<Begin Segment 1>

AF: Okay, thank you, Janice, again, for coming back and doing this. Again, this is just like a brief overview, I guess. The project is for the 100th anniversary of JACL, so we're going to do a bunch of pop up screens where we show basically the activism history of JACL. So a lot of these interviews will go into, like, I guess, sort of an archive so JACL can go back and use it. And also for us interns to pull information, important information that we get from you and other people that will be interviewing. So thank you for doing this again.

JD: Yeah, no problem.

AF: And so I'll be asking the questions again, I think you got them ahead of time. And so to Joy, and Joy, if you have anything you want to add at any point, you can just jump in. It's totally fine if you want to ask any questions of your own. And then at the end, I'll go back to Joy and see if she wants to add anything at all, and then we'll finish up. It'll be like maybe thirty to like sixty minutes. Yeah. I can start I guess asking the questions. So just some background information. Can you tell us, Janice, a bit about your background, where you grew up? Your family history during World War II, how they came to America, all of that?

JD: Okay, great, thank you. Let's see. So my family immigrated, gosh, I'm thinking like in the early 1900s. And also on my mom's side, they, my great grandfather and grandfather came over from Japan from Shizuoka-ken. And they came to make money, basically. And they moved to Bellevue and they were able to purchase a farm in Bellevue. So I think they were renting farmland for a while and farming, and then they ended up buying a piece of land that they were able to, because of alien land laws, weren't able to own property. But my aunt was an American citizen,  she was born in the U.S. And so she was old enough that they were able to put the property in her name. But I recall that my grandfather and great grandfather, after like regular farming, then they went to their new plot of land to clear it and prepare it to be a farm. So it was all for, they had to dynamite, you know, they had to cut down trees and dynamite stumps and all of that to clear the land to make a farm. And so they farmed there all the way up until World War II, and they actually were one of many Japanese American farmers that brought produce into the Pike Place Market on the ferry. So they'd go into town and sell the produce in the Pike Place Market. And my mom said that they made a lot of money at that, because there was no middleman to kind of take the profits, it was directly selling to the customer. So they were doing well. And then my grandparents, my great grandparents moved back to Japan. And they wanted to take my mom with them, but my grandmother wouldn't let them because she knew that my mom would just be a servant to them. And so stayed in the U.S.

And then they were interned in Tule Lake because they lived in Bellevue. I know Seattle people went to Minidoka and people that weren't in Seattle went other places, and so they went to Tule Lake, which was the segregation center. And they had a really rough time. My grandfather wanted to go back to Japan, he thought naively that Japan would win the war. And the rest of the family were like, no way. We're not going back to Japan. But it caused a lot of strife because of the pressure in that camp to, you know, be loyal to Japan. And so my aunt, the oldest daughter, my mom's older sister, was forced to renounce their citizenship. My Uncle Ed and Auntie Sue had to go to Japanese school so that they weren't going to American school. So they, when they got out of camp, they had to kind of go back and redo school because they didn't have a lot of the... they missed a couple years of American school because they were in Japanese school. So yeah, and then they sold the farm to Safeway, and lived in Seattle, and then my mom lived in... well, she was working in Bellevue house cleaning and stuff like that after the war. I know it was really tough. And she met my dad probably in the '50s and they got married and lived in the central area for a while and then moved to Beacon Hill where they were they spent the rest of their lives in Beacon Hill. That's where I grew up, Beacon Hill.

And then my dad's side -- oh, and there were like nine kids on my mom's side, so there were a lot of farm hands. No birth control back then. [Laughs] And then my dad's side, they're from Shiga-ken and I know less about them. So my grandmother grandfather came over probably around the same time, and then my grandmother had six kids. And unfortunately, her husband, my grandfather, died when she was still pregnant with her sixth kid, my Uncle Tommy. And so I know they really struggled. They didn't have anything. My grandmother had to do piecework so she was a seamstress, so she would just sew in her apartment and then sell that for piecework. So, yeah, they didn't have much and they really struggled. But they lived in the Eleanor Apartments for a while, you know, they lived in the International District for a while. And yeah, I mean, my dad growing up, he saved everything, we recycled everything, nothing went to waste. The chicken necks and just everything that you could think, he took care of everything, he never threw anything away, our cars, our everything was always use it 'til the last amount of, you know, used impossible. So yeah, and he went to Minidoka, he was a sophomore at U-Dub when the when the war hit, and then so he had, his studies were interrupted. They were in Idaho, I think he was just... I don't know if this was when they were in camp, but I know that he was arrested just for hanging around not doing anything and the police thought that he shouldn't be, you know, serving in the war or doing something more productive than just hanging out. He did serve in the MIS.. So he was he was in the MIS and then he went back to Japan after the war to just like help out his family and he like bought stuff at the PX and bring rice and even the clothes off his back, he left for them in Japan because they were so desperate and poor. But then he ended up working at the City of Seattle in the engineering department. And then I went to high school at Rainier Beach High School and then went to the University of Washington as well.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2020 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.