<Begin Segment 34>

LH: We were talking about the outcome of the Seattle school district clerks and the events that happened and so eventually -- also you were involved in the school district not only in teaching, but eventually as a principal.

MN: Uh-huh.

LH: And also in a multicultural program. How did that begin?

MN: When the people ask me that, it really began with one very, very anonymous kind of, innocuous phone call. This woman said that she talked to my husband who was a principal of a school, and they wanted to do something that was ethnic. It was in the '60s and they wanted to get some ethnic things going, and he suggested that I teach Japanese classical dancing. And I'm thinking there's no way I could teach Japanese classical dancing. You can't fake something like that. That's like trying to teach ballet after you have been off ballet for fifty years. You can't teach ballet, [Laughs] but they wanted anything ethnic so I said, "Well, why don't I teach Japanese language?" I mean, I know how to speak a little bit of language so my sister says okay. So I talked her into it. So her and I went to this school under the auspices of quality integrated education, we took a small group of kids and we tried to teach them how to say Ohayou gozaimasu and little -- and teaching language is so tedious that we kind of added songs and then we started doing some origami. I mean, hey, I did it. You go home and you learn from your kids how to origami so the next day you can share your culture with the kids at school. [Laughs] So we did that and then we had a little bit extra money so we took the kids down to the I.D. And the kids were saying, "Is this Chinese or this one?" And they were making these dumb insensitive kind of comments not knowing they were insensitive. And we said, "It's okay to teach Japanese language, a little bit of Japanese culture, but we got to teach them a little bit about sensitivity and racism and stuff like that, too." So we took them to my mom and dad's house and we had tea, and we said, "Did you know that these nice people could not become American citizens and not because they were criminals?" They always try to add a little bit of meat to it, not just... And then we had fun with the kids. And I think they had a nice time, but that was kind of our experience of how we began.

And then the next quarter they asked us if we would continue, and we says, "Well, we don't mind continuing, but we got to make this a little bit more meaty." So we really kind of zeroed in more. It was almost half and half: a little bit of language, a little bit of culture, but mostly American Japanese, the history, the value system. We went into a little bit more little meatier stuff, and then we wrote a proposal and tried to get it funded by the Seattle schools. And we got, wrote a proposal for I think it was for $250, and we said we'll buy books and we'll buy origami paper and we will take them to dim-sum trip, whatever. I forgot what it was. It was really a stereotypic trip I have to say, and we got funded and that was just so, that was miraculous that we got money to do this. It was really fun to get that first funding so we went down to Uwajimaya and bought some stuff, and we were really happy. And it got more involved and so then we got more parents involved and said, "Hey, join us in doing this. We want kids to be proud to be Japanese Americans. There is nothing in the curriculum that is Japanese American. We want the kids to understand who we are. We're going to build bridges." We had a little bit more lofty goals now. And so we wrote a proposal and we got more money and got more volunteers, and it got to be where we couldn't handle as many kids that wanted to be in the program. So I went to the University of Washington and got some college kids to help put on this volunteer program for the schools, and we got college credit for them. And then we decided that they needed some training before they joined us so we had college classes for these kids. And then we decided they don't know enough about the community so we had community speakers come and talk about what racism is and we got involved in a whole bunch of stuff.

LH: Gee, so this is really snowballing.

MN: Oh, it was snowballing, and next thing you know, they take the kids on field trips. We need insurance for them so we had to go in front of the board, oh yeah. And we finally got enough people to where we're working. We are not enjoying doing this for kids anymore. We're working. So I said, "Let's put in a proposal and get staff." So we wrote a proposal, and I didn't know that it was a dumb thing to do is write for a proposal and write your own self in for a job, which I did. [Laughs] I wrote myself in as the director of this particular project and they approved it. So me and a couple of housewives -- that's what we were. Some of us had education backgrounds and some of us didn't, and we paid ourselves, and we got on... it wasn't much. [Laughs] And then the program started expanding to different schools, more schools, more kids involved. And then we decided ok, we're putting on this small group of instruction for kids, but some of our activities are really good, and they're really, you know, so let's write them up and put it into a lesson plan that other teachers could use. So we started writing curriculum, and then we decided if we're going to get this curriculum over to teachers, we have to have some kind of a training, teacher training development session, for them, so we did teacher training. So it was a three ring circus. [Laughs]

LH: What time frame are we talking about?

MN: I think we started in '68 'cause that's when my son was... '70, maybe. That's when my daughter was born in '70. I can't remember. There is a date on the... I have these proposals downstairs. I forgot what date they're on. They're real old ones that we wrote. I think I even have the first one we wrote for 250 that we wrote for. Early '70s maybe, somewhere around in there. I can't remember. The baby was born in '70 so it was probably close to there and...

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.