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BY: So you alluded a little bit to this, but what did your parents think of your activism?

SM: Well, my mother was always afraid I was going to get arrested at a demonstration, or my picture was going to be in the newspaper or something, because she was always, like, don't stick your head up too high, kind of a person. My dad never said a lot, but when his health was failing and he knew he didn't have long to live, he said to me, "It didn't exactly work our way," meaning, doing everything right and nice and careful and all of that. He said, "Didn't really work our way. So go ahead and do it your way, but try not to upset your mom." [Laughs] And in my mind at the time, it was mutually exclusive, right? Like how can I be a hardcore activist and not have Mom worry? So there were a lot of things that frankly I did that Mom never knew.

BY: I think you told the story about you did a film or something and there was a big opening.

SM: Oh. After I left the Ethnic Cultural Center, I went to Channel 9, which was then still owned by the University of Washington, it was actually on the campus, studios were on the campus. And I was hired as Director of Community Involvement, which was a euphemism for "minority affairs." And what they wanted, I realized, I thought, oh, I've got this background in filmmaking. This will be great, I can produce programs and everything. Well, I was totally off base. What they wanted was for me to get communities of color to become members of Channel 9. So the first thing they had me do was be live on the air for the fundraising pitches. And I'll never forget, the development director came running to me at one of the breaks and she said, "It's working, it's working, Sharon. It's working." And she showed me all these pledge forms from people with Japanese surnames, but I didn't know a single one of them. I had never heard any of their names. And I went home that night and I cried. I thought, oh my god, they're just pimping me, really, to get people to donate when there really are no programs that relate to these communities. So I got upset and I wrote myself a training grant to become a producer/director. And the first program I did was a co-production with KING TV where Wendy Tokuda was working at that time. And we agreed that we would produce a half-hour special about Gordon Hirabayashi, who was one of the three Japanese Americans who went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight the incarceration. In his case, he was a graduate student at the UW, and he defied the curfew because JAs were supposed to be in by sundown or something like that, and he needed to stay at the library to study late into the night. And so he refused to go to the camps, and he fought. And with the help of the Quakers, he got legal representation and everything, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. So we decided to do this piece on him, we took him to the King County Jail where we sat in a cell and reminisced about what it was like and all of that. And that was the first project that I worked on, that was actually a video film. And so we decided to have a party at my house the night it was going to be on the air, and we invited friends and family and everything, and my mother refused to come. She just didn't want to face it at that time. And then the story about her going to the hearings and taking shorthand, taking down every word that was said in the hearings and transcribing it. That was late, that happened later.

BY: So something changed, what do you think happened with your mom?

SM: I think as redress and some of those things happened, we took her to the first Day of Remembrance at the Puyallup Fairgrounds, and it was touch and go whether she was going to go or not. "Oh, no, I don't want to go," "Yes, I want to go," "No, I don't want to go." And we really didn't know until the night before that she was actually going to go. And it was also a potluck lunch, and it turned out that she made rice balls out of her famous tuna gohan, which was something that they had in the camps. It was very symbolic, because they basically had army ration type food ingredients and they couldn't make Japanese rice and things like that, so it was rice and soy sauce with canned tuna fish and grated carrots in it, that was it when it was really supposed to have little clams and fish cake and all these, shiitake and all these other things in it. But they did what they could to make it, and so she made rice balls out of tuna gohan. And also, when she got there, she saw your father, Homer Yasui, from Portland at that time. And I remember in the car on the way home, she said, "Oh, Homer was there, too," and so and so, and so and so, and so and so. So I think it became acceptable and no longer shameful for her. She had carried that shame all the way through, and it was too emotional for her to see our video. But by the time the hearings happened, by the time the Day of Remembrance happened a few years later, she felt comfortable enough that I was part of this. And when she had her heart attack a few months before she passed away, she said, "Make sure you say I was in Minidoka." She wanted that in her obituary so people knew that she had been incarcerated.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.