<Begin Segment 12>

MR: After your retirement, you still stayed busy?

YD: Well, when I retired, I was going to do many things I had never done before. I learned how to play bridge, and I took several different classes. But during that time, I kept up with my tea ceremony class. And for practically about fifteen years, I would go to the different schools to teach origami, and I have been asked many times to talk about education, about life in Japan. But it got to the point where there's too much freedom in Japan, and I think they became too Americanized in their education. And so to be very honest, I didn't want to praise the Japanese education that I thought was much more superior to the American education to a point. And then when, going back to freedom of speech and freedom of everything, I think the Japanese children were, became too much Americanized. And I remember very well that Keiko, when she first started going to school, she would come home crying. I would say, "Why, what happened?" And she says, "Mother," she said, "over here, the children have no respect for their teachers. They treat them like friends, so they're not teachers." She says, "I don't like that." And I think it's very true that, I don't know what it is now, but it's, to me the children need to learn more respect to their elders and to the teachers than they actually do now. I think the older I get, my ideals are to a certain extent becoming more Japanese, and the Japan that I knew. And it's very hard for me because I was brought up so strictly in Japan, and I enjoyed that, but I can't force that onto my children. And in growing up in Japan, even in holding your chopsticks or holding your bowl or the way you eat or the way you revere things, there's nothing like it over in other countries. I learned many things that I was very privileged in that in Japan, there's so many different festivals. Practically every month, there's a festival, and we think of our Christian way, I'm a Methodist, and we think that our way of, there's one God, and we believe in heaven and earth. But in Japan, there are many gods, but it is not with a capital G. And there's a god of wind, there's a god of fire, there's a god of water. And when I was going to my sewing classes, we would save all of our broken needles. And in the summertime when it was very hot, there was a day that we would buy, the priest at the temple where I went to learn, he would get a block of tofu, and all the needles that we saved during the year, we would stick into the tofu and give thanks to the needles, and that we give thanks to the fact that we learned how to sew. And the way I was brought up too was that there's a, we gave thanks to the water. We had a well in our home, and we always had for New Year's, there was also a bamboo and a pine and a sprig of plum, give thanks to the water. And everything had a meaning, but it was not a capital G, but there was okamisama for everything. And I think that in learning your tea ceremony or in learning all these different things, you have a reverence for all living things. It is more like zen. And those are the kinds that you learn as being Japanese, but I'm still American.

MR: I know from talking to you earlier that you're very active in the lunch program. Can you tell about how that got started?

YD: Well, this year's the twenty-fourth, twenty-fourth year of celebrating. And twenty-four years ago, there was a group of people here in Portland who decided that we should have a place for the Japanese, and there are centers for the Loaves and Fishes all over Portland and Oregon, but there was no place for the Japanese. And because of the language, the Japanese people would not want to go to Loaves and Fishes. And so this group decided that we should have our own Loaves and Fishes place, and my husband was one of the founders of that. And there's Mr. Kawasaki, Tom Takeuchi, and Lury Sato, who's still there, and they formed this group, and we had a very hard time trying to get the Isseis to come.

[Interruption]

YD: Lury Sato was our first director, and I was her assistant because of my bilingual background. We would have to, there were not only I, but there was some other people who would call these Isseis and tell them why we're having this program, and it's not because we're poor or because we need it. It's a place where we could all get together and have fellowship, and that the government is willing to pay for part of this program and that we deserve it. And it was very hard for us to talk to the Isseis because there was a gentleman in our community who had a Japanese newspaper, and he wrote very derogatory remarks about Loaves and Fishes was a place for poor people who wouldn't be able to pay or wouldn't be able to buy their food. And so he, himself, was a very good person, but something went wrong in that he, everybody who was prominent or everything that was good, he made either a joke or had derogatory remarks about that. And so calling these people, they would say well, we don't feel that we need it, or we feel that it's a shame to go there. And so we would, especially I would say that's not the reason why. It's a place where we should all get together. And because if you didn't want to go to a place where it was just American people talking English, it's not for your benefit. This is a place where we'd all like to go and have fellowship. And we finally got a group of people, people like Mrs. Endo, Mrs. Mira, many wonderful Isseis. And when they first started coming, it was amazing because they would sit very quietly and not talk at all, even amongst themselves, and they would eat. And as soon as they ate, they were ready to go. And now if you go to Ikoi no Kai, it's really a place where people enjoy themselves. The only Isseis that we see, there is Miss Endo who very seldom comes there, and Mrs. Mira who comes there more frequently. And we have several other Isseis who didn't start from the beginning, but they might have come from Japan and found that this is a place where the Japanese can come and enjoy their food. And right now, we have a Monday, Wednesday, Fridays for American food. It comes from the central kitchen, Loaves and Fishes. And then Tuesdays and Thursdays, we have Skip Yamamoto who makes Japanese food, and everyone seems to enjoy it very much. And for the Japanese food, we have miso soup. We always have a salad. We have an entree. And then there's desserts that people like Lil Kiyokawa or Takae Okamoto, Okazaki, and Harue Ninomiya. They would make things for maybe like eighty or a hundred people. And they do that out of the goodness of their hearts, and it's all donated. And we only pay $2.50 for the food, but it's subsidized by the government. And we were hoping that we're able to keep up with this program. And I served there for two and a half years with Lury, and then I volunteered for twenty years. And last year I had to quit because of health problems, but it was a fun place to work. Now, we have quite a few Caucasians, neighbors, and people who come from far away because of the fellowship, and we have Koreans. We used to have more Koreans than Chinese, but I think they have a place of their own. But the Americans who come say they would rather come to our place because it's a nice clean place, and people are friendly. And so to me, it's a very successful place.

MR: That must feel good to be a part of that.

YD: It is, yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.