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JSG: Hello, I'm Joy Misako St. Germain. I'm a past president of the Seattle Japanese American Citizens League. And thank you, Kyle, for agreeing to be interviewed for the Seattle JACL 2021 Legacy Fund Grant project. This project is funded by a national JACL Legacy Fund Grant. It's aimed to preserve the rich history of legacy of the Seattle JACL, hrough preserving historical documents as well as supplementing the written materials by adding recorded oral interviews about pivotal leaders who played important roles in the chapter's history. The interview team today is Brent Seto and me. Brent will be the lead interviewer. This session will be about Cherry Kinoshita through the lens and recollections of her son, Dr. Kyle Kinoshita, as well as about Kyle himself, who is a notable JACL leader. Before I turn the session over to Brent, I wanted to provide a little bit of information about Cherry. Cherry was born in 1923 in Seattle. Cherry was incarcerated at Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington and in camp Minidoka in Idaho. During Cherry's two and a half years at Minidoka, she wrote for the newspaper called the Minidoka Irrigator. Cherry is best known for her activism in the 1970s with the Seattle JACL work on redress, spearheading grassroots efforts to lobby Washington state lawmakers on the injustice imposed upon thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. And at sixty years old, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in sociology from the University of Washington. Thanks again, Kyle, for your time with us today. I'll now turn over the interview to Brent Seto. Thanks, Brent.

BS: Thank you, Joy. And yeah, hi everyone. My name is Brent Seto. I use he/him pronouns, and I am one of the Seattle JACL interns for this year. Just a brief introduction about me. I'm a junior at the University of Washington double majoring in Political Science and Law, Societies and Justice. I'm passionate about activism and advocacy, and I'm heavily involved in the student government on campus. I'm originally from San Jose, California, and I wanted to intern with the JACL because I'm a Yonsei, or a fourth generation Japanese American, but I actually know very little about JA history or culture. And the JACL provided me with the opportunity to connect with the JA community and learn more about myself and my identity. But, yeah, getting started with the interview, Kyle, is there anything that you would like to add to our intro to Cherry? What was her personality like and how was she remembered by others?

KK: Yeah, thanks for the introduction. Thanks for the summary, that's helpful. I think I'll just go ahead and start saying a few things about my mom. And that'll kind of transition into how she impacted, I think, the community as well as me personally, which might tell you a few things about her. In terms of her personality, I think that obviously as a son, you remember your mom as very loving and very nurturing. I think that one of the things that probably isn't, wasn't as visible -- because she was a visible figure in the community -- is that family was really important to her. And by that, I mean, extended family, because we were pretty small family. I was an only kid. But if we're talking about family on her side of the family, my cousins who are the Sansei members, sons of her brothers who are now in Chicago, or whether you were talking about extended family on my dad's side. He originated from Gresham, Oregon, Portland area, and all the families down there, they had, they were berry farmers. But it's interesting, just in terms of how she was. I mean, she is really, really fondly remembered by the members of the family on my dad's side. When she passed, you could really kind of tell that, how much love and attachment that they had to her even though we were in Seattle, and they're in Portland. I think it must have been the way that she came into the family before I was born.

Just a little bit about that, she was incarcerated at Minidoka, but so were the Portland people, Portland area people. And there are lots of stories, by the way, of both kind of that Nisei generation of both cities being really thrilled, because it was like, "Oh, my gosh, we get to meet all sorts of new and interesting people." And part of that, I think, was figuring out who to go out with. And that's where my mom met my dad, because they were kind of interested in Portland people. After the... during incarceration, she was released to Minnesota. And it just so happened that my dad, who I'll talk about later, was drafted and went into the Military Intelligence Service, MIS, was based at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, so they were able to stay in touch with each other. 1948, they got married when the family went back to Oregon, and so my mom was there for a while. And I think there, that's where she became quite attached to the Kinoshita side, and they to her. So, what happened was, my dad was the youngest kid in the family and didn't really, wasn't able to have a stake in the farm. So, jobs were kind of hard to find in that way. And, that's how they made their way to Seattle, to stay with my mom's side of the family. So that's a long way of saying that they're just really close ties, the family. The Yonsei members of my dad's side just have tremendous respect for my mom, and just have a lot of fond memories, and were very inspired by my mom's activism. And the times that we see each other, they don't hesitate to remind me every time about that.

So, more about her personality, I think that maybe helped kind of explain a little bit her activism. My earliest memories were that we had a big old white house in the Mount Baker neighborhood. And it kind of had to be a little bigger, because my grandparents on my mom's side stayed with us. I remember them being retired. And I guess it was that, and I'll talk about them later, they had a dry cleaning shop before the war, and lost everything in incarceration. So I think... I don't think my grandfather on my mom's side really started his career and just kind of lived with us, as well as a bachelor uncle. But what I remember was that she always wanted better. That was so clear to me, in hindsight, she always wanted better. After having me, she went right back to work so that they could have two incomes, not just to support my grandparents, but I think that... I just remember that there are things that you could tell that she was bound and determined to build a better life for us and family and, I guess, particularly me. In addition to working outside the home in a variety of jobs, kind of secretarial types or mid-level kind of bank jobs. And by the way, this will come up later, they are not ones that I think she aspired to. I have the feeling, obviously, that she aspired to more, but it was most important to support the family and to build for the future. She pushed in that regard. I think she helped my dad started his own business. My dad, even though he had a college degree in agriculture, I think it was, learning the technology of food processing, couldn't find a job in that area. And so he became an auto body man working for Kono Garage, which was on 12th Avenue. But she pushed him to start his own business and worked really hard, even though she had her own job, in getting that business going, and getting us established in a house, saving up for my college education. And so that was really, I think, the early part of what I remember her in the '50s and '60s. I think that that is something that is so clear about my mom and just in terms of her personality. So maybe I'll stop here picking up where you want, maybe to get into a little bit how she got active.

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