80 Years Later

- So we'd go right up there, high as we could, and then slide down into the lake.

This is the place also where when we went on vacations in the summer, we would almost always find a box turtle.

- A box turtle.

- On the road.

- Uh-huh.

- So we'd generally have a turtle and I'd come here, have it at home for a while and then bring it out here.

See, but it's actually all concrete.

- Oh.

- My full name is Tadashi Robert Shimizu, and the thing that always kinda bugged me as a young kid was that my brother, who was older than I am, his name was Paul Hiroshi Shimizu.

You know, the thing would always say first name, and I felt like I had to put down Tadashi, which labeled me right away, I mean, not that no one would notice that I was Japanese by looking at me.

I mean, I think officially now I'm Robert Tadashi Shimizu because I've signed so many official documents that way.

- I think it's cool to have that like kind of, I guess, maybe American name and kind of a Japanese name, 'cause I don't really have that.

You know, there's like, my mom's middle name is Shimizu, but I have like a very Scottish middle name.

Like McLaughlin is like not quite Japanese, you would say.

You know, me and my mom have talked a little bit about like more recently just 'cause, you know, we've just been talking about this kinda thing more.

But like what if I had two middle names, you know?

What if I had Shimizu and kind of McLaughlin?

What if I had like both links to that, you know?

Matthew McLaughlin Shimizu, that would be the full name.

- You good, Mom?

Good.

Good.

- Okay!

I was born in San Francisco, California and lived there until I was five years old.

Down the street was my grandmother's house and they had a lovely Japanese garden and I could go sit with her and she would teach me how to pop peas.

Up and down that street they were all pretty much Japanese American.

There was a Japanese language school and I went to pre-kindergarten there.

We got a chance to have a band, an orchestra of whistles.

And I just love to be the conductor of the band.

I really feel grateful that I had that time because I feel comfortable being Japanese American.

- I kept, you know, notes on things that I experienced in camp and things like that.

And I was thinking about Aunt Toshi and your father being sent to, you know.

- And not knowing.

- Right.

- And so forth, I made some comments because I listened to some women at the latrine and I was eavesdropping because they were talking about the horrible conditions at Poston and, you know, and how things were so bad there.

And so I thought, oh, that is so terrible that, you know?

And everybody that part of our family was at Poston.

- Yeah.

- This is the family home in Shizuoka Prefecture and it still exists.

I wanted to have you see Grandma when she was young and in Japan, and this is the way she looked.

She is in a kimono, and most of us have only seen her in Western clothes here.

- On December 7th, 1941, I was 16 and a senior at Sequoia Union High School in Redwood City.

We didn't know about what had happened at Pearl Harbor until we got home.

Not long afterwards, we learned of some of the elders of our Japanese American community being taken away by the FBI.

My uncle was one of them and turned in a detention camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.

We couldn't understand why he should have been taken.

He managed the nursery in San Leandro, California, and he drove to the wholesale flower market in San Francisco each day to sell roses.

He was married with two little boys.

- I have zero memory of that, of what happened.

But I do remember, you know, us waiting to see him come back from the FBI camp.

- He left Aunt Toshi and the two little boys, and we didn't know where he was.

- That was a very scary time for our family.

- Yeah.

- Not knowing how he was being treated there or if he would ever be released.

- He was very bitter about it.

He definitely pledged never to come back to California.

He went there and the rest of us, women and children, all went to the regular camps, if you wanna call it that.

Things that I remember from camp were, you know, basically little vignettes, I think, you know, I mean just like stealing cucumbers, and I can almost picture having a bottle of soy sauce in my hand and hiding among the rose and pouring it on the raw cucumber and eating it.

And I remember being caught in a rainstorm and being carried by older people.

I remember those kinda things, but I think virtually, all of it is out of context, just something out of the blue.

- It was a stall, you know, where horses are kept.

There were iron cots, nothing on it.

My mother was so exhausted and she just sat there.

The thing is my dad is a kind of dad who's decided to sleep in the back part of the stall, which was the most smelly, and...

He wanted the front part to be left for us.

- My mother was an unusual person, I would say.

I'm sure she took this just the way she looked at the whole thing.

She just saw it as, well, stuff happens.

Stuff happens and you just make the best of it And I think that's probably how she looked at it and how she presented it to us.

It probably didn't hit us as hard as some, you know, because she was always kind of the mind that, oh, it wasn't that bad.

You know, there's a kind of a famous saying: shikata ga nai Things happen, you do the best you can.

And she never expressed a lot of bitterness or anger.

- All that went through my mind over and over again was a line from "Macbeth," "Ay, deep in the ditch, he bides.

Ay, deep in the ditch, he bides."

And years later I discovered what that meant.

That was a betrayal of everything.

Everything that I ever trusted or believed in was betrayed.

I felt so much rage that I could not express out loud because it was not safe.

When we were released from Tanforan Racetrack, this is the first church that I came to.

We could come here and be in the front seats and vote.

They didn't want us to start a Japan town, but they could not prevent us from coming to church.

- As people were allowed to leave camp, they were instructed not to congregate in public.

The West Coast was still closed to Japanese Americans, so they weren't allowed to go there.

But Chicago being in the center of the country away from the coast, it was an acceptable place for people to come.

- The people coming out of the camps came to this church because they knew that there would be help here.

- Both my parents were so active in social justice.

My father even went to Montgomery to greet the marchers from Selma.

- We were involved in a lot of fair housing kinds of things, integrating this community, just because we were denied access.

- They continued the work because it wasn't just being a minister, right?

It was also integrating a community.

- Have you been here before?

- The first thing they had was this completely worn down, torn up storefront.

There was just some random place, looked like it had no occupants for years.

And they just set up their beans sprout tubs there, and they made beans sprouts and tofu.

And, you know, somehow with as little, you know, opportunity to sell, it seemed to me they did well enough and, of course, were frugal and all that, and they bought this property and built this building.

- So they owned the land.

- Yes.

- And they built the building.

- They built the property.

It's the life work of, and how Grandpa picked up the pieces of the internment and of being put into prison and looked upon as an enemy of the state and all this.

And that he was able to still have a successful life and, you know, be content with his life and be happy that he put his two sons through college, you know?

- And I think he was more than happy with that, yeah.

I think Grandma was just happy that we were happy.

- Yeah.

- So.

- After, you know, being in the, you know, prison camps and I mean when I think about your dad, I think about him coming over here when he was so young and starting his life over here in California and, you know, Grandma having been kind of like living here and then both of them losing everything and having to start again.

- Yeah, starting over a couple times.

- Yeah, it's easy to just say it's like American dream kinda thing.

But that was not where they started, they didn't start...

They started with like an American nightmare and then tried to create something for like you, Dad, and Uncle Paul.

And it seems like from when you talk about Grandpa, that there is like still this, you know, bitterness even with creating a new life.

(birds tweeting) - And then you just squish it out from the center to meet the edges.

I think that's all you need, right?

- Yeah.

- All right.

- Yep.

- Sometimes, the first part of a conversation in Cincinnati would be, "Oh, where are you from?"

- Where are you really from?

- Yeah.

Where are you from?

And, you know, and if you were a wise ass like I was, sometimes, I would say, "I'm from Price Hill, where are you from?"

And then I remember one person getting really angry at me and saying "I was trying to be liberal and you made fun of me."

We were pretty fine with everything until I think the most devastating for us was you and Susie not being accepted by the sorority that Mom had belonged to.

It's kinda like you're cruising along, feeling comfortable with life and then you find that out.

- So Matthew and Dan, I don't know if you guys are familiar, Grandma was in a sorority called Kappa Kappa Gamma, which is a very popular sorority.

Since I'm her daughter, I would be called a legacy and Auntie Susie was the same.

And essentially, as a legacy to the sorority, you pretty much get asked back all the time and usually get an invitation to join.

Within one or two days, she and I both were like outright rejected by Kappa, my mom's sorority.

Dan, Susie and I each had kind our own different incidences of feeling, you know, or being, you know, the victims of racism and feeling different.

But through high school, not really.

And I was similar to Grandpa, I played sports, I did student body things, I had a lot of different diverse friends.

And I think for me, I felt...

I just didn't understand, but it was pretty obvious that the reason because I was half Japanese.

Nobody in these places looked like me.

And, you know, and it was just, yeah, shocking.

- I don't think it was even how you looked, it was your name.

- Correct.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Like you were mad, Mom was mad that she was also like, I mean sounds kind of melodramatic for a sorority, but she kinda felt betrayed, right?

This is a place where she had created some really good friendships and had done a lot for them.

And then now her two daughters were pretty much rejected outright.

- Yeah.

And the whole thing was that you ended up being not just a member of another sorority, you were the president of another sorority.

And it's just like how do they justify what they did?

- You know, with any person who's a survivor of trauma, it's a feeling of not wanting that trauma to enter into their current life, wanting to move on.

And the government, I think, was also intent on Japanese Americans moving on.

When we moved to Northbrook, it was such a drastic change going from this very comfortable, multicultural environment, and I was the only person of color in my entire junior high school.

And I felt, even though we never openly talked about it, I knew that our family was kind of under siege in this primarily white neighborhood.

I wonder if that is one of the negative inheritances of them going through the evacuation, you know, 'cause people didn't talk about it.

And I wonder if that led to, we just don't talk about difficult things.

You know, "Gaman" like you endure and you get through it, you figure it out.

And then the other phrase is Shikata Ganai, "It can't be helped."

So there could be a feeling of... we are sort of... out of control of some of the impacts in our lives and we have to just bear it and move on.

And that doesn't really work because there had to have been a lot of anger that was just forced down in order to be able to move on.

So I think that that could really have a negative effect on younger generations.

- Well, I think it was that we were getting to the point in history class where we were coming to World War II, and I approached my teacher and said, "Hey, like my grandmother went through this, should we see if she'd be willing to talk to the class so the students to know that hey, these are things that have happened, you know?

Here's just somebody who can tell you about that for, you know, what it was like, you know, in one of the dark times of our country's history of what kind of things have happened here."

- One of the things I really valued about you is that you admired what the Japanese American soldiers went through.

You really wanted to follow in their footsteps.

- The service of the 442nd definitely was a factor in me joining the army myself.

I don't know if it was naive or just wishful thinking, but I know my hope was that maybe I could least help to, in some way, maybe protect the legacy that they had left behind.

I wanted to show that hey, we're still here, we're still serving, you know, we're still loyal.

It might have been Jean that sent me a newspaper article about how Japanese Americans were like trying to give support for the Muslim American community 'cause they'd been through the internment, and, you know, trying to talk about how this shouldn't happen again.

I even put up those articles in my wall locker.

I don't know if I made much of an impact, but I know I tried to, you know, voice some dissenting opinion.

Say "Hey, you know, just 'cause, you know, the people we're fighting maybe from one place, it doesn't mean all people from there are the same."

As a reminder of where I'd come from, and, you know, that the, you know, the cultural legacy that, at the time, I felt like that had been left behind for me to inherit.

- Well, this is where we lived, on this side.

- On the left?

- On the left.

Yamaguchi's on the right.

These steps right here.

- Yeah.

- This is where I used to play ball.

(chuckles) - Did it feel big when you were younger I guess, or?

- Yeah, it felt enormous.

- Yeah.

(chuckling) My brother and I used to wrestle all the time and I was looking at it one day and I thought, how the hell did we wrestle- - Yeah, in such a small place.

- It's a small place.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

So my dad put this up.

- Oh, yeah?

And uh, this whole area over here, they had azaleas and rhododendrons on that ridge.

They were very happy, very content.

- Yeah.

- To sit here listening to the radio, the Reds game.

- Reds game.

- And he'd say, "It doesn't get any better than this."

And all I could think of was, I hope the hell it does.

I mean there are times I think as I got older, closer to 10 or 12, I would think, you know, "Why do I have to look like this?

Why do I have to look different?

You know, why am I identifiable to everyone walking down the street that, "You are different than the rest of us.

Or you're not as good as we are?"

But I think, you know, the overall treatment of myself, my brother, we were pretty much treated or taken on face value.

(crowd chattering) (crowd cheering) - We were good at things, we were good in school, and I think that's how they took us.

- Oh my gosh, check out this one.

- The matrix.

(chuckling) Yeah, it's kinda... Makes you look, like "Is that really me?"

- Oh yeah.

- My experience is like almost the exact contrast to what your experience was.

Like people tell me you're not Japanese enough.

I say I'm Japanese and they'll be like, "How much?"

Like, you know, like I'll be like, "Oh yeah, my grandpa's Japanese and my mom is half Japanese, so I guess I'm a quarter Japanese."

- Quapa.

- Yeah, exactly.

Quapa.

And then they'll say, "You know, well, 25%, I don't know if that's enough.

What are you doing here, you know?

You're only half Japanese.

You don't look Japanese."

It's almost like an exact opposite experience but sometimes, I look in the mirror and wish I was more Japanese, or I looked more Japanese.

So we're here at the Japanese American Service Committee.

This center was established many years ago during the resettlement period.

As a social worker for many years, I had studied the impact of trauma, different types of trauma, on individuals and families.

And it made me think about the trauma of the forced evacuation.

This project with the mural really came out of that and was one of the highlights.

The shame and denial, the expectation that we would assimilate, even though that's impossible in this country to a certain extent, and forget.

Also typically, as a mother-daughter... there was a lot of tension at a certain point.

But what I say is it took both of us working on it.

Like we didn't really talk about feelings.

And then, yeah, we were able to also, I was able to forgive, and forgiving in the sense of letting go and letting the love come out.

- Well, you know, the thing is that in the Japanese language, and I don't know a whole lot about it, but there is a phrase, Ai Shiteru but I've never heard anybody say that to anyone, not to say, "I love you."

It was really important later on in life to realize that actually, my children, growing up in this culture and in this generation, needed to hear me say, "I love you" "I love you."

And that's also something that my son told me when he was dying.

"Mom, I forgive you," he said to me.

He says, "You know, I really learned to say I love you and I wanted to hear people... You tell me you love me."

"So I have made," my son says, "I have made every effort to tell my kids 'I love you,' so that they would know that from me."

And that was a huge lesson for me, huge lesson for me.

- This is the famous safe that Grandpa put in.

- Oh, he installed it?

- Yeah, he installed it.

He put this in and put it in concrete so no one would steal it.

And I think, talking to the present owner, they tried to get it out and could not get it out.

- Yeah.

You could tell.

(chuckling) - The only other event they had here was to make mochi.

They would get a bunch of guys to come down and pound the mochi.

- Yeah.

- So they'd have it for New Year's.

- It gives me courage to know that they had like a certain pride within themselves.

- I mean it feels like the opposite of assimilation that they started a Japanese food store.

You and I both were like athletic and did, you know, like student body stuff and engaging in kind of like our lives in this very kinda traditional American way versus like being, you know, Japanese American, Japanese American half.

And I was thinking about, you know, kind of this transference, you know, like from you to me, to Matthew.

Even still now, like even through Matthew and Daniel finding my way as they've been more...

I mean they both speak Japanese and I don't speak any Japanese.

It's kind of just, you know- - Me neither.

- Yeah, and you neither, like neither of us.

Actually, neither of us speak any Japanese.

It's really just you and Daniel.

- Well, I mean, I think the inspiration for that for me, like to learn Japanese or to like learn about that kind of thing really came from like Kiyo, you know, at the family reunion.

- You know, telling us like, "Engage with it any way you can.

It doesn't have to be grand or, you know, have to like have, you know, something really super meaningful to it.

It's more about like engaging with the story, you know?"

(chattering indistinctly) - Make sure the- - Yeah.

- Don't roll back.

- I'm gonna get you as close as I can to the warmth.

Feeling responsible for people and taking care of people, it was something that I've been thinking about this whole time is just always how I've always noticed, definitely noticed, how grandma always met everybody, whether they're four years old or they feel like they're the black sheep and whether they're feel like the overachiever that she meets everybody with compassion and treats everybody the same.

And I think that was, it's always great to, you know, really treat everybody well and deserving of care.

Kind of thinking about just also what she's gone through to still have that kindness and meeting any hardship with grace.

As a high school teacher, I mean that's how I try to meet my students every day and something I'm always thinking about.

How can I meet our kids and make connections and treat them with compassion every day.

- It's scary times as far as being Asian.

And, you know, I thought there was a point where we were past that, but... You know, I'm afraid for Mom and Jean.

You know, they don't go out too much, but, you know, I mean, just, it can happen just walking down the street.

And that's not the way it should be, you know?

But unfortunately, that's the way it is.

- A lot of my peers, if I tell 'em my grandma was put into an internment camp, they kind of just go, "Oh wow."

They may have read it in a history textbook a couple years ago, but, you know, it's a part of you that you're like, "Damn," that like... Just because of the way someone looked or where they came from...

I don't appear too Asian on the outside, so it's something that I really carry with me on the inside.

We know Grandma's experience, and I'm kind of realizing that not everybody knows that experience, that it even happened.

- I mean, I love being able to take care of my mom.

And I love helping you tell your story, because I know not too many people can tell it the way you do, because you've really thought about it and you've connected with your feelings about it.

I feel like I'm sort of a caretaker of the story in my mother.

- Is it kind of the same, like the same trees and the same-?

- Yeah, this looks all the same to me.

You know I wanna be responsible for like carrying on like kind of intergenerational experience.

I wanna be able to like carry what my mom carried and my grandpa, you know, carried.

Like I wanna be that legacy, I wanna pass on that torch and I wanna tell, you know, my children that they're Japanese.

Even though they're gonna be, you know, maybe only an eighth Japanese.

(birds tweeting) - Well, I'd have to say that it makes me feel good.

It makes me wanna be you.

And in another sense, it's surprising that he...

I think he has more of a sense of it than I've ever had.

I think that there's always been a part of me that, that's hiding my Japanese... my Japanese-ness or culture or whatever you wanna call it.

And I think that was a brutality of my childhood that I was made to feel ashamed of who I was.

I mean I have to say I feel like I've lived a bit of a charmed life and gotten many things in life that many people didn't have.

But on the other hand, I think I gave up things that I probably shouldn't have.

(bird squawking) I think it's kind of a pretty unique opportunity, you know?

Like I get to talk about you, you know, talk about these things that happened a lot before I was born, you know?

And learn something new.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- It's hard to really understand.

I mean I think it's better just to have a discussion and let it flow and think about it later and what it means.

So I'd generally let the turtles go right around here.

I don't know if that was a smart thing to do or whether they made it out, you know, at the time they'd just start swimming away.

I don't know if they got trapped in here.

- Yeah.

- Or some kinder, smarter soul took him out.

Yeah, a beautiful day in Cincinnati.

- Yeah.