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AF: And was there anything about the academics you studied at U-Dub or maybe even high school that contributed to your involvement in the Japanese community today or not really?

JD: Well, we're a part of the Seattle Betsuin Buddhist church, and so I grew up in that tradition. And so I had a lot of Japanese -- I had my church friends, and then I had my school friends. I wouldn't say that the church was very activist at that time, we were in like Camp Fire girls and my brother was in Scouts. But unlike today, where I think the Buddhist church is more activist and more open, we weren't really at that time. And then I didn't really know a lot about the Japanese American experience until probably college, and I took Tetsu Kashima's Asian American Studies, whatever, 201 class or, you know, your traditional classes and learned about... and then, you know, I joined JACL, well, this is after college. But while I was in college, I learned a lot about the Japanese American experience. We read Personal Justice Denied, which is the whole commission that studied the incarceration. So we read that, and that was one of our assigned texts as well as Frank... is it Miyamoto or Kitamura? I can't remember, on the history of Japanese Americans in the Seattle area. And we got to meet Gordon Hirabayashi. So, yeah, that was really cool to meet him in person and have that have that as part of your college coursework. But I guess that I didn't really know that I wanted to do stuff, you know, activism or that at all. And so after I was like, almost done with college, I signed up for a political campaign and thought I would help out Lloyd Hara, who was the city treasurer, run for state treasurer, Japanese American, and I got to meet other people. I got to meet Ruth Woo, [inaudible], Gary Locke, bunch of different people, Belle Nishioka, who's the one that encouraged me, recruited me to join the board of JACL. So I didn't even know much about JACL at all until I got involved in that kind of tangential way to community.

AF: And were you intimidated by it at all, I guess, like at becoming president of JACL at a young age?

JD: Well, yeah. I mean, I wasn't president until I spent a number of years on the board. And so the first thing I did on the board was the scholarship committee. I think that they give all the young people, like, "Here, you're young, you do Scholarship Committee." So I did Scholarship Committee, and then, you know, I got to, I didn't know how to run a meeting. I didn't know Robert's Rules, I didn't know any of that stuff. And so that's how I became president. I've had like, maybe six or seven years of watching and learning and kind of seeing other presidents, you know, lead meetings and stuff like that. So by the time I was president, I felt like it was this family and so it wasn't as intimidating because, you know, you're on a first name basis with all of these icons like Sam Shoji and Cherry Kinoshita and May Namba and, you know, Kazzie Katayama, their friends, so it didn't feel too intimidating.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2020 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.