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LT: Well, after you retired from your profession, that phase became even more prominent because you gave back, you also created new programs that focused on Japanese Americans and learning more about them.
TT: Uh-huh. I think the... the first thing, of course, I worked at Ikoi no Kai, and then was fortunate to work with you as we did teaching the internment to teachers. That was huge, and I'm hoping that there will be another phase of that where we actually can get in the history books. But that was a great thing, yes. And then, now, of course, I've settled into... with the Buddhist Temple we did a lot of things, and we did programs for, we brought in bunka, and e-tegami, where they do the drawing onto the stationery so that they might have part of an eggplant here and then they can write their story. And we have people who do their journey, they'll take a big piece of paper, might have a car coming in, and they do their drawing along with it, and we had classes in that. And we've had people come in and do, teaching how to make yukatas and things. And that's been very, very important to me to share the culture. Then the biggest part became when I decided to spend more time in Gresham, and my girlfriend had me join the Gresham Sister City Association, and our sister city is Ebetsu, Japan, and so I'm very involved in the exchange program that we have with them, and both Gresham and Reynolds High Schools have Japanese language programs. So the kids have to be in the Japanese language program to go to Ebetsu or to host a student. The tie is huge when it has a language program like that, so there are kids who are not children of people who had it, but almost. So they're relatives, so this program has gone on for, like, twenty years. And so we have people who return and have this tie-in. We have kids that come for a month from Ebetsu in January, which is their big break, and we send kids for a month in June, and they shadow each other, so they actually can go through the schools because they speak, not perfect Japanese, but enough that they can get along.
We then have two other parts of the Ebetsu program, the most exciting one, of course, is the renovation of the Japanese garden. The Gresham Japanese Garden, Tsuru Island, was built and donated to the city by a group of Japanese volunteers in 1975. It's actually built in Gresham Main City Park, so the city, we're now working with the city to make sure that what happened in '75 doesn't happen again, which was it was overgrown, no one took care of it, no one took responsibility for it. We have a wonderful team since my landscape gardener actually is just so excited about this, so for three years we've been working on the renovation, and we've had to do drainage, Rainbird came in, they gave us all of our irrigation, we have a lighting company that came in and gave us all of the lighting. We have nurseries in the community who have given us stock, and yes, and we've written a... actually just a few grants, not too many. We have gotten very few donations. But because of the generosity of the community, we will be ready to, on June 28th of 2014, to have the first peek, I call it, at the garden. And next year we'll have a huge grand opening 'cause the bridge has to be redone, and it won't be done until next year. It's the most amazing -- I'm not much of a gardener, so Jim and his people do the gardening. But I like to be there and greet, and have volunteer parties and things, and it's going very well. It's lovely.
Then the third part is my baby, and the third part is called Skosh, or Little Japanese Cultural Festival. This year will be our third year. The first year we had it on a Monday evening for two hours at the Greater Gresham Baptist Church. I expected to have five presenters and probably fifty people come and visit. We ended up with huge, with probably seventy-five different presenters and groups that did things. We actually had a huge auditorium show where PSU's taiko ensemble made their debut, and we didn't have food because it was only two hours. We probably had close to a hundred volunteers. Then the second year we had it at Mt. Hood Community College, and we increased probably to two hundred volunteers, and we had everything: cooking demonstrations, Bamboo Grove, Hawaiian Grove came out and he made yakisoba, and so we had food for people. And this year we're making it even larger because we're going to be in our home site, so we'll be at the Gresham City Park. So Tsuru Island will have its opening at this same event. And then we will have, Grace Ishikawa's going to do the tea ceremony on the island so we'll have a little canopy for her, and she will do a continual thing as people come in and check it out. We have people who will do calligraphy to show people how to do it and then have demonstration, and also have their displays. And we have a couple of teenagers from Reynolds High School who do manga art. And she is going, she has art that she will sell, but she also will show them how to do manga art. And then we have my friend Jose Spoonberger, who does koto, and he's more of a musician, not a playing musician, but he has like five kotos, and he brings the Chinese one and others, and he lets people play with his kotos and he talks about it. And then we have an environmental festival also happening at that time, Friends of the Trees will be there and this type of thing. So it's turning into an enormous event, started from a little one. And for me, the Skosh part, of course, the cultural part, is what I want.
LT: What does Skosh stand for?
TT: "A little," sukoshi, which would mean "a little." And the white friends I have, a lot of times they'll say, they talk about one of the old ad for Levis was "a skosh more room," and that was the pants they started to make for the American public with maybe a little bigger butt space, yeah, so skosh. And so that's kind of how we came up with it, and so far it's caught on.
LT: And you're the coordinator, the originator, the coordinator, the organizer.
TT: Uh-huh. And what we hope is to eventually, I'd like to see, in fact, we just got the okay... I think we have too many shoes on, but there's the Coho shelter in Gresham Main City Park, and we had been wanting to have the pace to be able to have, like, brown bag lunches where we could have people come and do music and stuff and do some classes. I'd love to have the type of thing we're doing at Skosh come. So once a month during the summer, you know, we'd have maybe just some Japanese art, and we got that approval. So starting supposedly -- and I don't know if we're going to make the June one, but June, July and August we have the space. Then the city also gave us a double-wide trailer, just outside of the storage area where we have all of our plants and everything, and we have, Chem-Dry came out and volunteered and cleaned all the carpets. We have friends who came out and did the roofing and everything, and we're going to do classes there and hope to pick up with Metro East, and they have quite an intensive program of classes, and we're going to let them use our building, and then we will also use it for different classes. We'd love to do stuff with kids, obviously, but also just any kind of class. And this is where Skosh, where actually Skosh, the Tsuru Island, we have a person coming to talk about beavers because we have a beaver dam at the garden. And we have a person coming in, and he's going to talk about fish and cleaning rivers. We have them coming and talking about koi and water gardens. So there's a nice variety of things going from the Japanese bent with the garden and then into the environment. So that's my biggest project, is this whole... and I don't know what you call it, it's getting too big. So far it's been fun, so we hope it stays fun. [Laughs]
LT: Now this is in Gresham, which is east of Portland.
TT: Right.
<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.