Densho Digital Repository - Akemi Matsumoto Interview (Densho ID: ddr-sjacl-2-26-1)

<Begin Segment 1>

AF: Great. I can go ahead and introduce myself since you've never met me before. I'm Alison Fujimoto and I'm currently a sophomore at the University of Washington. And I'm at home, I'm in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and I'm studying Law, Societies and Justice right now with a potential minor in Diversity. So getting through online classes is sort of difficult, but I'm managing.

AM: Yeah.

AF: And yeah, I enjoy it, being at home with my family, though. I don't mind too much. Yeah, being with my sister and stuff. And...

AM: Does it mean that you want to go to law school?

AF: Potentially, yeah, I'm thinking about it. I was originally a bio major, actually.

AM: Wow.

AF: It was a big switch for me, yeah. It was something I decided pretty much this year that I was more driven to do, I guess, like, work in law and potentially civil rights law. So I really like it right now, so I feel like I'm going down the right path. So I'm pretty confident.

AM: Right. But there's a really good combination between biology and bioethics and the law. That's just a huge field that needs to be defined.

AF: Yeah, my dad was just talking to me about that.

AM: So those interests could come together.

AF: Yeah, yeah, there's so many different cross majors you can do at UW, you can double major, you can even triple major if you wanted to. So I think that's a benefit of going to a big school. They offer such a wide range of majors. And like, kind of like you said, like bioethics and a mix of different, a different two. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

AM: Yeah, I like your Japanese name, Kiyomi. That's one of my favorites.

AF: Oh, really?

AM: Mine's Akemi so we share the "mi." [Laughs]

AF: Oh, okay, okay. That's my mom's middle name.

AM: Oh, really?

AF: That's really funny. Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's so funny. And I guess I can go over the purpose of these interviews. I know Bill mentioned it in his email earlier, but we're basically recording these for the purpose of archiving them in the Seattle JACL archive, so we can reflect back on them. But also, they're going to use some of this information to go to the celebration of the Seattle's 100th anniversary, Seattle JACL's 100th anniversary, so we're putting together these like, multi-screen pop up screens, I guess. And we're going to be throwing a bunch of information together, especially focusing on like the legacy of Seattle JACL, how they impacted the Japanese American community, and then also focusing on like, the leaders of Seattle JACL that stood out. So that's why we're conducting these interviews, and they're gonna be recorded.

AM: I'm so...

AF: And Kyle, do you want to introduce yourself?

KK: Sure. Akemi, glad to meet you. I'm Kyle Kinoshita, currently a JACL board member. Just this last year, been kind of doing committee work since about 2009. I have a family connection with JACL.

AM: Cherry?

KK: Yeah, yeah.

AM: She was your mom?

KK: Yeah, Cherry's my mom. And I was telling Alison that I'm a retired K-12 educator, so it was kind of the thing that I was working on my career constantly and JACL was kind of my mom's church. And so I obviously admired everything that she did, it was kind of like, okay, just stay out of my hair and do your career. But after she passed, I think that I thought it was really important to sort of keep participating, and sort of preserve that legacy. So, yeah, so now I have more time to do that since I retired a year ago. Still doing education consulting and I'm an affiliate faculty team member at the U. So, but get to do projects like this.

AM: Yeah, fun projects.

KK: Yeah. And just to echo what Alison said, I think that especially now that, kind of the demographic of Seattle JACL is changing more and more to other generations, we find that we don't have an enduring record. It's kind of like you have folklore of people, but I think we need to do better than that, given the fact that Seattle JACL has accomplished so much. Yeah.

AM: I think though if you look at the newsletters throughout the years, they were pretty consistent monthly newsletters. And at least that tracks what people did during those times. So we have the factual thing, but we don't have the spirit and the heart. Unless that might have come through in the president's letters once a month. Because they were hard to write and you really wanted to draw to the membership that didn't come to the monthly board meetings. So yeah, but I agree. Our history, it's one of the most difficult things to do when you're running an organization, especially an all-volunteer organization, you just don't have time to document because you're so busy doing the work.

KK: Right.

AM: And I've helped found two other organizations that had exactly that problem. So APACE and ACLF, I worked on those founding boards. So yeah, it is a job, and now JACL's 100 years old. So my god, that's a lot of history.

KK: Yeah.

AF: Definitely.