<Begin Segment 18>

SO: Can you talk about your involvement with JACL?

LK: Oh, JACL. Yeah, we were always, I always believed in JACL. Such a good organization. In the olden days, even before I was married, I think I was secretary when Dr. Ijima was president, I was secretary for him. That was the time when, well, I must have been married then, because I wanted the house. He said, "We would try to get you that Orin Thompson house." And I was active in everything because my husband was studying, and so I belonged to investment clubs and bridge clubs and so forth because I had to do my own thing while he was going to school. And JACL, we... I don't know, we always danced in the Festival of Nations too, but that didn't have anything to do with the JACL, but we participated in that. We all did. Everyone. We just thought that was such an important thing. And then our children danced in that and Esther's grandchild danced in that and then I always... any project that the JACL had, I really enjoyed doing that. And I was sort of busy when the children were growing up, but after they were grown, and so I had more time that I could be more involved. All the exhibits that we did. I think that was a good time to meet more Japanese Americans too, because I made some good friends in the JACL. Right now it just seems like it's an ongoing thing, because I'm on the Education Committee. They seem to have a project every year, which is good. And then we go out and speak to different classes about internment.

SO: How did that start?

LK: For me it started when I was teaching. The social studies teacher would take my classes in Home Ec., and I would take his classes for the day. But that was double duty for me, because I had to do all my lesson plans for my classes when he sat in my classes. He didn't have to do anything, just sort of babysit. And then I had to do all that for five hours, but I thought it was worth it. It was important for people to learn about the internment. And then we would have, it was called Isabella, it's called Wolferage now. We'd go on a four-day retreat. We'd take the students for four days and we'd take two busloads, so that's about seventy students, and they would have an African American, they had Native American, they had a Hispanic, and one person backed out for or something for some reason so they asked me if I would go and teach origami. And so I said, "Oh sure." Well, here I'm teaching origami, and then everyone else is teaching all their history? I thought, hey -- I did that that year -- but I said, "If you want me to go again I'm going to teach the concentration camp thing, what happened to the Japanese Americans and the Japanese," and so they said, "Oh, fine," so I really enjoyed doing that. You could teach these kids in a small group, they all sort of went from class to class and then they did a lot of outdoors things, too, like snowshoeing and so forth. So it was really a good time. I did that for many years. Then since I was on the Education Committee, we would go to different places. Churches, at that time, churches wanted us to come so my sister and I would go and give speeches about the... and she wasn't in the permanent camp but she was in the temporary camp and then she could relate to them what happened to her while she was out here alone and then she would know what was happening to us. We've always been doing that.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.