(gentle music) - So we're here very appropriately in the Governor Gary Locke Library and Community Heritage Center of the Wing Luke Museum with the former director of the museum, Beth Takekawa and with Dr. Lawrence Matsuda.

Larry is an educator, a poet, a fisherman and an author.

And he's particularly the author of a book that I found when I was touring the Wing Luke Museum, and was in the shop and I bought his book, "Fighting For America: The Nisei Soldiers."

A story that we'll talk about in our conversation.

So I wanna start by asking Beth this question, why are we telling the story of all Asian Americans?

What is important about being the Pan-Asian Museum?

Maybe the only Pan-Asian American museum?

- A couple of reasons, I'd say, I've lived in a number of cities in the country, and Seattle is uniquely where many different Asian American ethnicities started out and still relate to today.

So Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, now Vietnamese American.

And the origin of this museum was from the beginning, reflective of that multicultural Asian American background.

- There's a unifying aspect to this story, the story of the museum and the story of Asian Americans in Seattle, certainly at the beginning, in the sense that they were segregated, they were discriminated against, and yet they helped build Seattle, helped build Seattle right here in this building.

Is it fair to say that?

- Oh, I think so, Larry would agree with me on that.

I would say, so the building, when I worked here every day, it was almost eerie to be here and- - Ghosts?

- Yeah, yeah, ghosts and voices.

- Right.

- And it was wonderful.

And so I would work late sometimes and our custodian would come in, he was long time staff member of the museum and was from immigrant from Cambodia.

And so I said, "Hey, you know, Namai, it's like there's voices in here."

And he said, "Yes, but they're good voices."

- [Crosby] And Seattle was known in 1910, around then when a lot of the Japanese immigrants came and many Chinese as well, as a city of hotels.

Because there were so many hotels for the immigrant seasonal migrant workers who worked in the canning, lumber industry, the hops industry in the 1890s, and it was, Seattle was the center of that.

- My grandparents ran a hotel just down the street on Dearborn and it was called the Russell Hotel, and it was a wood frame hotel.

And they had many people come and stay there.

Laborers from Japan who worked in the forest industry and the cannery industry.

And I recall pictures, it's like one long hall, housekeeping rooms on the side and a bathroom down the hall with a bathtub and a toilet.

And that was a hotel.

It was something like what this looked like.

- You know, I have given so many tours of that part of the museum.

And it's of course the historic spaces and that room with the really long table, which is old growth timber.

And that table was constructed inside the room.

But anyway, I've given so many tours and we talk about, oh, you know, obviously community had meetings in here.

And anyway, the man who managed this building for so many years, and he took me inside, he said, "Dear, you know, actually what people were doing around this table was gambling, you know."

- Well, it's a great cultural activity too.

It brings people together to take their money away from.

But, so the idea that there are these unifying stories, I think is an important thing that the museum, an important idea that the museum tells.

And Larry, your book about the Nisei soldiers, it's a reason that I wanted to do this conversation.

Because I read this book and I read Beth's introduction, and you both have a personal story that is related to the larger story of the Nisei.

And Larry, you were actually born on an internment camp.

- All of my stateside family were incarcerated.

My uncle, grandfather, grandmother on both sides, brother, mother, everyone except for our relatives in Hiroshima of all places.

- Right.

- And they were free.

- It's just so ironic.

- But they were bombed, you know?

And so the story intertwines with the camp and with Hiroshima and the A-bomb.

- Do you have any memory of the camp, do you?

- Well, you know, that, people ask me that, I was born there and I used to say, "No, I don't have any memories 'cause I was too young."

But what I have are all these borrowed memories, these stories, there wasn't a New Year's party, a wedding reception, a birthday party that didn't have the mention of camp.

No matter what, it always came up.

And sometimes it was really innocent, like, "Oh, you know, we had a piano," and that was it, you know.

"Not only did we have a piano, but we had this, that, this, that, but we lost it all."

And then you would hear the rest of the stories as they unfold.

And since my memories are borrowed, I only heard the worst things.

And ironically, I went back to Minidoka on the pilgrimage, and I expected to see this horrible desert, you know, where it's like a hundred degrees and every wood dust blowing everywhere, like I heard.

And it was all green fields.

The Japanese who were there irrigated.

- Right, they became gardeners.

- Yes, snake river.

And the land is just green and lush and it looks like, you know, a green and lush Skagit Valley, which is up north here, just a fantastic valley.

And it really did something to my mind, you know, like all these places I heard about that were so horrible, and I'd look at it and I say, "It's changed."

- But there's this unifying thing that so many of these soldiers who volunteered for the United States Army during the war became the Nisei soldiers, the Nisei Regiment, volunteered in the camps, from the camps.

And your father had the experience of his friends going off.

Tell us about his experience in the camps.

- So his, he had two best friends in Seattle, John Kawaguchi and Bako Kenosha.

And they were drafted into the army from Minidoka before he was.

And he had the experience, they both were killed in combat and they had their funerals in Minidoka behind barbed wire.

And my father was 20, 21 maybe.

And he had to give their eulogies in camp, yeah.

- In the camp.

- And I think he never got over the irony.

I mean, to say the least, you know, is the irony of that.

- Irony, tragedy and huge pain.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And the pain, no, his two best friends and then he has to go off and fight for his country.

A country killed his two best friends in combat.

They were fighting for their country as well.

That has locked up his family, has locked him up.

- Like Larry knows that a lot of families, they didn't talk about this time.

My father was the opposite, that within the family, he was very outspoken.

- Oh, wow.

- So we heard these stories all the time.

- I made a presentation once at the Minidoka pilgrimage, and one of the gentlemen stood up afterwards and he said, you know, he was a victim of rape.

And he said, in this case, it was the whole community being raped.

And we behaved like rape victims, we were silent many of us, we were in denial, we were depressed, some committed suicide.

Some like the 442 people tried to prove that they were good enough, to prove that they had value.

And so they volunteered, and that's phenomenal.

And still others said, "No, we're not gonna go, we're patriots and this isn't just."

And like Korematsu, Hirabayashi and Yasui all protested that and went to the Supreme Court and lost.

- And yet the story you tell in this book, which is so phenomenal to me, of the 442nd, and I think many Americans know a little bit about this, that there was a Nisei Regiment that fought.

What they probably don't know is that it was the most decorated regiment in the history of the United States.

And there are a couple of famous moments, which you talk about, which you write about in these stories like the Lost Battalion.

- Right.

- A Texas, a group of Texas soldiers who were lost and they go to find them.

- And the thing is, there were 211 Texans saved, and the numbers vary, but the 442 took a thousand casualties.

And I would suggest that if the 442 were the Lost Battalion, they would've had a hard time sending up regular troops to rescue them.

But I think the real story to me here is that the 442 is a ethnic story and it falls under ethnic studies when it gets classified.

I think the real story here is the Lost Battalion.

This has, you know, I'd urge a museum or somebody to investigate what happened to the 211 people.

What are the descendants doing now who would not have lived if these guys, these Japanese - If hadn't been for the 442nd?

- Didn't take a thousand casualties to rescue them, what are their lives like?

That would be an interesting story.

- It would be.

- Yeah, absolutely.

That seems to me, you know, is sort of a, an extraordinary story, particularly given in what this museum represents Beth, you know, the work that so many immigrants did to become part of their community, and not allowed to be citizens until the 1950s, when of course many of them were already gone.

- It's significant that those are the photos and the stories that are on the walls of this museum.

And I remember being part of the first Wing Luke Museum exhibit that I was a part of, the committees and everything, it was the Japanese American story 50 years after the executive order.

And that exhibit was extraordinary.

The fact that it happened, or the previous to me, the museum director, Ron Chew, was a community journalist.

And he, how do you run a museum?

How do you make exhibits, you know?

And he took his knowledge from being a journalist.

And so he involved all of us in telling our stories.

And so when this exhibit opened, it was 1992, and my father was still alive.

And I just remember that he came to the exhibit opening and he had this look of elation on his face that I have never seen.

And it was like an indication, you know, that this is my story, it's told from our perspective and it's on the walls of a museum.

And so for us here in the Wing Luke Museum, I've seen that happen so many times with people who are not used to having their stories on the walls of a museum or to be museum worthy.

And I'll never forget that look on my dad's face 'cause he was sort of bitter and angry, you know?

I mean, he carried a lot of stuff, yeah.

- He had every right to be.

But it really, it's doing what the museum ought to do, what you have done, which is to tell the story of people in the community and get them to tell it.

You provide the venue but they do the storytelling.

And Larry, in the book, at one point you have one of your characters say, "Tell this as if you're talking to your granddaughter and explaining what you did, to your granddaughter," which it seems to me is a great idea, is the notion that we should all be thinking about telling our stories in that way.

- The good thing about this was I interviewed every one of them except for one who had passed away, Shiro Kashino.

And I talked to these people, and my father-in-law was in the 442.

He got a silver star, I think two bronze stars.

And so I asked him, "What did you do?"

He wouldn't say, he would not talk about it.

So I was really surprised to talk to these people and have them actually tell their stories, which is marvelous.

And just tell me your story and we'll work with it.

And once you get 'em talking, then they get it out there.

There was a lot of sadness there, that people lost friends and relatives, and there was frustration, but they all persevered.

That was one of the clear things out of all of this.

And they all had a belief in America too, which was liberty and justice for all.

Even though they had no liberty, they had no justice, they kept those values.

- And so then the really, the question becomes the legacy of that story and those men and the legacy that the museum represents.

Where is the community today?

Is the community remember these things in these men and what they did, and now is it possible to have a different sort of pride about it, not just with the anger?

The anger can still exist, obviously, about the way they were treated.

But where is the community today?

- Well, it's a, I feel like the younger generations in the Japanese American community are, have even more openness and interest in the history.

- In the story, yeah.

- Yeah, and the story.

And in some ways I feel like it's a bit less personally painful, you know, for them.

And, but it doesn't matter, I mean, that's their experience.

And in a way they can be ambassadors for the story in a way that the people who was so painful, they couldn't speak about it.

And so the younger generations can, and it's good.

- But Beth, in terms of your comments, I have a friend, he's a psychiatrist, not my psychiatrist however, you know.

But he says that trauma, generational trauma can go three generations.

So, you know, the, what happened to your parents, you and your children would probably be affected by the trauma, not in the same way, but it carries over.

And I've seen that in my son.

I mean, I have a distrust in government and he does too, you know?

'Cause I mean, we were betrayed by our government, I mean, you know.

And so that's something that he carries forward, which is interesting that that's one of the residual themes, at least in my family, that still survives.

(gentle music) (slow music)