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Eimi Okano and Jeanette Arakawa

Date: August 11, 2022
Interviewer: Ellina Yin, Yvonne Kwan, Vickie Taketa
Interviewee: Eimi Okano and Jeanette Arakawa

Eimi Okano and Jeanette Arakawa met as mother-activists in the Palo Alto area and joined forced to lead the textbook evaluation efforts that were later taken on by Asian American Community Involvement (AACI).

Transcript of Eimi Okano, Jeanette Arakawa

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Systems & Power Timeframe 0:00 >> 13:49

EO: Okay. My name is Eimi Okano, longtime resident of Palo Alto, and we moved to Palo Alto around 1966. And one of the early organizations that we became active in was the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple. And when I first arrived there, I knew the minister's wife from previous occasions, and she said, "I know just the person I want you to meet." And she introduced me to Jeannette. And I did not know anything about Jeannette at the time. And we got to know each other better as we did different activities at the temple belonging to the women's group and being active with the children's Sunday school classes that we jointly taught. So, and then that's where it's all started. And our kids were in school, the same Palo Alto Unified, and the issues were interesting in and becoming more so when Jeannette was active with her PTA and the chair of the committee for... I don't know what it's called, activism? Legal compliance?

JA: Human Relations.

EO: Human Relations. It's a nice name. Human Relations Committee. And through that, she became interested in the fact that there was no representation of people of color in textbooks. And so she thought it would be interesting to see whether in the course of the school that the kids went through, whether they would ever be exposed to stories about other people besides the white people. And so we started looking at textbooks, and examining each one of the textbooks and counting faces and realizing that there were if there were people of color at all, it was colored in faces. In other words, it was white first, and they just put some color over the faces. So that was what our experience was in looking at textbooks. And therefore, Jeanette decided that we should count heads and have a record of what we really found in K-8 textbooks. And so she got a committee together. And there were, let's see. Martha Holman, who a wife of a doctor and active with Stanford University as well as Palo Alto Unified. And there's Mallory, who was a PTA person who worked with Jeanette and Marie Bryant. She was. I guess she was active at Gunn High School, I wasn't sure where she came from.

JA: Cubberly.

EO: Cubberly. But she was African American. So our committee itself was made up of two of us. And Marie, who was African American, and then two Anglo Americans. So the five of us were going through the textbooks and came up with a hole. I wish we had computers in those days, but, you know, in those days what we did was we counted heads and had "one, two, three, four, five and cross" and counted heads that way in the textbooks and put it together on graph paper. So that took a lot of time. But with the five of us, we were able to put together a report for Jeanette, who was the head of the committee. She helped to define what our each step would be, trying to bring the point across that there were no representation of people of color who contributed anything to the textbooks at all. And that began our journey to look at what it would take. And Jeanette was the one that did all the research that it took to find out how to get things changed at the state level so that textbooks would then be reflective of what our population is of today. So, ok Jeanette. And that's that's how we got started with counting heads, then making a report to the State Board of Education.

JA: I can still remember Eimi's daughter, Kerry, oldest child, saying “unidentifiable non-whites”. That was the expression that Eimi had going to describe people who were unidentifiable, but they were non-whites. And I think at this particular point in our history, there are more non-describable, let's see, undescribable non-whites than probably any other. Describes more people than any other people at this moment. And there was a paucity of undescribable non-whites. But one of the things that we did is decide that we would try to illustrate a point, and we put together a montage of faces of a variety of color and ethnicities, and we took it to Escondido School's third grade. And then we asked the question, "Point out which are the Americans in this picture." And the only people that they pointed out were the whites.

EO: And these are pictures that we got from Life magazine that we knew were American pictures of Americans, not of foreigners. And that's why we put it together in that way and could ask that question and feel like if they identified anybody of color, that they were American, because it came from a description that showed that they were a part of the United States.

JA: I think part of the the disgust that I felt was because of my past experience of being identified as an enemy.

EO: Yes. But I you know, I was five years old at the time. She was close to ten. And so at ten and the teenage years, I think that population of Japanese Americans really suffered more of the name calling and identifying and pointing rather than me at five years of age. So I didn't experience it to the extent that I heard other people tell stories of what happened with them as they were a little bit older. So yeah, it was very painful. And it marks you when it when you're impressionable at an impressionable age and told that you're not an American.

I think one of the early things that got us interested in doing something about it was that there was a textbook. No, there was a book that was written on Japanese Americans, "The Untold Story." And in that particular book, it told the story of Japanese American kids in camp, etc. But in it was an erroneous, demeaning aspect of description of Buddhism. And I think that's what made us say that this cannot be adopted by the State Board of Education as a textbook to be read by all students, because that's going to re-emphasize discrimination against people of different religions. And so Jeannette was able to shift gears a little bit there, and we were able to figure out what's going to happen with the textbooks. And she said that we had to go to the State Board of Education before they adopt this book. And in the meantime, she was talking to people of influence. She has a relative that was in higher education in the university someplace. Anyway, in trying to get the people at the university level to know that there is this erroneous passage in that book and "Would they be willing to speak up against this book?" made a big difference.

And the State Board did not adopt this book for the state education of kids, which was really a great, great milestone for us. And, you know, you get a little taste of success like that. So when you see something that's not right, you're apt to speak up again the next time. And I think that when we started looking at textbooks that the kids were looking at every day and knowing that there was this lack of inclusion of people of color at all levels of K-8, then that's when the decision to let the State Board of Education know that there was this big hole and it was Jeanette who did the research on finding out that any description of what the content of the state books would be are in the guns and ammunition or alcohol and firearms…section of the state Ed code, which was... It floored me, of all places, to have a description of what you're going to have as a description of kids in textbooks. So anyway, that started our journey on letting the state board know, and over time. they were able to see what we were trying to say. And at all the meetings that we started attending in Sacramento, the publishers were really interested in what we were saying and not too pleased with the fact that they're going to have to change their whole textbooks in terms of pictures and inclusions of stories, etc.

But as it turns out, as we were making this trip to Sacramento many times, there was also a separate group in Los Angeles who was also doing the same thing of pointing out the fact that there were no inclusion of Mexican American heritage and stories. And so we met at the State Board of Education, and both of us made our pitch to the state board saying that this had to change. And through many, many meetings back and forth, we felt that it was worthwhile, as the state board did make that decision to include this section in their State Education Code, which would then have more representation in the textbooks of kids. So that was fun.

So, you know, when we talk about activism, that counts as activism, but I think that for us as parents, just making a point of of clarification and change, it was not, you know, rallying the troops, so to speak, or feeling like the activism of today where young people are making their voices known. We kind of did what we did because it was the right thing to do, and I don't know that we ever thought of ourselves as activists at that time, but it's interesting to hear the conversation from young people here.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 13:49 >> 19:11

(Interviewer) Can I ask both you and Jeannette: What was it in the fifties and the sixties? Was there any outside influences, movements that also inspired you?

EO: Well the Black Movement was going on strong at that time.

JA: I don't know if you'd call it a movement, but when the war was over in 1940-something, forty-four, forty-five. I was living in, you know, in 1945, we were returning from camp. And I was a freshman in high school when I returned to San Francisco. And in high school around about freshman year, US history is a course that is taught and offered. And the teacher who was an instructor for it, for US history, at Lowell, was a forensic teacher. I don't know if you have been involved with forensics. It's debate, and I was in his class and he said "Jeanette, I lost most of my debaters when the war started." So apparently he had a large class of debaters. And he said, "Won't you try out for us?" And I was not a debater. There was no way that I would join something like that simply because I was Japanese and he taught U.S. history.

But we touched on World War II, but there was no mention of the camp. And when I was a freshman at Berkeley, one of the things that you had to do was pass a Subject A – an English class. I was fortunate, but then you had to take either English or Subject A. English or Subject A in order to fulfill your English requirement. And I happened to enroll in a class where the teacher at the end of the class said, "I want to talk to you Jeanette." And then he said, "Were you in the camp during the war?" And it was the first time that anybody who, outside of those having been in camp, to bring up the subject of camp. So that these feeling that nobody else cared. And this teacher says to me, "I kept records from the time that the evacuation took place, and the evacuation basically removed me from my San Francisco home." And then he said, "In a situation like this, there are the spoilers and the spoilees." He said," You are in the category of spoilees, and I'm cataloging the spoilers." And he says, "I'm working on the spoilers. You need to share your story of being in camp." And so, it was the first time that anybody had ever brought up the camp. And then as it turned out, the teacher, my speech teacher, had been writing a book. And it's called "War, Prejudice, and the Constitution." And so then he says, "It's important for me to write my story. You need to share your story."

Transformation & Change Timeframe 19:11 >> 23:08

EO: Well, you know, it's it's interesting to have a friend who's on the same wavelength as one is. And so whenever an issue or a project or something comes up, then she, or I, or we would get involved in it and pursue it to wherever it took us. And so that's how the textbook issue was an important part of our working together.

And we did a lot of things at the temple together in terms of social organization as well. And so the activism came about just because we cared about the same issues. So like when the issue of Fred Yamamoto's name came up in not wanting a school named after him because the name "Yamamoto" was anathema to a certain population of newly arrived Chinese Americans in Palo Alto schools, then that went before the school board, and of course, it involves my kids, my grandkids. And Jeanette, of course, cared about it as well. So we got involved in going to meetings there. And she gave a talk, and I made a sign, and we both had a chance to say to the School Board that Yamamoto is an American name. So what's wrong with naming the school after Yamamoto? And they didn't see it that way because they had a crowd of vocal population there who did not want Yamamoto's name at all, because that was a name that conjured up war time atrocities in China. So at that time. And that came up, I was thinking about this more recently, and I think that it came about so quickly that we didn't have a chance to organize ourselves in order to put forth the different issues that should have swayed the school board better than what we did on the spot. So anyway, that was my regret after the fact that we didn't work harder to be sure that the Yamamoto name is a school in Palo Alto right now. (Interviewer) So Jeanette's smiling because you had that moment where you both held up that sign. Could you talk a little more about that?

JA: Well, on the day of the hearing, Eimi said, “I think I’m going to make it.” Her daughter Kimberly was making signs, I think, and she says, “I think I want to make a sign,” and I said, “Well, go for it.” And the sign read, “Fred Yamamoto is an American name too.” And as it happened, you know, each person at the meeting was given a chance to to speak. And they – the President of the School Board – called on the people, and I was short changed. You were given so much time to get up to the podium and speak and whatever. And I’ve barely introduced myself or the name like “Arakawa,” you know. It goes fast. And Eimi happened to be right there. And so I insisted on speaking, and he insisted that I sit down, and Eimi was right. There was the sign, and it was captured on film.

Timeframe 23:08 >> 27:20

JA: Yeah, I'd forgotten about it. It's what occurred to us that there are support organizations for the churches, and they're broad, and there's the recognition that... There is not a recognition that that there is an underlying organization that will assure that Japanese American organizations will survive. For example, the temples have this big organization that is... Not that it's going to survive because of that organization, but it does have something that provides a foundation or a remembrance. I don't know of how you would describe it, but we want to know that. I don't know about you guys, but I want to know that 25, 30 years from now, there is an organization that revives an endowment to them. So the JACL might still be here, AACI might still be here. I don't know whether I'd be. But what it is, it's more of a fund which is distributed over a long period of time, maybe ten years, with $10,000 a year. And there are some organizations that have already been designated as the recipients. And I'm embarrassed to say I don't know what those are. I'll have to look it up. But in looking, I think we need to look to the future and know that that this organization, the one that you represent, still exists down the road. It's not a one-time one-shot deal.

(Interviewer: Connie Young Yu, CYY) So that's both of you, a full collaboration on this, too. Hakone Gardens.

JA: Have you received any communication from them?

CYY: Oh, not yet. I'll talk to you about that then. Wonderful for the support.

(Interviewer: Vickie Taketa, VT): That's an an incredible concept.

JA: But it it needs to be done if you want to keep the organizations going and keeping the Japanese history alive.

Narrative & Identity Timeframe 27:20 >> 28:42

EO: See, I think right now, too, seems to be a time where we see Asian Americans in particular, and hopefully Japanese Americans will join in as well. I have not seen that that it's called out that so much. But to see that the Asian Americans are active in standing up for their own rights right now, as we see many incidences of discrimination and physical assaults and things going on and being called out now, I think it's always been happening in different ways, but it wasn't as publicized as it is today. And I think that we have to, as Asian Americans, we need to be in the news when these things happen so that things can change for the future. And to have these incidences right now, you know, I fear for my grandchildren who are young and being exposed to anti-Asian rhetoric of any kind. It's a concern. And so I think the Asian American voice has to be heard. I think we've been quiet too long. And so whoever has a voice is someone to be supported. If their voice is in the right direction that we want to go with. So, yeah.

Timeframe 28:42 >> 33:31

(Interviewer) Thinking about your your children and grandchildren. So, Jeanette, you have a granddaughter? In turn, could you talk about, you know, you must have inspired her and helped motivate her.

JA: Actually, she was an anomaly. She went to the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and she entered as a somebody who takes care of entertainment. What would that be?

(Interviewer) Her major was in business, entertainment, hospitality?

JA: Hospitality

She enrolled as a hospitality major, and she did extremely well, and she entered the honors program there. And as it turned out, the honors program shared the same office building as the law school. And apparently there's some communication between the law school and the honors program. And so by the time she graduated, they had recruited her as the law student. And she's completed her four years. And she's also completed her, whatever it is, the bar in Nevada. But in the process, she also got an internship at the time. At the time she was recruited for law school, there was a person or organization or law firm that volunteered to provide her an internship. So she got her scholarship to law school as a junior. She had to go to work in that law school, and the internship guaranteed that she'd have a job every summer until she graduated. And upon graduation, they'd hire her. And she had, uh, what does she have....

(Interviewer) So have you and she talked about, you know, community involvement? And has she ever interviewed you about your life story?

JA: She's coming home this weekend. She also got a clerkship with the judge after graduation, so she hasn't selected her major or what specialty she's going to go into. But I only share this story because she worried about what level of school she should go to, and going to what is considered to be a lesser school can provide a lot of opportunity. So if you're interested in law, check out Las Vegas.

Systems & Power Timeframe 33:31 >> 35:16

(Interviewer – not in recording) So going back to what you started to talk about, Eimi. When I talked about movements of the fifties and the sixties, and you started to talk about the influence of the Black movement. Do you want to kind of talk a little bit more about that?

EO: At that time. Let's see. That must have been in the sixties or seventies, right? At the same time that we were doing our own work with the textbooks, there was an overlay between the two. And to see the the vitality with which the Black movement was making its point as necessary as it was in order to do that, it became a a conversation at every turn. It's not something that you could easily get away with: you couldn't hide it under the rug. And I think to see that activism going on over there and the progress that they were making in terms of getting their rights or the laws changed – slowly but surely – I think that also fuels anybody who wants to get something done. It inspires the hard work to do that. And so I think that the overlay of that kind of activism at the same time that we were trying to get things moving at the local level was inspirational. And I think that it helped to know that if they can do it, we can do it too. And so I was glad to see that that movement was started. Very necessary. And started so that it can inspire all the rest of us to also make our point known when we needed to have things change. So in terms of textbooks, it made it easier for us to make our point when we know that there's this activism that's already behind us in the environment.

Transformation & Change Timeframe 35:16 >> 39:27

(Interviewer) So can I ask the two of you the same question? Did the two of you testify to the hearings on reparation of Japanese Americans? And how did you feel, and what did you think when you got that check and apology in the mail?

JA: The apology is what really moved me and the check. My parents were still alive, and so the checks went to my parents. But this letter of acknowledgment meant the world to me.

EO: I think it was inspirational that the head of the United States would be able to write a letter of apology, you know, from his position at that time. And Ronald Reagan is someone who is known to have had some interaction with Asian Americans, maybe in general, but Japanese Americans in particular. And so he understood and could see that this was the right thing to do. And when he signed the check, it made it easier for the others to follow suit as well. So we were very fortunate that our government can distribute that kind of apology along with a check after they made a mistake in sending citizens to concentration camps.

JA: And the result of the constitutional... The movement that passed, that Congress passed in support of their findings that the reason for the war was because of racial prejudice and the poor leadership. And my history teacher from Cal, his work was a major part of the research that went into passing those of that movement. And the name slips this.

(Interviewer): War hysteria.

JA: What was the congressional movement? What was the name of the movement of?

(Interviewer) Reparations? Redress? Redress and rehabilitation?

No, it was, uh, it almost sounded like an amendment.

(Interviewer) It was called H.R., Wasn't it named after the 442? H.R? Civil Liberties Act?

JA: Yeah, something like that.

(Interviewer) Civil Liberties Act. It was the Civil Liberties Act. Yup, it was called H.R. 442 - Civil Liberties Act.

JA: So for me and for 100,000 other people and anybody else who [inaudible]

Joy & Cultural Resistence Timeframe 39:27 >> end

(Interviewer – not in interview) Is there anything else you want to say about your collaboration and friendship as two activists over a lifetime?

JA: I'm at a very critical point in my life, Eimi.

EO: We've had a long friendship.

(Interviewer) It shows.

EO: And we will continue. Yes. I just know that whenever there's an issue that is in the news or something, I know that she and I will probably be on the same side of that issue. And that's not easy to say with a lot of other people. So it's one of the easier conversations for me to have with her, because if it's at that level, then at many other levels, we have similar kinds of ideals. So we've been very fortunate to find each other.

(Interviewer) We're fortunate too. Yes. And when you talk about this is "my space," I have a feeling that this is part of that inclusive space for you Jeanette as well.

JA: Well, clearly she... Sometimes it's more her space.

EO: It's nice to come to her space.

JA: Well that's not what we meant at all.

(Interviewer) How important do you feel your friendship was in enabling you to do the things that you accomplished together? Like, would you have been able to do it without each other? How important was this friendship for both of you to keep you going and inspired?

JA: Oh wow, that's difficult. I can't imagine. I just can't imagine.

EO: Well, I know for myself, I would not have been able to go along with anything without her. But I know that she would have been able to move forward with a group of people that would help her reach their goals as well. So I was glad that I was able to be part of her sphere of influence and be able to work... There's nothing like working on a cause that you believe in with other people who believe in it too. And so I think that I was fortunate that we happen to have that kind of common interest and goal in life in general and that we get along, because otherwise, it'd be hard. I think for me, it's like we've had a common a common lived experience. And going through the war years the way we did, and then to happen to move to Palo Alto at a time that a lot of things were changing, like, for instance, for me, I had a young family, but at that time I wasn't that politically involved or interested or active at all. But as my kids got older and started going to school and joining the PTA and knowing about all the causes that one can get involved in, I was lucky that my husband allowed me to do whatever I wanted that made me happy. And so he supported me by watching the kids and being able to be there when I needed him. And I think that that was pretty much the same way it must have been with Kiyo [Jeanette’s husband], who also supported Jeanette in her endeavors. So we just happened to be lucky to have family that were able to be independent enough – that didn't rely on our physical presence at all times. And we were able to pursue that which was necessary. Like, I mean going, I mean thinking back on it, going to Sacramento as necessary, and I can't even remember what I did with the kids. You know, it was taken care of. Somehow or other it was done, and we were able to do what we were able to do. So I think that it was a tempo of the times, and our families, and especially our husbands who supported us, and the community that was ready to hear what needed to be changed. The change, I think. And the fight goes on. The change is to make society more egalitarian and equal for everybody. And we do that in small and large ways. And Japanese Americans, Asian Americans, is one part of that. But there's the bigger picture that we have to be aware of, especially today. I am concerned for what the future looks like politically right now. And so it's especially important for you young people to be involved with making it right for the future, whatever that means and whatever that takes. And to round up people who are interested in being a part of that. A lot of people will go along, but somebody has to lead the whole thing. And so I'm hoping that you all are the ones to lead, and we will follow you.