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JSG: Okay, hello I'm Joy Misako St. Germain, a past president of the Seattle Japanese American Citizens League. Thank you, Ruthann and Mika for agreeing to be interviewed for the Seattle JACL Legacy Fund grant project. This project is funded by a national JACL Legacy Fund grant, and the purpose is to preserve the rich history and legacy of the Seattle JACL through preserving historical documents, as well as supplementing the written materials by adding recorded oral interviews with pivotal leaders who played important roles in the chapter's history. So the interview team today is Elaine Kim and me, and Elaine will serve as the lead interviewer. We're honored to have with us today members of the Kurose family, Ruthann, Mika and Paul might join us, and they are lovingly known as people who are engaged with peace activism, and community service. We also would like to acknowledge Aki Kurose, a mother of Paul and Ruthann and grandmother of Mika, who passed away in 1998. Aki was a teacher and social justice activist who when incarcerated during World War II at Minidoka, was first exposed to the Quaker values of advocating for peace and nonviolent conflict resolution. Elaine, would you like to introduce yourselves and start the interviews?

EK: Absolutely. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you, Ruthann, and Mika, and, Paul, if you hop on for being able to contribute your time to being a part of this interview. Just like Joy said, it's really about being able to document impactful leaders like you, Ruthann, Mika, Paul and the late Aki Kurose. My name is Elaine and I am a junior UW intern for the Seattle Legacy Fund grant project. But enough about me. Heading straight into the amazing Kurose family. So Ruthann and Mika, if you don't mind briefly introducing yourselves and telling us how you got to be involved with the JACL. So if you don't mind, Ruthann if you don't mind starting, and then Mika following.

RK: I'm Ruthann Kurose and I've been involved in JACL for a long time. Decades. I got involved probably about during my first year of college. I initially, I was involved in the ID on other projects, and then connected with JACL through my mom and at that time the education committee. And JACL's education committee was involved with the school district and other communities on looking at quality integrated education and figuring out what that was, and it led to the dispersing of the teachers of color and students, busing students as a means to achieve quality integrated education. There's that... that has become somewhat controversial. And at that time, it probably, I think it was important that we desegregated the schools but it may not have been the best way to ensure equal academic achievement. Do you want know more about me still beyond the JACL?

MR: Yeah, why don't you keep going?

RK: I also was involved in JACL's Youth Committee. And we had kind of a drop-in center for teenagers who were not so conventional, who were more at risk, kids who went to Franklin and then kids who went to the alternative school Project Interchange. We worked with [inaudible] to provide a place for the some of the youth who needed to be in, who were required to be in supervisory environment for after school. We had a partnership with a crisis clinic, but mostly the drop-in center was a place for kids who felt they didn't really belong anywhere else and there was... they would play music, play pool, hung out and hopefully stayed engaged in an environment where it was supervised and they could be comfortable. I was involved off and on in different ways through redress and through the Civil Rights Committee but I found there was a time when JACL had some really talented young activists, Joy Shigaki, for one, and Tatsuo Nakata, and they were, and they were young leaders who I looked to, rather than the other way around, for talented leadership and commitment and connecting us with other community projects working on the [inaudible] Peace Foundation with Joy and then Joy also was, worked with some of the other communities to bring the Emmett Till movies. I think that that amount of things about the Seattle chapter of JACL is I think we had more linkages and coalitions and shared programming with organizations, and in a way, that's very Seattle.

EK: Okay, well, thank you, Ruthann. I can just tell from all the rich history that you had with the JACL and all the organizations that you've worked with, I'm thrilled for the rest of the time --

RK: And not very, I'm not very clear with my sentences.

EK: Oh no, not at all. But thank you for sharing all that.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2022 Seattle Chapter JACL. All Rights Reserved.