Densho Digital Repository - Sharon Maeda Interview

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Sharon Maeda Interview
Narrator: Sharon Maeda
Interviewer: Barbara Yasui
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 7, 2023
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-529

<Begin Segment 1>

BY: Today is March 7, 2023. I am Barbara Yasui, and I am interviewing Sharon Maeda in the Densho studio located in Seattle, Washington, and our videographer is Dana Hoshide. So I'm going to start with just some background information. What is your full name?

SM: Sharon Rae Maeda.

BY: Okay. And when and where were you born?

SM: In 1945 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

BY: And what generation are you?

SM: Sansei.

BY: Okay. So can you tell me briefly about your grandparents? Where in Japan they came from, when they came, approximately or exactly when they came to the U.S., and what they did and where they lived. So let's start with your, let's see, it would be your maternal grandfather, Yasuta Kageyama?

SM: Grandpa Kage -- we always just said "Kage," we didn't say Kageyama -- came from Yokohama and we lost track many decades ago of that part of the family. He came to work on the railroads like many other Issei, as a young man, and ended up settling in Oregon.

BY: And how about your maternal grandmother, Ichino Bichu?

SM: She came from the Osaka-Kobe area. And we kept in touch and we still are in touch with that part of the family. They mostly live in Osaka now.

BY: And how did she end up in Hood River?

SM: Well, this is an interesting story. She was the oldest of three daughters, and so to give their oldest daughter a chance for a better life, they had her in an arranged marriage with Grandpa. But the irony is her two younger sisters, after World War II, ended up marrying medical doctors and they ended up being very wealthy and led quite a charmed life, and Grandma toiled on the farm in Oregon until she was in her early nineties.

BY: How about your paternal grandfather, Rikichi Maeda?

SM: He came from Yanai, which is way, way, way to the edge of the island. And he was, I don't know exactly where he was raised, that's where his family's from. But he was orphaned at the age of eight, and he was raised by the Methodist missionaries. And he came over doing the same work on the railroads, but he ended up in Portland.

BY: And what about your paternal grandmother Yoshiko Bitow?

SM: She was from Hiroshima, and she was the daughter and granddaughter of generals who ran Hiroshima castle for the emperor. And so she ended up being married off to someone who spoke English and was a Christian because her father could see that the Meiji era was ending, and he thought this was a way to maintain some level of, I guess, status or power.

BY: Interesting.

<Begin Segment 2>

BY: Okay, let's talk a little bit about your parents. So what was your father's name?

SM: Milton Maeda.

BY: And when and where was he born?

SM: He was born in Portland, gosh, I can't remember the exact date, 1914 or something like that, maybe. [Narr. note: June 19, 1914.]

BY: And where did he grow up?

SM: In Portland, yes.

BY: In Portland, okay. And can you tell me a little bit about his educational background and his occupation?

SM: Well, he went to high school in Portland, and then he went to Oregon State College and graduated in electrical engineering. And now there's a stereotype about Asian engineers, but he was like the first in Oregon at that time. 1939 was a really early time for electrical engineers.

BY: And was he able to get a job as an electrical engineer out of college?

SM: No. He ended up working at the grocery store in his neighborhood that he had worked at when he was still in high school, and it took a while before he ever got an engineering job.

BY: And when was that? Do you know when he got his first engineering job?

SM: Well, he eventually started in the early '50s, I believe, he started working for the Bonneville Power Administration, and it was a quasi-engineering job. And then in '55, when he was offered a job at Boeing and we moved to Seattle, that's when he really became a design engineer.

BY: Okay. And where was he when Pearl Harbor happened?

SM: In Portland.

BY: Okay. And so was he incarcerated?

SM: Yes.

BY: And where?

SM: Minidoka. The Portland livestock building is the assembly center and then to Minidoka, Idaho.

BY: Okay. And did he stay in Minidoka for the whole war or did he leave early? And if so, where did he go?

SM: No. They had a program where if an employer inland, away from the West Coast, would verify that they needed you for a job, you could get out of camp. So I don't remember exactly how long they were in camp, but he wrote to his college classmates, and one of them had a father who owned a little company in Milwaukee, and sent for him.

BY: And that's where you were born?

SM: And that's where I was born, yes.

BY: Okay. So after the war, then he lived in Milwaukee, you all lived in Milwaukee for a while and then what happened after that?

SM: Well, I was still a baby, but when it was safe to return to the West Coast, my parents and I moved to Portland.

BY: Back to Portland?

SM: Uh-huh.

<Begin Segment 3>

BY: Okay. Let's talk about your mother a little bit. What was her name?

SM: Molly Mariko Kageyama.

BY: And when and where was she born?

SM: She was born, I believe, 1919, in Hood River. [Narr. note: November 23, 1919]

BY: And did she grow up in Hood River, then?

SM: Yes, she grew up there and she went to Oregon State College and she was a few years behind Dad, and they were engaged when the executive order happened. And so they got married at the Portland Livestock building in a horse stall so they could go to the same camp.

BY: Okay. So they met in college, is that right?

SM: I think they might have even known each other before that, because his best friends were the Yasui brothers, and they bought, the three of them bought a car together. And so Dad went along with the Yasui brothers to Hood River and met Mom as the little girl hanging around. [Laughs]

BY: And then so where was your mom when Pearl Harbor happened?

SM: She was on the Oregon State campus. She had just graduated in June, and she was offered a full-time job working in the administration of the college. So she was there as a full-time professional employee.

BY: And so what happened to her then? So Pearl Harbor happened, she was at the college, and then...

SM: Well, there was great pressure from various political forces to rid the campus of any "J-A-P-S." And so her boss physically moved her back home, and drove her back home to Hood River for her safety.

BY: Okay, so she's in Hood River, she's engaged to your father who was in Portland?

SM: Yes.

BY: So what happened then? How did she ended up in the same place that he did?

SM: Well, that's when they decided to get married, because the Hood River people were being sent to Tule Lake, California, and the Portland people were being sent to Minidoka, Idaho, and so they decided to get married in the assembly center. So she had to be driven to Portland, and Min Yasui, who had not turned himself in yet but refused to go to the camps, drove Mom and he was Dad's proxy to get the marriage license at the Multnomah County courthouse. He was a lawyer so he knew how to do all this stuff. And then he took Mom, with her one suitcase, and the marriage license application to the gates of the Portland livestock building.

BY: And so they were married there, and then since they were married, then they could go to Minidoka together.

SM: Right. But then they became part of Grandpa and Grandma's family. So in the camp, it was Grandpa and Grandma Maeda, Mom and Dad, and Aunt Frances, who was Dad's older, unmarried sister. So there were five of them as a family unit.

BY: That's a great story.

<Begin Segment 4>

BY: Okay, so just talking about your parents a little bit more, what they were like, what values did your parents instill in you, would you say, as a kid, and then even later?

SM: Well, there were several things. One was, you know, always do your best, and then there was this whole Nisei thing about don't make waves, don't bring undue attention, negative attention to yourself, kind of thing. But I think the best part was just the joy and love as a family. We had a big extended family, and lots of relatives and lots of friends that we called Auntie and Uncle and cousins, we weren't really related to them, but there was just like a lot of close friends. And it was a very positive environment to grow up in, despite the fact that we didn't have much money and we lived allegedly on the wrong side of the tracks, et cetera. We didn't know we were poor. I mean, the fact that we got to pick one dress out of the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog for school the next school year, we thought that was cool. We didn't realize that only having one new dress was, like, not how wealthier kids lived. We always felt like we were, that we had plenty and that we were loved.

BY: Did your parents ever talk about the incarceration to you, and if so, what do they say?

SM: Almost nothing. As we were growing up, when we would go on family vacations, road trips to California or something like that. We would run into people and they'd say, "Oh, we knew them in camp, we knew them in camp." They'd run into people in various places. When we moved to Seattle, there was a lot of, "Oh, we knew them in camp." And it always seemed like it was positive, but in my mind, I was thinking, "Wow, they must have had a really big Girl Scout/Boy Scout camp," because that was my only frame of reference. And it wasn't until I was in high school that I learned about the incarceration. And then Dad was supportive of me learning more. But Mom wouldn't talk about it at all.

BY: So tell me a little bit about how you found out about it and how your father supported you in learning more.

SM: You know, I don't actually remember how I found out, but I know that for U.S. history class in high school, we had to write a paper that we worked on all year long, final paper, and mine was on the camps. And at that time, there was almost no literature available or anything, so I was doing, like, original research, going to Ike Ikeda's basement and combing through old faded newspaper clippings and things like that, and finding out from various people in the community what it was about. I just don't remember how it first came up, but I do remember very clearly when I gave my oral report, other kids in the class said that I had made it up and that it wasn't true. And my teacher had to tell them --thank goodness he knew the issue -- he had to tell them that it was true and it was a horrible scourge on democracy in this country, blah-blah-blah. But that part I really remember. I don't remember how I first found out.

BY: And who was Ike Ikeda?

SM: Oh, he was an amazing community leader. For decades, he was the director of Atlantic Street Center, a social service agency in the central area. And he was somebody that my parents knew from camp again, and he was like, maybe younger than my parents. But he had somehow amassed these boxes full of news clippings that he had in his basement, and on Saturdays, Dad would take me over there to his house and I would sit on the concrete floor in the basement going through and reading these clippings while Dad and Ike were carrying on upstairs. I believe professionally he was a social worker.

<Begin Segment 5>

BY: Okay, let's talk a little bit about your childhood. First of all, do you have any siblings?

SM: Yes. My sister Diane, who's eighteen months younger.

BY: Okay. And where did you grow up?

SM: Well, the earlier -- well, I was born in Wisconsin but I was still a baby when we moved back to Portland. And we lived there until 1955, I believe, when we moved to Seattle.

BY: So you were about ten when you left?

SM: I was in the fifth grade, fourth grade.

BY: And so what was your neighborhood in Portland like?

SM: It was very much an inner city neighborhood. It was, thinking back, it probably was the only neighborhood that my parents could buy a house in. It was about fifty percent Black and fifty percent low income white.

BY: And so then in 1955, you moved to Seattle, and what neighborhood did you move to and what was that neighborhood like?

SM: Oh gosh, that was culture shock. My father came up a few months ahead of us to start working, and we stayed in Portland to finish out the school year. And he was told by his colleagues that the Highline School District was the best college prep district among the public school districts in the area at that time, and so he was determined that we would buy a house in the Highline District. And so we ended up, I believe, being the first or maybe the second family of color to move into Normandy Park.

BY: So it was a pretty white neighborhood?

SM: It was a middle class neighborhood that had restrictive covenants.

BY: So how did he get around that, do you know?

SM: Well, the real estate agent that showed Mom and Dad the house, first of all, all the real estate agents wanted to show us houses on Beacon Hill, because that's where they were channeling all the Japanese and Chinese at that time, sort of a variation of redlining. But he insisted on looking out there, and the real estate agent was new and didn't realize that he wasn't supposed to sell us a house in Normandy Park. So when my parents went to sign the papers to get the house, the owner of the real estate company took the agent aside and said, "We can't sell to them." So the agent felt really bad, and the owner of the house was furious because he had already purchased a new house in another city, his family had already moved, he needed to get -- I think it was Minneapolis where they moved -- anyway, he needed to get there and sell the house here. Turned out he was an airlines pilot that flew the Tokyo route and had a great affinity for Japanese culture and everything. And so he was furious and he got Dad's phone number and called him and said, "I'll sell to you directly." And so it was an owner sale, and he went around to the neighbors and told them that we were coming and they better be nice to us. [Laughs]

BY: That's great.

SM: So we didn't have any trouble with the neighbors.

BY: Yeah, because they were nice?

SM: Yeah, they were all nice. I mean, people brought pies and cookies and things like that to welcome us.

BY: That's a great story.

<Begin Segment 6>

BY: So I'm assuming that the schools that you attended, first in Portland and then in Seattle, reflected the neighborhoods. In other words, were the schools that you attended in Portland, more diverse than the schools you attended in school? What was the diversity of your schools like?

SM: Well, the school, the elementary school in Portland was black and white, but I did not understand until I was an education major at the University of Washington about tracking. So I was always first grade, second grade, third grade, like that. I was always in a class with all-white kids except for two Black kids, and it was the same two Black kids. And what I later learned with this tracking is, because we could read before we got to school, we got put in with the white kids in the, quote, "smart class," and all the other Black kids on our block in and in the neighborhood, they were in another class. And we never ended up in the same class, and we kept thinking, "Oh, maybe next year we'll be in the same class," but no, they had us tracked.

BY: And how about in Seattle? What were the schools in Seattle like in terms of ethnic diversity?

SM: Oh, there was no diversity.

BY: No, so it was predominately white?

SM: Oh, exclusively. I mean, Highline High School at that time, there were five students of color in the whole school, including the foreign exchange student. [Laughs] But it was not just culture shock, it was also an academic shock because in Portland, we were way behind in English and in math compared to where they were in the Highline District. So we had to play catch up. So we came from being in the "smart class" to struggling to keep up. Because we didn't know, like for me, it was, I didn't know how to conjugate sentences, because we hadn't learned that yet.

BY: So who were your friends when you moved to Seattle? Were they mostly white kids then?

SM: Well, yeah, I mean, that's who was there, that's who was there. And we had, on Sundays, we came into town to go to Blaine United Methodist Church, which is predominately Japanese American. And so we had friends from there, but then they were totally separate from our friends in high school. Our friends in high school were all white.

BY: And did you have any Asian American role models as a child?

SM: Oh, yeah. I mean, there were a lot of people that we admired. Family members included my cousin who was like three years older who was student body president, homecoming queen and everything of her school in Oregon. Min Yasui, who was a lawyer who was working in civil rights, my aunt Frances who worked most of her career for the World Council of Churches and traveled all over the world. And then there were people in the community that we admired from time to time. And as I became more political, politically engaged, people like Congresswoman Patsy Mink and people like that were role models.

BY: And when you were in high school, what kinds of extracurricular activities were you involved in?

SM: Well, I'm smiling because I kind of always majored in activities and minored in academics. [Laughs] I was very active in high school. I was Girls Club president and that was the only office I think I ran for, but I was real active in the clubs. And I'm terrible at other languages, but I love the idea of learning these other cultures. So I was in the Italian club, the German club, the French club, the Spanish club. Because we got to go, one of the things that happened in those after school clubs is we got to go to a restaurant and order food and all of that. So I was involved in lots of stuff.

<Begin Segment 7>

BY: So I want to talk a little bit about how you, how your identity as a Japanese American came to be. So do you remember when you first became aware that you were Japanese American and about what age you were?

SM: Well, I have to tell you this kindergarten story. First day of kindergarten, some of the white kids did the "ching-chong-Chinaman" and were chasing me around the yard during recess, the schoolyard during recess. And I was defiant, and I said, "I'm no Chinaman, I'm a Negro." And my Black friends from the block all started laughing, and I didn't understand the difference between Japanese dolls and Japanese food and Japanese language, and the fact that my friends on the block were Black and so they were "Negroes." And so I didn't understand the difference of all of that. And my parents later told me that they stayed up half the night trying to figure out how to explain ethnicity to me without being demeaning of Black people and everything. So anyway, I don't know when I finally learned what being JA was, but I remember running for office in high school and a teacher telling me that I had to take my lanterns down. Because I got these paper lanterns, and then I wrote my name and pasted it to the lanterns because I thought, hey, these signs will really stand out. And I got in trouble for that. And other kind of little passive aggressive racist things happened to me from the teachers in high school. And so then I became more defiant and more defiant, and by the time I was in college I was kind of really defiant about who I was.

BY: And strongly identified as Japanese American.

SM: Oh, absolutely. But based on my early childhood, I also really embraced what was going on with the Black students as they were starting to emerge as a political force on campus. And the first activity that I organized on campus was bringing James Meredith to campus. Because the student body, in their imminent wisdom, were bringing George Wallace to campus, and I was, like, outraged. And so I found out how you could get money from a speakers' bureau, and I organized bringing James Meredith to campus as a counter to George Wallace.

BY: I want to circle back to your college experience in a minute, but I wanted to just ask you another question about your childhood. So as a child, I mean, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but just if you can think of another example, did you ever feel like you were treated differently by anyone in either a positive or a negative way because you were Japanese American? So any incident?

SM: You mean when I was a kid?

BY: Yeah, yeah.

SM: Well, in elementary school, because it was a mixed school, I mean, like I got to be a junior drum majorette marching in front of the band, that were, like, seventh and eighth graders. I got to ride on the Rose Parade float and stuff, but they didn't put me in a kimono or anything like that. I was just one of the kids. Moving to Normandy Park and being at Highline, when they asked me to do similar things, it's like they wanted us in kimonos, so it was like we're Japanese. And that happened several times. Also had teachers who, you know, now, reflecting back, I can say were really racist. But at the time, I just got upset. Like Highline was a big gymnastics school, won gymnastics first or second place in the state every year. So we had a girls gymnastic gym and a boys gymnastic gym, and everybody in PE had to go through gymnastics, that was required. So I was on the balance beam and I fell off, flat on my back. And I can remember like it was yesterday, the teacher coach standing over me and saying, "What is wrong with you? Your people are supposed to be good at this." And that happened to be at a time when there were several Japanese superstars from Japan in the Olympics in gymnastics. Not, "Are you okay?" "Did you hurt yourself?" anything like that. And those kind of things happened periodically in high school, from the teachers, not from the students.

BY: Interesting.

<Begin Segment 8>

BY: Okay, let's move on to college. So what college, university did you attend?

SM: University of Washington.

BY: Okay. And what did you do in college? So I assume you had a major and you did activities. What kinds of things were you involved in in college?

SM: Well, I started in architecture school, and the sexism was so great by the professors, that I thought, I'm not paying tuition to be insulted every day. So I transferred to the school of art, and I got my degree in art education.

BY: And what, again, extracurricular things were you involved in?

SM: Well, again, I majored in activities. [Laughs] I was involved in the mock political convention, the model congress, model UN, I was involved in all of those kind of political policy kind of things. And I ran successfully for the board of the control, which is like the student government. And I was also, like, on the publications board, which ironically, didn't fit at the time, but then I had most of my career in communications, but I didn't realize it at the time.

BY: So what do you feel like? What were the seeds of that political activism or your involvement in, what was it, do you think? Was it just your nature, was there something in your background that made you interested in that? What inspired that in you?

SM: Well, you know, some people looked up to rock stars and I looked up to political figures that I thought were doing something important. And part of it was influenced by the fact that one of our neighbors was a state representative, and his father was a secretary of state for the state of Washington. So they had political things all the time. They were in the upper echelon of the Democratic party, and so since my parents were the only other Democrats on the street, they would get invited. We would, as a family, would get invited to various things. So we met the Kennedys when they came to town and things like that. And I started doorbelling for him, Vic Meyers, Jr. was his name. I started doorbelling for him when I was fourteen and I would go around with him. Even back then, they didn't let fourteen-year-olds do doorbelling on their own, so I always went with him. And his own kids who were our classmates were not particularly interested at all, but I was fascinated by all this stuff. And so I would go with him and I'd hand out the literature and whatever, and I loved it.

BY: Were your parents, I mean, you said that they would get invited to these things, were they politically active, would you say?

SM: Well, they voted Democratic, but they were not active. I mean, they didn't join the Democratic club or anything like that.

BY: And were they involved in any Japanese American organizations like the JACL or the Nisei Vets or anything like that?

SM: Well, in Portland, Dad was president of the JACL one year. They were members in Seattle and they went to the annual banquets and the fundraisers and things like that, but they were not active, per se.

<Begin Segment 9>

BY: So you were in college, you graduated with art education. What did you do after college?

SM: I taught in the public schools for two years, and then I went back to grad school, I wanted to learn more about filmmaking, so I could present things that were not stereotypical and that were more inclusive to the students, I always intended to go back and teach. But the timing was wrong, it was when Boeing had that big slump and they were laying off teachers right and left, and I couldn't get back into the system. So I ended up staying on the UW campus working as a student activities advisor, and then the director of the Ethnic Cultural Center on campus. So I never went back to public school teaching.

BY: And you told me earlier an interesting story about trying to get a job as a teacher, that there was a school that you really wanted to teach. Could you share that story?

SM: Oh, sure. So when I graduated in 1968, the recruiters from the school districts would all come to campus, and so you had appointments right on campus. And I interviewed with a bunch of different school districts, Hawaii, sort of a fantasy thing, all over the Puget Sound area. But I really wanted to teach art at Garfield High School. Garfield had a tremendous arts program at that time. I had met one of their teachers who tipped me off that another teacher was retiring. And so I was all set to apply for that, and I got through all the interview process and everything, and I got called to the district office to sign my contract. And I was meeting with the deputy superintendent. At that time, they had two deputy superintendents, one for the north and one for the south, i.e. all the people of color were in the south. Anyway, he was, congratulations, the document was sitting right in front of me and everything. And he said, "But we're not going to assign you to Garfield." And I must have had a pitiful look on my face. So he explained that there was nothing in my background that said I could handle "six-foot tall Negro boys," and so they were not going to put me into that situation at Garfield. And I was so freaked out that I couldn't say anything. I just got up -- without signing the document -- I just got up and walked out. And when I got to the car, I just sat there shaking at what had happened. But that's how I ended up in the Renton School District instead.

<Begin Segment 10>

BY: All right. So I know that you had a very long and varied career mainly in media and communications. What have been some of your most memorable jobs or experiences? So I know you've done many, many things, just some highlights.

SM: Oh, gosh. I feel really blessed that I found jobs, that I got paid to do something that I loved. I mean, many people go through their whole career doing a job because it's a job to pay the bills. I was very fortunate, and even though my career was pretty eclectic, going from one thing to another thing to another thing, there always was something that was really compelling and really exciting for me. Let me think about... okay, I was executive director of Pacifica Radio Network in the 1980s. And we had one case at the U.S. Supreme Court, the right to editorialize for all noncommercial broadcasters. At that time, public radio and television were not allowed to editorialize. Because in their infinite wisdom, when Congress created public broadcasting, they decided that they didn't want local politicians trying to push the station to do one thing or another thing. So the best way to avoid that is that we couldn't editorialize. But at Pacifica, we felt like, hey, if a commercial network can editorialize and they're selling Coca-Cola or hemorrhoid treatments or something, why can't we, who can't advertise, why can't we editorialize? So Pacifica went all the way to the Supreme Court. It happened, the suit happened before I got to Pacifica, but the actual hearing at the Supreme Court happened when I was there, and we won. And we agreed that we weren't going to editorialize about local potholes or local politicians or any of those things. That when we did use that, we would use it for something really important.

And we were at a national board meeting several years after we won that right, hadn't editorialized yet at all, had no policies on it in particular, except that the whole network had to, really all five stations in New York, Washington, D.C., Houston, L.A., and Berkeley, all had to agree to whatever we editorialized on. So we were at a board meeting, and during a break, I got a phone call from our reporter in Johannesburg, South Africa, and he said -- now remember, this is in the 1980s -- and he said that President Botha's government was amassing the military outside of Soweto, and it was the tenth, it was about to be the tenth anniversary of the uprising in Soweto, where the local people were protesting the national government. And he said, "If something isn't done, there's going to be a bloodbath. They're going to kill all the people that are marching in the streets." So I went back and reported that to the board, and they immediately decided, that's our first editorial. And so Jack O'Dell, who was the chair of our board and a longtime civil rights leader, just went into a back room and, by hand, penned out what he was going to say, went over to the local station and recorded this. We decided we would put it on the air, every hour on the hour through that date, which was like several weeks away. And we had lots of affiliate stations who took our national news on a daily basis. And we encouraged them to have their own editorials on the same issue. Well, they just aired our editorial. Bottom line was, there were so many calls, and the calls were to call the White House to tell President Reagan to tell his friend President Botha in South Africa to back off and allow the peaceful commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising, or else the whole world would be against them. The White House comment line -- and that's back in the days of regular telephones -- it blew up the line completely. And so I decided, okay, I'm going to call and just chat it up with whoever's on the other end of the line. So I said, "So are you getting many calls about this?" "Oh, yes, and we can't understand what's going on because every hour on the hour, we get a flurry of calls from all over the country, and then things quiet down. And then again the next hour, we get a flurry of calls again. We can't understand what's going on," and she was the one that told me that it blew out the lines for a while, because I don't know how many lines they had, but anyway, it blew out the lines. So that was, to me, one of my proudest moments, even though I didn't do the editorial or anything, but because we used the resources we had, which was five major market stations plus all of our affiliates, to make a difference someplace else, thousands of miles away. That's one of my proudest moments.

Another one was when I was working for the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church. This was in the late 1990s, early 2000s in New York. And we had a prearranged phone call with the Cuban Council of Churches, and it was right after the little boy was found floating in the water, Elian Gonzalez, and there was this whole brouhaha about his distant relatives in Florida wanting to keep him, versus his father in Cuba wanting him back. The mother drowned during this unsafe trip to try and get to the United States. And so I almost just gratuitously said, at the end of the phone call, "So if there's anything we can do to help the little boy, let us know." The next morning at seven o'clock, there was a fax in my office from the Cuban Council of Churches asking the churches in the United States to help them get the boy back, and it was in Spanish. So I raced to our bilingual Spanish writer and I said, "Can you translate this real quick?" And she translated, and her eyes were just as big as can be. So then I ran to my boss's office and he said, "This is bigger than the Methodists, we need to take it upstairs," which meant to the National Council of Churches of the United States. And so to make a long story short, that led to the grandmother's coming over and Dr. Brown, who was the head of the National Council of Churches, who was a grandmother herself, she took those grandmothers to Congress, all around, and it was a whole big campaign. And I stayed in New York and handled all the press and the media. And I had worked with the national media before in a previous job. So they had me stay in New York fielding all the calls and who would be the guest on the Sunday shows and all of that, and that helped get him back home.

BY: So it sounds like, at least, those two examples are really the power of collective action.

SM: And communications, yes.

BY: Yeah, right.

<Begin Segment 11>

BY: So then how did the lessons that you learned around that -- I know that you eventually had your own company, media company. So can you talk a little bit about that?

SM: Well, that was accidental. When I came back after six years at Pacifica Radio, I could not even get interviews in any of the local media. And so it was disconcerting to me, but people that I knew started saying, "Oh, while you're waiting to get a job, why don't you just do this little project for us?" So then people started handing me short term consulting jobs. And one thing led to another and I thought, oh, I can just do this. So that's how my Spectra Communications started and I eventually got partners and it became a decent sized small business. But I never originally planned on going into business for myself. There was no outlet for me here, and I was insistent I was going to stay home in Seattle.

BY: I know you also did a stint with HUD. Can you talk a little bit about that? Was that right, HUD?

SM: Yes.

BY: Okay, yeah.

SM: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That was kind of a fluke, too. The Clinton Administration wanted their cabinet secretaries to look more like "America." I.e., at that time, President Clinton appointed more diverse cabinet officials than ever before. And those cabinet officials, in turn, wanted their subcabinets to also be reflective. And Henry Cisneros was secretary of HUD, he had filled many of the positions, he had nobody from the Pacific Northwest. And among three remaining subcabinet positions he had was somebody who was a communications specialist. So he had been mayor of San Antonio years before, so he called his old friends Mayor Rice and several members of the, former members of the Seattle City Council, and he gave them his criteria. Oh, the third criteria was that he didn't have, he only had one Asian American. So Asian American communications, Pacific Northwest, that was basically me. So all of them listed me somewhere in their list of people that they gave him. So when he saw my name on all of these lists, then he sent for me to come for an interview and that's how I got that job. [Laughs]

BY: Okay, great.

<Begin Segment 12>

BY: And talk about your more recent jobs. I know that you worked again in radio and newspapers, so talk about your more recent jobs.

SM: In 2012, I believe it was, I was working for United Food and Commercial Workers as a special projects director working on external things that were not specific to grocery and retail but were more their community engagement work, which I loved. And they, at one point, asked me to step away from the union to start a nonprofit that would train the next generation of leaders. So I went to do that, but I told them, you know, I will set this whole thing up, but I really want to retire fairly soon. So I retired in 2015, and I'm just minding my own business in the Rainier Valley, a group that I knew a little bit about had acquired a low power FM license, but they didn't have the station on the air yet and they were running out of time, so they asked me to come help. So I was their first station manager, got the station on the air, and raised enough money for them to function, and then I retired again. [Laughs]

BY: Retirement number two.

SM: Yes. And then Marcus Harrison Green, who was the founder and editor of the South Seattle Emerald, took me out after I had retired that second time to congratulate me, and then he said, "Oh, by the way, could you help us out for three months? We're between managing editors and we need you to do that." He had just come back from a stint at the Seattle Times, so things were a little bit rocky internally. And he wanted to pull it all together again, and he needed somebody to do the day to day. So I said, "Oh, three months? Okay, I can do that." Well, that was January through March of 2020, and that was the pandemic, and then it was all hands on deck. So I stayed there until July of 2022. I gave up the editorial part fairly quickly, there's plenty of underemployed journalists around, but what they didn't have is a stable financial base. So I stayed on and raised money and helped plan a future for them. So I finally retired in July of last year.

BY: So is it sticking, the retirement?

SM: Well, yes. I mean, I'm still volunteering a little bit, and I'm still volunteering on various other community projects. But I'm not doing work-work. [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 13>

BY: So I want to switch and talk a little bit about your community involvement in activism, so outside of your paying jobs. So what organizations have you belonged to? And that could be Japanese American organizations as well as other organizations?

SM: Well, there are several different strains of activism, first and foremost is political. And I worked on Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign, and I was an organizer for college campuses around the northwest. It was unpaid, but it was like a job.

BY: Was that when you were in college?

SM: Yeah. I was in my last year of school. And volunteered on many, many political campaigns on national, state and local level. As I matured in my own skill-building, then I started looking for young people who would be appropriate candidates and kind of helping to nurture them to go that direction when I saw people who really had the skill and the heart and the soul to run for office. I started out, and in more recent years, that's been my major involvement in politics, is really mentoring and helping new candidates, mostly people of color.

BY: Have some of those people become successful?

SM: Oh, yes.

BY: Like tell us, name us some names. [Laughs]

SM: Well, like Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who would have done it all on her own by herself. But, I mean, I worked on her first state senate campaign, I organized her press announcement that she was going to run for Congress, and I'm very involved with a whole lot of people in the community. Rebecca Saldana, who's a state senator, Teresa Mosqueda, who's a city council member, Tammy Morales, who's a city council member, there's sort of a theme here, "women of color."

BY: Have you been involved at all with Sharon Tomiko Santos?

SM: I was in the early days, but you know, she wins by like eighty-seven percent. So this is part of my choice. Some people say I'm a gadfly, but my choice of engagement is more with those who need a little oomph, or those who have some obstacles to overcome. So even with my donations to community organizations, if it's a multi-million dollar organization that's doing very well, even though I love them, I will give them a small donation. I will give the larger donation to that grassroots group that's just starting out that really needs, where fifty or a hundred dollars really makes a difference to them. So I've always picked the spots where... I mean, and frankly, I don't work on Pramila's campaigns anymore. I mean, when she wins by that kind of amount, or Sharon Tomiko Santos, I don't work on their campaigns. I mean, I would endorse them, although I couldn't when I was working in media. But the rest of the time, I would endorse them and that sort of thing but I just... I'm not needed there. I feel like I can be of more help with people that need the push still, or need to be introduced to more people in the community or whatever.

BY: Okay. So besides political involvement --

SM: So then I've also been involved in... well, you asked about JA organizations. I've supported most of them, and for a hot minute I was on the board of the JACL years ago when Dr. Lindy Sato was president of the board. And he pushed really hard for the Sansei generation to get engaged. And so on one particular year, Kip Tokuda and myself and others were all added on to the board as sort of the first wave of Sanseis to be on the board. But I didn't stay involved. I mean, I went to meetings and things, but JACL meetings were so horrendous. [Laughs] They were so long and they would decide something, and then the person who was on the minority side would bring the issue up the next meeting and they'd discuss it all over again. And I got really anxious. I didn't want to just sit there and go through things over and over and over again. I was involved in the redress movement to some degree, but I was mostly living in California during that time. So I was mostly using Pacifica Radio, the medium, and helping behind the scenes on writing press releases and things like that.

<Begin Segment 14>

BY: So you were not in Seattle when the commission hearings were held here then?

SM: When the commission hearings were held, I was here.

BY: Okay. And you told me an interesting story about your mom, which I'd love you to share.

SM: Yeah. My mom graduated in what they called secretarial sciences, like business school for women back in the '40s when they were supposed to be in a secondary role in business. And so she knew shorthand like... and she would even do her recipes in shorthand so we couldn't even tell what her recipes said. But she would not talk about the camps or anything that happened. But suddenly, when those hearings came to Seattle, she got on the bus, took her steno pad, sat in the back, and she wrote, in shorthand, she wrote everything that was happening. And the next day, she would have them all typed up, she would go home and type it up, manual typewriters. And she would have it all typed up before the official copies ever came out. But both days, she was there taking down everything, and that was kind of like her contribution.

BY: Do you still have copies of those notes?

SM: I don't.

BY: Densho might like those. [Laughs]

SM: We don't, and we haven't seen them in years. I think she probably handed it over to the leaders who were doing this. Because I remember somebody in that leadership group, every time I ran into him, would say, "Oh, and your mom finished ahead of the court stenographers." So I think she must have just given it to them, and that was the days before copy machines and things.

BY: All right, so other organizations?

SM: I was involved in grad school and beyond in an organization called Seattle Third World Women, and it was women of color, highly progressive radical, patterned after the Third World Women's Alliance in New York that had some really heavy hitter women who organized that. And we did community service projects, we had our own projects, and the big thing that was great for us is we had study group once a month. We had meetings every week, but one week a month, it was to study. And that was at a time when the men were leading everything. And there was a whole lot of Mao Tse Tung, Marxist theory, things like that that was new to us. And a lot of the women felt intimidated to be in the mixed gender groups because the men were, like, know-it-alls and they were pontificating and whatever, and they didn't feel like they could ask the questions and learn, and so that was a priority for us to make it a safe space to ask any questions and learn from each other. It's not like any of us were experts, but we learned from each other. And that was real important. I was involved in, I don't know, the World Affairs Council with international visitors. I was involved in so many different things, it's hard to remember.

<Begin Segment 15>

BY: Can you talk a little bit about your time at the Ethnic Cultural Center at UW? I know that's kind of circling back to grad school days and all of that, but talk a little bit about that.

SM: Okay, that was '71 to... well, '70, I went back to grad school. '71 to '73 I was a student activities advisor; I was the only person of color in the activities office. I got the Black Student Union, the Asian Student Coalition, American Indian Student Association, et cetera, MEChA, International Students, et cetera. So I got all students of color basically, all their student organizations, Hawaii Club, all of that. And I loved working with the diverse students. So then when there was an opening for director of the Ethnic Cultural Center on campus, I was recruited to apply for that job, and I did that from 1973 through '75. And that was a really amazing time on campus because the activism was full blown by then. The student groups were very active, and the Cultural Center had a study center where they could get tutorial help. It had a small theater where they could do performances and things. And then the center itself had offices and community space and kitchenettes, cook their ethnic food and do their own activities separate and apart from the student organizations that were housed at the HUB on upper campus.

BY: And it sounds like, there again, that your role was a supporter, mentor, coach kind of role.

SM: Right.

BY: Rather than being the leader of all these things?

SM: Right, exactly. And a lot of student leaders came out of that, because since I had been in student government and everything, I knew where the student body money was buried, you know, millions of dollars even back then. And nobody ever told them that they could bring speakers to town or those kind of things, and I knew exactly where that money was. So when they wanted to bring somebody to campus, I helped them apply for the speakers bureau and all of that.

BY: And it sounds like, throughout your career, you've been able to leverage that knowledge, that sort of insider knowledge of how systems worked to write grants. So tell a little bit about that.

SM: Well, you know, there was a period when progressive activists were, like, "Are you with us or are you not? Are you inside the system or are you part of us?" And I always felt like, hey, we got to have people on the inside. Sometimes I was on the inside, sometimes I was on the outside, but whatever I learned on the inside, I always wanted to share. And that's where a lot of that came from, because if you don't know that that money is available, or you don't know how the system works, then you can't really do the best of helping to change it if you don't really know what you're changing. So I always felt that that was important to pass that on.

<Begin Segment 16>

BY: So one of the reasons we're doing these interviews is to sort of figure out is the connection between the incarceration and community activists now. So in your mind, is there a connection there? In any way, is your activism inspired by the incarceration?

SM: Well, I don't know that it was inspired, but I think all of us in the Sansei generation are impacted positively, negatively, or in between by what happened to our parents' and our grandparents' generation. And if Min Yasui had not had to fight for evacuation claims to help people get their properties back and things like that, and spent his whole life in civil rights, and everything was just hunky dory. You know, I would have been involved, because I'm just a social person. But I might have been involved in less political things, I might have been more mainstream and not rocked the boat as much, you know, like my mom wished that I was. It was like, oh, we don't want to see your name in the paper again, kind of thing. It drove me to do things in a more activist way that I think, had the camps not existed at all, and we were just a middle class family moving along, I would have been active in more middle class things. Because I don't think that it was my nature to not be involved in something. But the things that I chose to be involved in are clearly a reflection of my commitment to justice. And clearly, by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I knew the camps were injustice. I didn't have the sophistication to understand about all the levels of racism and discrimination and all of that, or to even name it, but I understood that that was not right.

BY: Can you tell the story about how Min would come to your house when you were kids? I think that's an interesting...

SM: Oh, this is a great story. Min and my dad, Min Yasui and my dad were friends, family friends as teenagers and young men. So... and they bought a car together with one of Min's brothers and things like that. So in the 1950s when the war was, World War II was over, there was this Evacuation Claims Act that allowed people who had lost real property to claim what had been theirs before incarceration to try and get it back. So Min, being a young lawyer, decided he was going to like, that was going to be his mission to help community members file their claims. And apparently it was a lot of paperwork. So when he would come to Portland, he would stay at our house, and we had this upstairs, well, it wasn't a guest room, it was more like an attic. But he would stay up there and he would go, like, to a church, and he explained to everybody, you need documentation of this, that, how much your car cost when you bought it, blah, blah, blah, all these little things. Bring your receipts, bring any documentation, all of it. And then he would go back a few days later to the same location and gather up all their documents. So in this big attic room, he had piles of papers which I'm now guessing each family's was a different pile. And he had these piles all over, and then he had a card table that was his desk, and he would work up there on days he didn't go out into the community, he was working like crazy doing that. And as I recall, he got something like 4.6 percent of the 1941 value of what people claimed back, so it was next to nothing. I mean, and we all, in the Seattle area, know the story of the Freeman family that acquired downtown Bellevue, what is now downtown Bellevue, which used to be Japanese strawberry farms. And so there's lots of stories like that all over the place. And I don't really know how far and wide Min went. Did he go all up and down the West Coast? I'm not sure. Or did he just go to the Pacific Northwest or what, I'm not sure. But I remember very clearly 4.6 percent, so that's a very, very small amount.

<Begin Segment 17>

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.

<Begin Segment 18>

BY: So there is this concept of "intergenerational trauma." So the idea being that people who lived through the incarceration experience, so the Issei and Nisei, suffered extreme trauma, but the idea of intergenerational trauma is that that trauma is passed down to the Sansei in successive generations who didn't experience firsthand the incarceration, but that somehow that trauma has been passed down, and sometimes it manifests in things like drug and alcohol addiction, mental illness, suicide, those kinds of things. What do you think about that concept? Do you think it exists or not?

SM: Oh, I think it's true. I think it's true, and I remember Dr. Minoru Masuda was, I can't remember if it was psychiatry or psychology that he was a doctor of, but he was a professor at the University of Washington. And he did this study way back in the '70s that showed that the Nisei, his generation, had the same mental health trauma as Holocaust survivors. And we know that Holocaust survivors have passed that trauma on to the next generations. So I have no doubt that it had some impact on our generation. I don't know about the next one after us, but definitely on the Sansei generation. And I feel like I was just lucky to have positive outlets. So it wasn't drug or alcohol or any of those kind of things. It was like, we're going to win a seat in Congress or we're going to get somebody to speak for us. And I had positive role models and grabbed onto those to find justice and success, whereas some of my peers didn't. And it's a tragedy because we lost many people who could have been, who are smarter than me, who could have been much more productive, who would have invented cures for diseases, who could have done all kinds of things, who didn't find those positive avenues to get out of it.

<Begin Segment 19>

BY: I want to ask you about one more concept, and that is the "model minority" myth. So what do you think of the "model minority" myth?

SM: It's a curse; it really is a curse. There are Sansei and Yonsei walking around right now that embraced that. And they think that that's how they got their job and that's how they're going to move forward. Not recognizing that that stereotype only takes you so far. And in a way, it's very destructive because it pits us against other communities of color. Like, "Why can't you be like those Asians?" "Why don't you study hard and not get into a gang?" or whatever. I mean, totally disregarding the conditions under which people grew up differently and were oppressed in different kinds of ways. I think it's really... I think it's really disgusting, and it's a construct that was created by powerful people in the government, and or in the media perpetuating it, and that's part of why I went into the media when I was an education person, and I still wish that I could have taught all the way through, taught school. Because the media, the reason I went into the media was because of the stereotypes, and it includes the "model minority" stereotype. I mean, how overwhelming is that for a Sansei who comes from a family that can't afford to get them to college, who had to go to work in their family business, small business, and ended up working there their whole lives, and barely making a living. And I remember friends who went to the university for, like, one year and then dropped out. And did they drop out for economic reasons? I don't think most of them flunked out. I think that they dropped out for economic reasons or for family responsibilities, you know, Dad died and I got to go home and run their business, that kind of thing kept happening. And so they never had, they never had the chance.

<Begin Segment 20>

BY: Okay, last question is, on a scale of one to ten, how important is your Japanese American identity to you?

SM: Oh. Well, it's a ten, but it's not my only identity.

BY: Okay, what do you mean by that?

SM: Well, I identify very clearly as a Japanese American, as a Sansei. But I also identify as a political progressive, as a woman, as an activist. Identifying as a woman of color who works across ethnic groups, I have multiple identities, which I think is healthy.

BY: Okay. And any final thoughts that you would like to share with us?

SM: Well, I think I said it earlier, but I really do feel like I was blessed to have had the nurturing and the exposure that many of my peers never got. And oh, one thing I forgot to say early on as a young child, I was one of the first Sanseis born in the Portland Japanese community. I mean, I was born in Wisconsin, but in the Portland community, I was one of the few little kids at the beginning. So I was around adults all the time, Isseis and Niseis. And they all just kind of doted on me, and I thrived on it. As a little girl, I was a showoff. [Laughs] I would sing and dance, although I can't sing, I would do all these little things on prompts because I got reinforcement, positive reinforcement from all these people. I was around so many older people all the time, and my sister, being younger, didn't get the same advantage. Like my grandfather didn't take the two of us around, he took me around while my sister was a baby. And so I really feel like I was blessed to have all the opportunities, and that makes me have a responsibility to give back.

BY: Thank you, good job. [Laughs]