chicago, so they had a relocation program where they helped people buy a house and find schools when they got to their new place. But this was nothing like that. This was very punitive, very... it was a prison experience where people lost their jobs, lost their school education, they lost their homes, lost their professions, and got removed on very short notice and stuck in basically prison camps, some of them for the duration of the war. Some of them were able to get out before the war ended like my mom and dad, but they were not allowed to come back to home, Watsonville or Shelton, they had to go somewhere east of the camps. And so it was a total disruption to everyone's lives and destroyed a lot of livelihoods in the process. So to use that kind of terminology was just really offensive. So Mako said that we need to be truthful about what happened, so these were not relocation centers, they were concentration camps or incarceration centers; they were not assembly centers, they were temporary detention facilities, and we should use that kind of terminology. It wasn't an evacuation, it was a forced removal. So that was a little bit controversial. I mean, some people like Roger Daniels had started using the term "concentration camps," even in, I think Roger Daniels started using that in the late '60s or early '70s. But it was not that common, and it was very controversial. But she said we're not going to... during redress we said, "Never again," but we can't really make sure that it never happens again if we're not truthful with ourselves first and with the larger community, the general public, in describing what happened. So she pushed the Power of Words within the JACL, and it actually got a lot of resistance. It took, like, two cycles of introducing a resolution and then getting it pulled or postponed until the following year or then even after it passed, people wanted to add amendments later that would water it down, so she was fighting against that.

So there was -- in 2011, I believe -- there was a JACL national convention hosted in Bellevue by the Seattle and Lake Washington chapter of JACL. And Mako wanted to do a workshop on the Power of Words, and she knew I was involved with the Tule Lake Committee, and we'd always been pretty interested in the Power of Words or terminology, particularly around Tule Lake segregation center and the so-called "no-nos." So she said, "Well, Stan, you need to come and help me put on this workshop," so I said, "Okay." And so we did a workshop and then we formed a committee to put it together. And started meeting regularly, and then after the convention, the committee was still meeting. Because then Mako said, "Well, now that we have this thing passed, then we have to figure out how we're going to get it out to the public."

BY: So the resolution passed in Bellevue, and so now it's an official policy or whatever on the JACL?

SS: Yeah, if you go to the JACL website under the Education tab, you'll find Power of Words and you can get the handbook. Describes, "these are inaccurate, and therefore not to be used terms, and these are the preferred terms."

BY: And then that became your reentry, so to speak, in JACL, then?

SS: Yeah. Because then Mako said we need someone who can shepherd the Power of Words within the board, because she said, "Well, I'm going to be retiring from the board soon, and we need someone who knows a lot and is strong on Power of Words. So you need to step up." So I said, "Oh, okay." And then she said, "Well, I'm also on the National Educational Committee through the Pacific Northwest District. So you need to start going to the district meetings and get the governor to appoint you as the NEC rep from the Pacific Northwest District." So I said, "Oh, okay." So that got me more, kind of, enmeshed within JACL locally and regionally.

BY: And currently you're the president or the co-president, is that correct?

SS: I'm the co-president. I was president for two years, the Covid years, and I'm co-president this year with Kyle Kinoshita.

<Begin Segment 8>

BY: All right. You mentioned Tule Lake, so let's talk about your involvement with the Tule Lake Committee.

SS: Sure. Okay, so Tule Lake was the camp that that my mom's family was sent to from Shelton, Washington. They were put on a train in Olympia and they were sent directly to Tule Lake. They did not go to one of the intermediate, like Puyallup Fairground assembly center, the temporary detention centers. So I've always had an interest in Tule Lake. When I was at Berkeley, UC Berkeley at the Asian Student Union, they were doing a pilgrimage, they were organizing pilgrimages to the Tule Lake camp site. And they did one in '78 that I missed, and then they did one in '79 and '80, which I went to. And in those days, there were about, I don't know, five buses so maybe 250 people total, all from the Bay Area, almost entirely students or recent graduates. I would guess that there were maybe five Nisei, people over the age of thirty who attended. And it was also, because it was so student-oriented, mainly UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, but we did get some students from Stanford and some of the community colleges as well. It was also multicultural, so I remember we had a fairly good-sized contingent from the MECHA and Berkeley and SF State one year. That first year in '79 that I went, it was on Memorial Day, and it was the year that they dedicated the state historic marker at the site of the highway, which the Northern California district of JACL had kind of spearheaded getting that put there. So I just remember about three hundred and fifty, or three hundred people at this unveiling ceremony to dedicate that plaque, two hundred fifty of them were the students from the pilgrimage and then there were maybe thirty or forty dignitaries from the state and from JACL.

BY: But almost no survivors.

SS: Almost none. I mean, I'm sure there were some, but I know within the pilgrimage, there were no more than about, there were literally a handful, I think around five Nisei who had been in camp.

BY: So when did you become one of the organizers?

SS: Well, within the Asian Student Union I became a junior member of the organizing committee, I think, CANE, Committee Against Nihonmachi Evictions, was the primary organizer in '79. But they got a lot of support from the Asian student unions at UC Berkeley and SF State. So I got tasks like I was on the security detail where we were staying at the fairgrounds and literally camping out. We brought our sleeping bags and we rolled them out on the floor of this exhibition hall and then we'd cook our own meals. And we weren't sure about the reception from local folks. So we would have security, we had people stay up all night and patrol the perimeter of the exhibition hall area and escort people if they needed to go to the bathrooms at night, which I remember having, like, the two to four a.m. shift. And then when I moved to Seattle in '81, there wasn't a pilgrimage that year, but in '82 and '84, there were pilgrimages. And so I was asked to... I wanted to organize some people to go from Seattle, so I did that in '82 and '84. I think '82 was memorable because... oh, that was before I started working on redress with the regional office. We wanted to get a bus to take to the Tule Lake pilgrimage, so we went to Seattle JACL to ask for a thousand dollars so we could rent a bus to go down.

I remember that JACL was starting to try to do a transition in leadership from the Nisei to the Sansei. So all the officers, president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, were Sansei. But they had like a twenty-four member board, and almost everyone else were Nisei. So I remember we had to make a presentation as to why we needed a thousand dollars for this, and I could tell that the Sansei officers were not feeling like they wanted to spend a thousand dollars on this kind of thing. And I know that the treasurer in particular was kind of looking down and shaking his head, so we were not feeling good. But then one of the Nisei board members said, "Well, so who's going on this thing anyway?" So I said, "Well, you know, we have a bunch of students from UW, like five or six students from UW, there were some of these community activists from the ID, and then there's these ten Issei from Kawabe House. And when I said the word "Issei," you could see every Nisei in the room, they suddenly sat up. And I thought some of them were falling asleep, it's like someone just jolted them with electricity, all the Nisei sat up and then they said, "Well, if the Issei want to go, of course we'll fund this." You know, the Sansei officers still thought it was a bad way to spend the money, but they could see that all the Nisei were going to vote yes on this, so then it passed unanimously.

<Begin Segment 9>

BY: So over time, has the nature of the pilgrimage changed at all?

SS: Yeah, it's changed radically over the years.

BY: How so?

SS: So before redress, so when I started going in '79 and then '80, '82, '84, it was still primarily led by students or recently graduated young people, and that's mainly who attended. Although in '82 and '84, that started to change, and I think because it's related to being post-commission hearings, and early part of the real big push for redress. So more Sansei came, there were still some Issei who were alive and spry enough, genki enough that they could go on a trip that long. And so we started having more older folks attending. I even brought my mom to, I think, the '84 pilgrimage. And that created a dilemma because we realized that Nisei and certainly Issei could not be sleeping on the floor in an exhibition hall or in a tent on the grass outside. So then we started looking for places they could stay, and starting putting people up in motels. First year we tried to find places closer to Tule Lake, but the places around Tule Lake at that time, anyway, were mainly like, more for duck hunters, and so they were very one-star, two-star places at best. So then we had to take people to Klamath Falls, which was about 30 miles away. And that was a big hassle because when it was all students, we were all based at the fairgrounds in the city of Tulelake, and everyone was together the whole time. But now that we're having these older people, and some were staying in Klamath Falls, that meant you had to have buses running back and forth, which took a lot of time and a lot of logistical planning.

And then there was a big hiatus because of redress. Everyone who would be organizing it was focuses on getting the redress bill passed, so the next one after '84 was late '80s and maybe even '91, I think it was like '91 before the next one happened, and that one was organized by people who had been good students in the early '80s, but this is like ten years later. So they're all kind of like young adults, some of them had kids already, they were all out in the workforce. And the main group was NOC, Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, in San Jose, California, because there was also a fairly large grouping of Tuleans, ex-Tule Lake incarcerees in the San Jose area. So they were kind of the main driving force. So then most of the people who came were older Sansei and Nisei, a lot of Nisei started coming, because this is post-redress. I feel like the whole redress movement opened up a lot of things for the Nisei before the commission hearings and before redress was won, were really, really hesitant to talk about the camp experience and what had happened to them and their families. And having it out there where Congress is talking about it, Norm Mineta getting up on the floor and talking about what happened to him as a kid, and having that on national news, I think it opened it up and the commission hearings were, a blue ribbon commission was sitting and listening and wanting to hear what had really happened. And then the commission report detailing that this was unconstitutional, it was due to racism and a lack of political leadership, and economic greed. I think made it safer for people to express themselves, kind of like the Me Too movement. Now it's kind of like, until that first person steps forward and comes out publicly, everyone's holding back and feeling like they're the only ones, and no one wants to hear this, and I need to just suffer in silence because nobody's interested and I'm the only one who really feels this bad. And then they find out that now there's 125,000 people who feel just as bad, because they went through the same thing, and so people started talking about it more. So anyway, we started getting more like families and more Nisei coming, and then that goes through the '90s.

And then we get people like Jimi Yamaichi, who was in his early twenties at Tule Lake, through the segregation period as well and became the head of construction crew at Tule Lake, so he actually was the foreman of the crew that built the jail at Tule Lake, and repairing the barracks or the guard towers as well, I suppose, or the hospital or the high school. His crew would be the ones that would go out and do that work. So he knew, like, all the buildings, where they were and what they were used for and how they operated, where the hog farm was. So he knew all of that, and so he started coming in the '90s, and then Hiroshi Shimizu, who was, I think it was like two or three in camp time, but his father had been in the segregation center and then his family were going to renounce and they were going to be sent back. There was some problem, and so they were in New York to get on the Gripsholm, the ship that would take people back to Japan. But then at the last moment, they said, "No, you guys can't go," I forget, there was some paperwork snafu. So he didn't go, and they ended up getting sent to Crystal City because they were still being held after the war ended. And so he got involved in the late '90s, and then other folks like Satsuki Ina and Barbara Takei, got involved in the late '90s or around 2000, and that created another big change, because through the '80s and '90s, we had all been going to Tule Lake and looking at it and talking about it as one of the ten WRA camps, other than location not really that different than Minidoka or Poston or Heart Mountain. But Barbara in particular, and Satsuki and Hiroshi, and then Jimi Yamaichi eventually, started saying, "No, we got to talk about the segregation center." Because that makes Tule Lake unique, and the whole thing about "no-nos" and "loyalty/disloyalty" and renunciation, all of that takes place, comes to a head at Tule Lake in the segregation center. And in many ways, Tule Lake became kind of an early Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib of the WRA system where things happened that nobody wants to talk about. Not the government, not the people who went through it. And as bad as all the constitutional violations were at the other nine camps, they were even worse at Tule Lake when it became a segregation center. So in the 2000s we started doing things.

So like we'd have themes each year, and so one year it was the "loyalty questionnaire," another year it was renunciation. And we tried really, really hard to make it a safe place for people to talk about that experience, because there was such a severe stigmatization of the "no-nos" and people who were at Tule Lake. It really strikes me that Tule Lake became the largest of the ten WRA camps, it had almost nineteen thousand people after segregation, but before segregation, had twelve thousand people. They shipped in another twelve thousand people at segregation from all the other camps, and they moved out about six thousand people who were "yes-yes" to other camps. So if you look at it, that's twelve plus twelve, it's like twenty-four thousand people went through the camp out of a total of 120,000 that were taken away. So you figure like one in five or at least one in six Nisei would have been in Tule Lake, but I can guarantee, like in the '80s or '90s, or even the 2000s, you walk into a room full of Nisei and say, "Hey, how many of you were in Tule Lake?" You're not going to see one in five hands go up. And that's because of the stigmatization. Like people went to great lengths to hide the fact that they were at Tule Lake.

BY: Even if they were there early, maybe.

SS: Yeah. Or if they were, that they would make a big point of saying, "Oh, I was at Tule Lake before segregation, and then I was at Amache," like my grandfather. That was his case. And if you were sent there at segregation, then you would say, "Well, I was at Poston," and you wouldn't mention that, "And then I got sent to Tule Lake."

BY: Interesting. So are the pilgrimages still going on? What's happening with the Tule Lake pilgrimage?

SS: Well, Covid, like with everything else, Covid messed it up. We were supposed to have a pilgrimage in 2020, we do it every other year on the even years. So, of course, that one got cancelled, and '22 we were debating whether we should try to do one or not and we thought, "We have too many older folks, riding in a cramped bus is too risky." So we just did a virtual one in '20 and '22. And we're now discussing, like, well, should we do one in '23 or should we wait 'til '24? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we'll do another one in '24, but I'm not sure there'll be one in, we might do another virtual thing in '23.

<Begin Segment 10>

BY: Okay. All right, so let's move to Nisei Vets. So you are not a military veteran, correct?

SS: No.

BY: So how did you become involved with Nisei Vets?

SS: Well, because my taiko group practices there. Seattle Kokon Taiko has been practicing at the Nisei Vets hall since the late '80s, '88 or '89, I think. And I would have to say, we're one of the preferred renters there, the prime one being Cascade Kendo Club because it used to, before the war, it was the kendo dojo, practice place for the kendo kai. And that got shut down because of the war, and it took years after the war before it was able to reopen. So they sold it to the Nisei Vets, who wanted a clubhouse after the war because of racism. The other vets groups like the American Legion or the VFW wouldn't allow Japanese American vets to join them. So they said, "Well, we'll form our own vets organization." So they bought the clubhouse for like a dollar or a hundred dollars/some nominal thing. So now that the kendo kai is the renter that can never be expelled. So my taiko group's been practicing there for years.

And around 2000, early 2000s, the Nisei generation was really dwindling by that time, and the Sansei generation was looking at, so we need to step up and take over. And there was a debate at the time of what should we do with the clubhouse, because it was getting pretty old and needing a lot of repair. So there was a question of should we refurbish, remodel the building and keep it? Should we sell it and build somewhere new? Should we just sell it and rent space for meetings and not try to maintain our own facility? So there was a real question of what would happen. And the decision was finally made to... there's a history here, so let's keep the building, so we'll remodel it. And in order to do that and make it work, we need more people involved. So they put out a call to all the groups that rent space there, basketball teams, the kendo kai, the taiko group, saying that we need people to help us if we're gonna save the building. And if you're a renter and you want to have this in two years, you need to step up now. So I started going to the meetings and volunteering. And because I had experience editing newsletters, I said, "Well, I can help with the newsletter." Thanks to Karen Seriguchi who, her other job besides being a regional director with JACL was being an editor for one of the major publishing houses, and Ron Chew, because when I first moved here, I worked for the International Examiner and Ron Chew was the editor at the time. So those two really helped me in terms of my own writing, but also just what it means to edit other people's writing. So I volunteered, and we had a newsletter committee of five or six people: Sam Mitsui and Matsue Watanabe, and Kachi Ikeda were the senior members. And then the new ones were me and Page Tanagi, who was our graphic designs guy who does a lot of community work. So Page ended up becoming the graphics editor, and I became the copy editor. So now all the articles come to me and I edit them and then submit them to, we have someone we hire to do the layout. And then Page gets all the photos and graphics and gets them ready and submits those.

BY: So it's gone from a six-person committee to a two-person committee, it sounds like.

SS: Three.

BY: Three? Oh, okay.

SS: Three because there's the paid staff person, he's paid a nominal fee, but he does the actual layout and submits it to the printer. Page takes care of any of the graphics, editing and photo editing, and then I take care of the editing the copy of the articles. And then the committee also includes the commander, Nisei Veterans Committee Commander, and the NVC Foundation president.

BY: So what do you see as the future for the Nisei Vets?

SS: That's an ongoing question. So it will no longer be a Nisei veterans organization, but they will keep the name. There are, to me, a kind of surprising number of Japanese American veterans who are around. So there was thought maybe five years ago, eight years ago, that they would close down the Nisei Veterans Committee because it's a 501(c)4, a veterans organization, and to maintain that status, you have to have a certain percentage of your membership as vets, and transition to a 501(c)3, which is the NVC Foundation. Which is, when they first set it up, it was like, so the vets go into NVC and everyone who is not a vet, spouses, sons and daughters, friends, supporters, can join the NVC Foundation. And the thought at that time was that we'll have a transition period and eventually we'll shut down the NVC as a veterans organization and then we'll have the NVC Foundation take over. Well, so there were some Sansei vets who said, "Well, no, we still got vets, and we should maintain that veterans legacy because we have vets from Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan coming up. So now it seems like they'll be able to maintain the NVC. And another question is whether they want to, how they want to handle the NVC Foundation. Because it's a little bit cumbersome having two nonprofit organizations kind of sharing responsibility for the building and future planning and stuff. So I think that is yet to be resolved.

<Begin Segment 11>

BY: Oh my gosh, Stan, you're involved in so many things, but I want to hear about them all. [Laughs] Okay, how about Hiroshima to Hope?

SS: Okay. From Hiroshima to Hope was another thing we started under Karen Seriguchi and the JACL. In the early ('80s), there was the Nuclear Freeze movement, which was precipitated by the U.S. planning to place cruise missiles in Europe. It was during the Cold War, and it was considered to be very provocative because if you have a cruise missile based in, like, Germany, at that point West Germany, or France or Belgium. And it was nuclear-armed, you could reach Moscow in twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, versus if you had to shoot an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, ICBM, from Kansas or Wyoming, it would take thirty, forty, fifty minutes to get there. So the feeling was if you got an alert saying, "the Russians are attacking us," or, "the Soviets are attacking us." And so we have thirty or forty or minutes to decide whether that's a false alarm or it's really happening before we have to launch our own. If you put cruise missiles in Europe, then the Russians are only going to have half that amount of time. So basically it's a hair trigger on nuclear war. So then there was this big Freeze Movement. Mike Lowry, our congressperson, one of our congresspeople from Washington state who was also the first congressperson to submit a redress bill in '78, was still in Congress and involved in the Nuclear Freeze Movement. So we invited him to give a talk on the dangers of nuclear war on Hiroshima Day at Blaine Methodist church. And we weren't sure how it would go over, but I think because it was Mike and it was Hiroshima, there's a pretty big Hiroshima Kenjinkai in the Seattle area. We got, like, over three hundred people, almost all Japanese American. And we co-sponsored with Physicians for Social Responsibility. So anyway, that was the first Hiroshima Day event that I know of in Seattle. It was probably '84.

Then we continued to do it annually another year, '85 or '86, there was also the war in Central America, so we had that as kind of a theme of remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also being anti-war and including current wars like going on in El Salvador and Nicaragua with the Contras. And other people were getting involved, like Martha Brice in particular, and Mary Hanson, and they scouted out... oh, and then in one year, in '88, I think, we did it on the UW campus, because the JACL was holding their convention there. And we floated lanterns in Frosh Pond, that big pond in the middle of UW campus, which was very pretty, but it was also very difficult. Because it's actually a big drop from the edge into the water. So to get them into the water, then to fish them back out was a big deal. So Mary and Martha figured out, well, we could do it at Green Lake. So from the late '80s until today, every year, there's been a From Hiroshima to Hope event on the shores of Green Lake. My taiko group started playing at the '88 one at Frosh Pond, it was the first time we played, and I think we played every year since then. I've missed maybe four or five in that time.

BY: And then are you a member of the organizing committee of that?

SS: Yeah. So I came and went and came back. So I was helping organize it through the '80s and then I kind of dropped out other than playing taiko and helping arrange the taiko performance into the next fifteen years maybe. So around 2010 maybe, I don't remember exactly, I got back involved with the planning committee, and I'm on the board of From Hiroshima to Hope now.

BY: Okay, let's see. So it sounds like Hiroshima to Hope was sort of a coalition of different organizations, not all Japanese American. Your other activities, I think, reflect that as well.

<Begin Segment 12>

BY: So talk a little bit about APALA, and I don't remember what that stands for, so if you can...

SS: Okay. So APALA is Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. It's the API caucus within the AFL-CIO, so it's recognized by the labor, the major labor federation in the U.S., and gets some funding from them, I don't think it's a whole lot. But they have an office in D.C., and they have chapters all over the country, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, L.A., Seattle, Chicago. I think there's one in Atlanta, D.C. And they advocate for Asian Pacific Islander issues within the labor movement as well as internationally, because a lot of unions have international connections. So we have ties with unions in the Philippines and Okinawa and Japan and Cambodia. And the Seattle chapter is one of the more active chapters. My wife is a past president of the Seattle chapter of APALA, she also was on the national board of APALA for many years.

BY: So is that how you became involved?

SS: So I became, yeah, because we hold the chapter meetings, or before Covid, we held the chapter meetings at our house, and we'd have anywhere from ten to fifteen, occasionally twenty people come, but it would always be a potluck, a dinner potluck meeting. So I would mainly watch the tables and do the dishes and make sure the teapots were full, and just kind of listen in from the side.

BY: So what is your role now with that organization?

SS: I'm just a dues-paying member, but I did go on... there was a visitation exposure tour to Okinawa and Japan in 2019. And one of the founding members who works at the UCLA Labor Center, Kent Wong, has close ties with people in Okinawa and also in Tokyo in the labor movement there. So he organized this tour, so I went with my wife Tracy. And about, I think there were maybe ten of us total, ten or twelve. And so I've kind of become active in support for Okinawa in particular. There's an effort to... well, so the U.S. has many bases in Okinawa. And one of them, Futenma air base, is located in the middle of Ginowan city, it's literally... there's ocean on one side and the other three sides are the city of Ginowan. So we visited an elementary school that, there's the school building, there's the playground, and then there's the fence surrounding the airfield. And they've had incidents where planes flying overhead, things have dropped off. Like a door from one of the Ospreys broke off and landed in a playfield. So they have what looked like... like when you go to a baseball field, there's little dugouts for the teams? So they have what looks like that, but they're actually reinforced concrete, they're bunkers for safety. So if any aircraft crash or drop stuff, they can tell the kids to go run to the bunkers and they'll be safe from falling material. Anyway, so they're moving that airbase, or the plan is to move that airbase to a less populated part of the island, which is at Henoko, which is on Oura Bay. And Oura Bay is a wildlife refuge; it's got like five thousand different species. It's got almost as much biological diversity as that national monument off of Hawaii, which was, I don't know, like five times as big and had seven thousand different species. This one is one-fifth the size but it has five thousand different species, some of which are endangered. And they're doing the construction on one side of that bay. So Okinawa is against it, the governor is against it, the legislature, state legislature is against it, the people held a referendum and seventy percent voted against it. But Japan's federal government is pushing it forward as well as the U.S. So we're trying to help lobby the U.S. Congress to stop that program.

BY: And so APALA is involved in that fight then?

SS: Yeah.

<Begin Segment 13>

BY: All right, finally, let's talk about Tsuru for Solidarity. When did you get involved with that?

SS: Okay. So Tsuru for Solidarity is a relatively new organization. It officially formed in August of 2019, but it really has its start at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage in 2018. So in 2018, that spring was when two big things happened. One is the Trump administration started the Zero Tolerance Policy, where they were intentionally separating children from their families at the border and dividing them, so the children were locked up in one place and the parents were locked up in another. And they didn't keep records, so after the program was ended, they couldn't find most of the parents to reunite the families. So we were outraged by that. I think that was announced in April of 2018. And then the second thing was the Supreme Court was listening to the Muslim, looking at the Muslim ban version number three, and they had just approved it. So the Muslim ban we felt was, like, very racially discriminatory, religiously discriminatory, targeting people because of their religion or their ethnic background. And all of that was, carried these echoes from World War II and how the Japanese were looked at. Like there was no individual assessment of danger of guilt. It was like, you're Japanese, you're guilty, you have to be taken away and locked up in a concentration camp. Similar view of Muslims at that point. And the whole thing of locking up kids and separating families was reminiscent of what happened to so many Japanese American families. Or usually it's the father got taken away, no one knew where they were going or how long they would be gone, some people didn't hear from them for years. And little kids being locked up, even kids in the orphanage were taken away to Manzanar and they had an orphanage, barracks where they locked orphans up if they had any Japanese ancestry. My brother was four years old when he got sent to camp, and Uncle Heek said, "Yeah, we thought he was going to die there." Because he wasn't the healthiest kid to begin with, but sanitation was bad, the food was bad, the medical care was virtually nonexistent at Poston. So he had dysentery and we thought he would, or we didn't think he would make it. Fortunately, he did, but that whole idea, and then folks like Satsuki Ina was born in camp, Hiroshi Shimizu was two or three years old when he got taken away to camp. So at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, we're feeling like, people were just feeling outraged and saying, we say "never again," but it's happening, so we've got to do something.

So we held a demonstration outside the jail, and we made it optional. It was after the usual ceremony we do to remember all those who had been at Tule Lake. And said, "After this part is done, we're going to hold a rally in support of immigrants and against the Muslim ban and against family separation. And if anyone wants to join us, you're welcome to do that." And probably about eighty or ninety percent of the people did, and the ones who didn't were mainly the older folks who had to go use the bathroom and wanted to get back on the bus because it was kind of hot outside. But there are a number of Nisei, eighty-year-olds, who were out there chanting with us. And then a number of people, the Minidoka pilgrimage was the following weekend, and a number of people who were on the Tule Lake pilgrimage went to the Minidoka pilgrimage, and they said, "Hey, we should do the same thing." So they had a march and rally at the Minidoka pilgrimage, and I think a couple other pilgrimages that were happening later that summer said, "Yeah, we should do that, too." And then we heard about other people in, like, L.A. and Chicago and New York organizing around similar issues. So in February of 2019, there was basically, it wasn't exactly a pilgrimage, it was a pre-pilgrimage scouting party of about twenty or thirty people who were going to Crystal City to prepare for the actual pilgrimage in November. So they went there and then someone told them that, well, you know, there's a child incarceration facility at Dilley, which is like thirty miles down the road from Crystal City. So Satsuki and others said, "Well, we got to stop there, and we should bring tsuru to hang on the fence, so hopefully the kids can see it and know that someone's thinking of them." So they put out a call for ten thousand tsuru. Everyone thought, well, that's a lot. [Laughs] I hope we can make it. But we organized it, and Seattle itself alone sent, I think, eleven thousand folded cranes, and they ended up with something like twenty-five thousand total. And so tsuru became kind of the symbol of this whole movement of supporting children who had been separated from their families, supporting the families, opposing family separation, opposing child incarceration at all levels for any reason. And opposing racism like the Muslim ban. And so by August, people started communicating and they said, "Well, we should just form a new organization to do something about this."

Oh, and in June of that year, we had heard that they were going to start a new camp to hold children at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, so we sent a team out there, Japanese Americans, and then contacted local folks in the Black community and the Native American community and the Latino community. And it want really well. It was not that large. But then the people that, local folks that we had called together and said, "Well, we want to do something bigger because they're still talking about putting the incarceration facility at Fort Sill." They said, "And we want you to come back and help lead it." So of course, we said, "Yes," and we got like four hundred fifty people to go to that second one. And people were feeling like there's a need for more leadership within the Japanese American community to support immigrant rights. Because we have a story to tell that is relevant, and because of the camps experience, we also, in a way, have a moral authority to make statements about the damage and the trauma of family separation, child imprisonment, racism, ethnic stigmatizing, religious stigmatizing. And if you have the moral authority, then you also have the moral responsibility to use it, to do something. So that's how Tsuru for Solidarity got started.

BY: And what is your role in the organization?

SS: So now I am on... we don't call it a board, we call it a leadership council. So I'm on the leadership council of Tsuru for Solidarity, and I am co-chair of what we call the Direct Action/Arts Action Committee.

BY: And what does that mean?

SS: So "direct action" refers to when we do something like hold a rally at the state capitol in Sacramento to support Lam Le, a Vietnamese immigrant, came here a twelve-year old, got involved with gangs, committed a crime, went to prison, changed his life, turned around, spent thirty-three years, I think, in prison, came out at the age of fifty. But if he doesn't get a pardon, he could be deported by ICE. And so we held a rally outside the state capitol to support him. We went to El Paso because there is a, one of the two existing child detention facilities that the federal government has. One of them is at Fort Bliss in El Paso, so we went there during Covid to hold a rally with United We Dream and Detention Watch Network and the few other local groups to protest the imprisonment of children. So the Direct Action Committee is responsible for planning out those kinds of things. Arts Action is one of the things we feel we can contribute to the movement overall is a cultural element that is different and sometimes missing from other actions. So in particular, taiko, tsuru folding as well as hanging, lately we've also added jizo, the kami, the god that protects children, to our repertoire. So, because we feel that oftentimes it's as important, sometimes more important than the words we say is the feelings and the emotions that we tap into, and that art is a much better way to reach people on that level than a speech. So the arts part is always important with any Tsuru action.

The other thing we feel is that our community experienced severe trauma because of World War II incarceration and forced removal. And that we're still dealing with it, that it's intergenerational, even if, like me, even if you weren't born in the camps or lived through the camps. Because your family did, you still feel it, and it still effects your life. And we know that that's happening to especially the kids who come across the border, but the families were separated, and anyone who was incarcerated, because like the folks in Tacoma in the Northwest Detention Center, they don't know how long they'll be locked up there. They're still under the similar conditions, lousy food and poor sanitation and inadequate health care and great uncertainty, separation from their families, from their community. So you feel that healing, a healing process needs to be started and be ongoing. And so whenever we do an action, we try to have what we call a healing circle where people, it's a safe space where people could talk about how they're feeling what they're feeling. And just being able to express that is a step towards healing.

<Begin Segment 14>

BY: So we've talked a lot about your involvement with a lot of different organizations. I want to spend a few minutes talking, having you reflect on what that all means to you. So the first question is what inspires all of this activism? Why do you do that? Why do you do it?

SS: Oh, gosh. Well, I guess it goes up to, goes back to my upbringing. So I was raised in a Christian household, although I'm not religious myself, and I probably lean more towards Buddhism than Christianity. But I was raised with the idea that, to treat others as you would want them to treat you. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That everyone is created equal and every person deserves respect. And the idea that the U.S. is supposed to be a beacon of light that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence should mean something, it shouldn't just be words on paper and that at its best, the ideals are something that it's worth working towards. So, and then there's personal experiences like watching the border patrol come and take people away from my raspberry crew and trying to figure out why the government would do that. What had these people done? Watching the Vietnam War on TV, I was too young to go. Although the draft ended the year after I turned eighteen. So actually I was fortunate my draft number was high enough that I didn't have to submit to that. But if I had been one year older with the same draft number, I would have been drafted. And then also watching stuff on TV in the news about the Civil Rights Movement and Black Panthers and then reading stuff that my sister sent me, and Gidra, and learning about Asian American history in general, but the camps experience in particular. Kind of, not just piqued my interests, but also stirred something inside about, kind of outrage that this could happen in a country that espouses such different ideals. And then wondering... and therefore wondering what can be done to change that, to make "never again" a reality. And I know that one individual can't solve all the problems, and so there needs to be some focus to what you do. So I guess my focus has been the Japanese American community in particular, through JACL and Tsuru and NVC and taiko and Asian American community in general through APALA, and a lot of things we get involved in with those other organizations. Because we always try to make coalitions and work with other groups. And I guess the... it's also the economic, social, political, economic study that I did with, at Stanford, taking courses, an econ course on Marxism, taking a sociology course with St. Drake. And the Chicano lit course that Castillo taught, and the one on the Shtetls, the Eastern European Jews in the Pogroms period, kind of exposed me to a lot of other communities and struggles. And then being in the Asian Student Union at UC Berkeley, with all these questions rolling around in my head, really helped solidify the idea that organizing is important, that you need to get more people involved, educated and involved. That knowing something isn't enough, that you have to get people to actually do something.

BY: How important is your Japanese American identity to you?

SS: Japanese American identity. Well, I don't know, it's the basis of my being, I guess you would say. I mean, I've always known I was Japanese American, and I've always been proud of that. And I know some of my people in my cohorts through high school, even in my family, I know have had problems with that, partially because of the "model minority" myth, partially because of general racism against Asians. I feel fortunate that I've always felt comfortable and proud of being Japanese American.

BY: Do you feel that your parents either modeled that or instilled that in you?

SS: Well, not on a conscious level. They never said something like, "You should be proud you're Japanese American." But I think my dad modeled what it means to be a good person in terms of respecting others, treating others equally as the owner, the farmer, you know, the owner and the manager, he was in a higher position, so to speak. But when he went out in the field to talk with the workers, it was never condescending or ordering them around, and he was always respectful and treated people like equals. I think they appreciated that.

<Begin Segment 15>

BY: You talked a little bit about intergenerational trauma when you were talking about Tsuru for Solidarity. And so this idea that a kind of trauma that is experienced by one generation can be passed down to successive generations who have not even actually experienced that thing, in this case, something like incarceration, that's the idea. So how do you think it is affected, has it affected anybody that you know? Either in your family or friends, or what makes you think that there's evidence that that is a real thing?

SS: Well, I think the suppression of Japanese American culture that occurred after the war, and even the self-imposed suppression of culture, like none of myself and none of my cousins who were born after the war learned any Japanese. All my cousins who were born before the war knew enough Japanese they could converse with my grandparents, but none of us after the war could. I attribute that largely to a conscious suppression of the language by our parents because they felt, they probably felt like that's one of the reasons we got targeted is because we were speaking Japanese. So if you speak only English, you'll seem more American, and it'll be safer in a racist society if you fit in better that way. And I think a lot of what happened within the Japanese American community, there was a weird dynamic of, on the one hand, they do want you to be, learn about your heritage and cultural norms and participate in Bon or Oshogatsu. But on the other hand, they don't want you to stand out or seem different or be singled out unless it was for good grades or good behavior at school or at work. And I think that led to a lot of my contemporaries and even some of the people younger than me having questions about their identity. More than just questions, having a degree of self-hatred. Like, "If only I were white, then I could be this or I could do that." And, "It's because I'm Japanese that I can't, that that's what's holding me back." So it was this kind of self-doubt or even self-hatred that emerges, whether it's conscious or not. And that's really destructive and leads to a lot of unhappiness. It also can lead to a lot of self-destructive behavior, like a number of kids I went to high school with, Japanese American kids, got into drugs and petty crime. And some of it was, I think, because they really weren't comfortable with who they were or who the society thought they would or should be, and so they were kind of reacting to that. Or they weren't just comfortable with themselves, and so they were trying to find a different reality in different ways.

BY: So do you think that the incarceration exacerbated that for Japanese Americans as opposed to, say, other Asian Americans?

SS: Yeah.

BY: And how so?

SS: Well, because it became a crime to be Japanese in America. The fact, like what Jimi Yamaichi said was, "my crime was my face," that just the fact that you were Japanese meant that you were undesirable, that you were no good, that you were suspect. And that had an effect on people where you either react by saying, "Well, so I have to prove myself and I have to be two hundred percent American." And to show that, one way to show that is to reject anything that was Japanese. Another way to show it is to do and die on the battlefield. Another reaction is to say, "To hell with this. If you're not going to treat me as an equal, then I'm not going to stay." And so some people renunciated, renounced their citizenship, because they felt the country had renounced them. And the varied responses led to real distrust and animosity within the community, which in my view is caused by the government's actions, but plays out in individual lives where people blame each other or say that you made the wrong decision and that's why your life is miserable, or that's why your family lost everything, rather than blame the government. At Tule Lake pilgrimage we'd do these things called intergenerational discussion groups where it's like a healing circle. It's a safe space where you can talk about specifically the camp experience and what it meant to you and your family.

So I was paired with, I was facilitating one year, and I was paired with this Nisei guy who was a farmer from the Central Valley in California. And he was, generally he was very jovial, joking around and saying, "Oh, not that bad." "There were some good things that came out of it, I met my wife," da-da-da. And basically saying that it wasn't such a bad experience that we survived it and so what? One of the younger people -- but he also was a farmer, and then he said something that kind of disparaging of Mexican farmworkers. And so one of the young people kind of called him out on it and said that, "I think that's unfair and maybe even a little racist." And so then he got really angry and said that they want to, the farmworkers union wants to take everything and they don't care. And so then his final eruption was, "And they're not going to take our farms again." And so in the moment, I was just trying to calm things down, because he was getting really heated. But afterwards, what I realized was that he was still having trauma from his family losing their farm during the war, and now he's blaming the Mexican farmworkers or the UFW for doing the same thing. But he's not blaming the government who was the one who actually took his farm away. So there's all this displaced anger that is pent up. And when you have that kind of rage inside of you that doesn't have any place to go, sometimes it comes out in odd places, like in a group that's supposed to be a healing group, and with the wrong targets, the Mexican farm laborers rather than the U.S. government. So I think... and that can happen within families. A lot of people, we don't like to talk about it, but a lot of Nisei, men in particular, ended up drinking a lot after the war. I believe there was an increase in suicides after the war. And a lot of that is related to the camps experience.

<Begin Segment 16>

BY: All right. You've alluded maybe a couple times to the "model minority" myth. I'd like to know what you think of that, or what are your thoughts on the "model minority" myth?

SS: Oh, yeah, the "model minority" myth is a way for white supremacists to divide and conquer. So the "model minority" myth is based on the idea that through hard work and diligence, anybody can make it in the United States, including people of color. And the fact that Japanese are, Americans are doing well overall economically, educationally, occupationally, they will say is proof. And it's because they worked hard and they did well in school and they didn't cause trouble, and therefore they are a "model minority." They're not white, but they succeeded because they followed the rules and they didn't rock the boat. And it's used particularly, sometimes directly, but often indirectly, to criticize other minorities: Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos. The unspoken part, or sometimes outward spoken part, even, is that if you were more like them, the "model minority," then you too could succeed. But it totally ignores the history of racism within the U.S. and the structural barriers that the racism has created, number one.

Number two is that quote/unquote "model minority" status is easily changed, which we've seen in the last two years. Whereas Asian Americans in general were considered the "model minority," but when Trump started talking about the "China Virus," "Kung Flu" stuff, and China was seen as a, more of a competitor and actually enemy nation, then we see how quickly it can turn to people being attacked on the streets and really racist things being said about people. And the other thing we know is that white nationalists and racists do not make distinctions between different Asians. If they're going to attack an Asian, they don't ask you if you're Chinese or Japanese or Korean or Thai, they just hit you or yell out an obscenity at you. So that's why you get stuff like Vincent Chin, Chinese American. These laid-off autoworkers were angry because the auto industry was going down the tubes. They don't blame the owners of the industry who made bad decisions and decided to move jobs overseas or made bad decisions, and so their company was going down, they blame Japanese auto manufacturers and therefore they blame what they see as Japanese people in general. And they see this guy that is Asian, so even though he's not Japanese, he's Chinese American, they hit him with a baseball bat and kill him.

BY: So why do you think that some Asian Americans, Japanese Americans, buy into the "model minority" myth?

SS: Oh. Because if you... because of the perks you get from it. If you buy into it and you are one of the people who have a better paying job or higher education or can live in a nicer house, then you can say that I made because, you can agree with the "model minority" myth. "I made it here because I worked harder, because I'm smarter, because I'm more diligent, because I follow the rules and I'm being rewarded for that," and justly being rewarded for that. And the unspoken thing is that other people could do the same thing if they would only work harder and follow the rules, et cetera. I think it's a historical look at things, because if you look at, like in Seattle, the redlining, the reason the International District is where it is, the reason that all Blacks were concentrated in the Central District, and the reason that most Japanese lived somewhere between the ID and the Central District was because of redlining and racial covenants. And the fact that we're not there by and large anymore, but all our institutions are, the Buddhist temple, the judo dojo, the language school, JCCW, Nisei Vets hall, is testament to the racism that created the J-towns. I think the fact that some people have escaped that kind of overt racism and prejudice, is no guarantee that they won't experience it again. And to ignore that, I think, is at everyone's peril. And it also does not help to achieve a better world, a world of greater equality and justice. Because basically you're agreeing that, yeah, there's haves and have-nots, and I'm one of the haves right now, so I'm okay with the situation as it is, the status quo suits me fine. And I think that's very short-sighted and frankly irresponsible.

BY: All right. Are there any final thoughts that you would like to share?

SS: Hmm.

BY: Is there something that comes to mind that I didn't ask you about or that, "Oh, I should have said that"?

SS: Well, so I think that to create a better world, a more just world where everyone can be treated as equals, we need to have some real systemic changes in the way we run our economy in the way we structure things. So certainly that includes things like our immigration policy and our penal system, so-called legal system. Because basically we need to transform the way we deal with immigration, with crime, with jobs and how we appropriate or divide up the social capital that's created. We're the most productive country in the world, in the history of the world, yet we have a huge number of people who live in poverty, who don't have adequate health care, and those are all social policy decisions. We can do it differently, but we choose not to. And until we transform the way we structure that, we're not going to have a just or equal, or peaceful society.

BY: And yet you seem to be the embodiment of, yes, there are these structural problems and yet individuals can do something about that. What do you think of that?

SS: Well, change, particularly social change, doesn't happen in a vacuum. Someone has to have a vision and a plan and an idea of what could be better, and then work to make it so. You can't just say, "I wish things would be better," because wishing isn't going to create change. So wherever you are, whatever you're doing, there are, have got to be some steps you can take. It can be small steps or it can be big steps, but if you can get enough people to move with you, then you can move mountains, is my belief.

BY: Great, thanks, Stan, for your time.

SS: Thank you.