Kishi Bashi – Omoiyari Album
Japanese American, Singer and Songwriter, Kishi Bashi’s (Kaoru Ishibashi) latest album, Omoiyari highlights the experiences of incarceration. The Japanese word, Omoiyari, means holding empathy and compassion. The album is the result of two years of Ishibashi’s numerous interviews with with those affected by, and visits to former WWII internment camps, where around 120,000 Japanese descendants across the United States were incarcerated.
KBCS caught up with Ishibashi before his Seattle performance at the Showbox SODO in early October.
Producer: Yuko Kodama
Photo: Max Ritter
Thanks to John Woodgate for transcription. Special thanks to Tamiko Nietering for assistance with this story.
Yuko Kodama 0:00
KBCS 91.3 I’m Yuko Kodama.
Kishi Bashi, is a singer and songwriter whose most recent album “Omoiyari” centers its lens on the experiences of about 120,000 Japanese descendants who were incarcerated in internment camps during the Second World War. Research for this album took Kishi Bashi, or Kaoru Ishibashi on numerous trips to visit former internment locations throughout the United States. He spoke with me about this experience at the Showbox Sodo in early October.
Unknown Speaker 0:35
Song
Yuko Kodama 0:50
Tell me about that first time that you went to Heart mountain and what that felt like for you as someone coming from a family that didn’t experience being incarcerated in the camps.
KB 1:04
That wasn’t the first place I went, actually I went to Manzanar and Poston first actually, and some of the West Coast sites like the assembly centers. And honestly, it was a little troubling at first. I went to Manzanar and I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it’s a beautiful place under the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s very peaceful, you know, you go there and you’re wonder “why am I not feeling the trauma, or the injustice that happened” and I think you can’t feel bad about yourself for not being able to process things immediately. I think it sometimes it takes time might take years and maybe never, you know,
Yuko Kodama 1:35
As you’re talking about this, you know, you might have had a more difficult time processing it at first, but then you’ve come to work on music that is speaking to the processing of this and videos around this as well. So as you’ve been processing, where’s it taking you?
KB 1:54
I was writing music all throughout. Sometimes at the places sometimes just in hotel room or sometimes at home, after visiting and I think what that really did was to collect my ideas in to a musical form that I could compile later. I definitely have a larger view of what the conflict was like in World War Two ethnically and racially, you know, it was it was a complicated time.
Speaker 1 2:16
Tell me about some of the songs that you’ve worked on, speak to some of these concepts that you’ve been working through.
KB 2:23
Well, okay. Like, for example, I have a sample theme for Jerome, which I wrote for the Jerome incarceration center in Arkansas, which I visited. And what I didn’t really realize initially, was that the camps are really full of Japanese people. We like to say, Oh, they were Japanese Americans. And for the most part, they were Japanese people coming to America to make a better life for themselves. And obviously, their kids were naturalized, born in America and as American as anybody could be, right. But there’s so much Japanese culture in these camps, that a lot of it was suppressed. And a lot of times, parents from Japan, “Issei”, first generation parents, would make the difficult decision of suppressing their culture in order for their children to survive. And for me that was extremely painful because I value my Japanese heritage and I speak Japanese. It’s kind of heartbreaking for a parent to have to do that for their kids. And I think there’s probably some immigrant communities today in America that might feel similarly that they have to make this difficult decision to suppress their culture so that their kids can have a better shot at assimilating
Unknown Speaker 3:27
song
Speaker 1 4:00
Tell me about your daughter, you took her to Heart mountain? What made you decide on that? This is a personal journey for you where you took your parents and how was that? What brings you back to these places where people were formerly incarcerated over and over?
KB 4:17
I mean, honestly, it’s I think the people bring me back. You know, I’ve made a lot of friends in in Cody, and also people who attend heart mountain, the pilgrimage. For my daughter, it’s like, I want her to know what I’m working on. She knows everything about what I’m working on. Honestly, she’s likely will you stop talking about internment, you know, and I’d be like, “I wish I could”, but I talk to her about a lot of things and I’m convinced that her generation at least, you know, the people I see, are more empathetic, you know, and more ethical, I think, than I was when I was a kid. You know, to know that they’re okay with like LGBT and they’re actively trying to not be racist, you know, is is something that I, when I was 13 I didn’t I didn’t have any of that. Nobody was discussing racism. That much, you know, definitely nobody was gay, you know, they’re everyone’s in the closet, you know, back then. So I think like to see that it gives me a lot of hope and that when that whole generation becomes voting adults and taxpaying adults, it’ll be a different society. I also like to point out that a few years ago, over 50% of all school aged children are people of color. So that’s a very powerful indicator that this country is really headed into a more dynamic, diverse society that will have just only positive benefits, I think.
Unknown Speaker 5:43
song
Yuko Kodama 6:06
Next is part two of segments from a KBCS interview with singer and songwriter, Kishi, Bashi or Kaoru Ishibashi. Kishi Bashi shares his take on mass incarceration and racism with me at the Sodo showbox venue on October sixth.
KB 6:42
When I started to look into Japanese incarceration, there’s something that always was at the back of my head that I had to address which is like mass incarceration. The largest like ICE facility here in like Tacoma the detention facility, you know, Something that’s, I feel like every opportunity I get, you know, I need to mention it because it’s it’s such a problem. So “Angeline”, the song is about convict leasing, which is Jim Crow era, basically, criminality that was put on the African American people like especially males after the reconstruction after the Civil War, the South quickly just made up a bunch of the vagrancy laws to convict African Americans so that they could impose a fine upon them that they had to pay off through hard labor. So chain gangs, all those things, those are a result of convict leasing. And basically the foreman would come and the sheriff would round up people, and then just put them back on the plantations that they could have been formerly slaves on. Many considered it worse than slavery, because as a slave, you wouldn’t want them harmed, because they have to work for you, but as convicts, you could just work them to death. And so that’s the unfortunate story after the civil war that a lot of people still don’t really understand. We know the word Jim Crow, it’s in the textbooks, but the Legacy of Jim Crow and like lynching and all this stuff is still being uncovered. It’s a difficult topic for, especially for white people in the south to talk about, but it’s just something that needs to be continually acknowledged and talked about.
Unknown Speaker 8:19
Song
KB 8:39
African American males are viewed as criminals, you know, and this is why they end up in jail because it’s easier to put them in jail if you think they’re criminals, right? So it’s the kind of thing that I felt so strongly about, especially since I live in the south, I live in Georgia. There’s two camps in Arkansas. To see just this systemic racism that still exists there. It’s difficult to if you’re in a position of privilege to really acknowledge, but it’s just all around you. And if there’s so many communities that always live as second class citizens, you know, unfortunately.
Unknown Speaker 9:12
Song
KB 9:36
I mean, the most important thing about racism and discrimination, is that you just have to keep talking about it because it’s not like black or white or it’s a very nuanced thing for different people in different situations. So it’s literally evolving, dynamically, like every day, but it just needs to be talked about, you know, constantly.
Unknown Speaker 9:57
Song
KB 10:06
We’re all human beings with varying levels of fear and discomfort. Intergenerational the you can be a complete racist when you’re 18 and become a great part of society when you’re older. You know, people change.
I think we all have our preconceptions about what the world is supposed to be like. Every single person has a different perspective. They’re all like different universes. any random passer by has a world as vivid as your own. So you know, to have that in mind is a little humbling, but also makes it kind of exciting.
Unknown Speaker 11:30
Song
Yuko Kodama 11:35
That was music artist Kishi Bashi speaking with me in early October at the Showbox Sodo. 91.3 KBCS this is Yuko Kodama
Nature – Cooper’s Hawks
Which birds in our forests have Ewok-like skills in our local forests? Go for a walk with Seward Park Audubon Center’s Ed Dominguez and KBCS’s Yuko Kodama on the trails of Seward Park.
Producer: Yuko Kodama
Photo: Virginia Sanderson
Unknown Speaker 0:00
91.3 KBCS music and ideas listener-supported radio from Bellevue College.
Unknown Speaker 0:05
…Good day to hit the trails in Seward Park in Seattle as the Audubon Center’s lead naturalist Ed Dominguez and KBCS’s Yuko Kodama talk Cooper’s Hawks.
Unknown Speaker 0:25
So that’s the sound of one of our four juvenile Cooper’s hawks. So Cooper’s hawks are in a group of hawks that are called accipiterwhen we’re talking about the raptors that we have called hawks, there’s two big groups. The soaring hawks like our common red tail hawk that you’ll see over any of our freeways as you’re driving along that ride the summer thermals in a circle and big loops up in the sky looking for small mammals down on the ground. Those are in the soaring hawk category and they’re calle buteos. These hawks, the Coopers hawks, are in another group called accipiter, and their hunting strategy and their prey is completely different. Cooper’s hawks are songbirds eating hawks. And instead of writing thermals and soaring, their bodies are designed to move through forests like we’re in now with great agility and skill, kind of like in the Star Wars movie where the Ewoks were riding those sleds and they were flying through the forest and not running into anything because they were skilled at maneuvering. Cooper’s hawks have short wings, and long tails that act like a rudder, and so they whip through the forest and will snatch birds, either out of the air or snatch birds as they’re perching. We have a nest right here in Seward Park, and four eggs hatched. And so we have four young Cooper’s hawks, that like all youngsters are constantly begging to be fed….so that squealing sound that you’re hearing is one of the four youngsters saying ‘Mom, dad, bring me something to eat, bring me something to eat’. And so they will bring in one of our songbirds, a song sparrow or a towhee, a junco for the youngsters to eat. They’re a medium size hawk, they’re not nearly as big as the soaring red tail hawk. In size, they’re more crow size, maybe slightly larger than a crow, but they’re not a big animal. They’re small body is what they need to be able to maneuver through the forest, through all these branches and trees and their prey is small – songbirds so they don’t need to be big bodied like an eagle or a red tailed hawk.
Unknown Speaker 2:32
(Oh ,there it is)
Unknown Speaker 2:36
Yeah, looking out into the field. Yep. Do eagles eat them?
Unknown Speaker 2:43
No, these birds are way too maneuverable for eagles. So eagles primarily will eat fish. They will also eat rodents. Like we’ve got Eastern cotton tail rabbits. The population has exploded this year. -There he goes. But these Cooper’s Hawks are way too maneuverable for a big eagle to try and get ’em to be like I don’t know, a naval analogy. It’d be like a little speedboat, a PT boat, buzzing around in a destroyer a battleship trying to get it that just the eagle can’t move with that kind of agility to get a small bird like this. There it is You see the pale breast. It’s almost white with dark vertical streaks that hang down. We call them teardrops.
Unknown Speaker 3:30
He’s turning his head. It’s dark dark wings. Here he goes.
Unknown Speaker 3:33
(squealing of Cooper’s hawks)
Unknown Speaker 3:36
Striped bands on the underside and the tail.
Unknown Speaker 3:39
uh huh.
Unknown Speaker 3:42
So they’re all sitting around waiting for food..
Unknown Speaker 3:44
Waiting for food. Because although obviously they fledged and so they’re able to fly. It takes a lot of skill to be able to successfully capture prey when you’re a raptor. In the case of these guys, since they feed on songbirds, they have to be able to track a songbird down flying through the forest, or see one that’s perched somewhere, judge the right amount of speed to fly in with, get their talons extended at the right rate and come down and clasp on them. And there’s a lot of mistakes before they finally are successful. So all summer long, they’ll be dependent on their parents to feed them, while they continue trying to hone those skills so that they can make a living on their own.
Unknown Speaker 4:26
Wow! There it goes!
Unknown Speaker 4:26
That was Audubon Center lead naturalist Ed Dominguez with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama
Nature – Local Bats
The Yuma Bat, Big Brown Bat and Little Brown Bat share the Puget Sound region with us during the summer months. In late summer/early fall, the bats migrate to Central Washington to hibernate. Find out how these small mammals fly, catch their food and take shelter in this special bat series, as Seward Park Audubon Center, Lead Naturalist, Ed Dominguez and KBCS’s Yuko Kodama watch for them on the banks of Andrew’s Bay in Seattle’s Seward Park.
Producers: Yuko Kodama and Jesse Callahan
Photo: Andrew McKinlay
H2A Workers in Washington State
Honesto Silva Ibarra was an H2A visa guest worker and 27 year old father of two from Mexico. He died in Washington state, as a worker at Sarbanand Farms. Around the time he became ill, other workers at the same farm were reported ill, dehydrated from the extreme heat and heavy smoke from the summer forest fires.
What came out of the investigation into Silva Ibarra’s death was the passage of State Bill 5438, created to fund an office tasked with monitoring labor, housing, and health and safety requirements for farms using the H2A visa program. It also prioritizes outreach to domestic farmworkers before farms use the H2A program.
Rosalinda Guillen of Community to Community Development (C2C) spoke with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama about the H2A Guest Worker Program and the latest with the Washington State H2A Program Oversight Committee.
Produced by Yuko Kodama
Photo: Community to Community Development
The Book They Can’t Erase – The Jeli, Keeper of Stories
Arsalan Ibrahim’s life was turned upside-down one day with the purchase of a West African music CD. This marked the start of a long journey into deep connection with his ancestry and lineage of storytelling. Today, Ibrahim is a Jeli of the Mande tradition, using the kora as the vehicle to pass on stories and support the bridge of knowledge between Africa and North America.
Special thanks to Logic Amen and the Griot Party Experience for this story.
Making It Out Alive
According to a 2013 Washington State Domestic Violence Fatality Review, guns are by far the most common weapon used in domestic violence homicides. More than all other weapons combined. Emy Johnston shares her remarkable story of how she navigated for her life after being shot by her ex-partner.
A warning that the content on this story is disturbing.
Resources for help:
Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence Friends and Family Guide
New Beginnings (Available 24 hours): 206-522-9472
DAWN (Available 24 hours): 425-656-7867
Mother Nation Services for indigenous families
APICHAYA Services for Asian families
The National Domestic Violence Hotline (Available 24 hours) : 1-800-799-7233
Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence
Producers: Yuko Kodama and Jesse Callahan
Photo: Emy Johnston
Speaker 1 0:00
91.3 KBCS music and ideas listener-supported radio from Bellevue College.
According to a 2013 Washington State Domestic Diolence Fatality Review, guns are by far the most common weapon used in domestic violence homicides, more than all other weapons combined. Next, domestic violence survivor and thriver, Emy Johnston shares her remarkable story of navigating for her life after being shot by her ex-partner. A warning that the story involves disturbing content.
Unknown Speaker 0:35
My name is Emy Johnston. It was November 19 2012. My ex had been told to leave work that day because of some kind of issue that he was having with another co-worker, I can’t really remember what the deal was. But they didn’t like his attitude. They asked him to leave work. So he got really upset. And he came to meet me for lunch downtown. And he was really stressed out about money. He said, they’re asking me to leave, I don’t know if I’m going to get fired. I feel like I’m going to do something crazy. I just- I don’t know what to do. And I said, You know what, I’m going to take the rest of the day off. I’m going to go tell my boss, I need to leave. Let’s go home. Let’s watch a movie. Let’s cook dinner. Let’s just relax. You know, don’t stress about this. And he said, ‘No, just stay. You need to keep working. Do your thing. I don’t want to interrupt your day’. He left and I went back to work. And it was pouring down rain. And by the time I was getting ready to get off work. He said, Oh, I’m down at this bar in Belltown. Why don’t you come down and meet me? I said, okay, sure. So I go down to the bar right after work. He was in that kind of happy drunk stage where, when I got there, he was, ‘I love you so much. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve never loved anybody the way that I love you’ and just hugging me and just so happy to see me. And then he’s like, here, I want you to hold my credit card for me. I don’t want to spend too much money tonight. So why don’t you just hold on to it? And I’m like, okay, sure, no problem. And we we’re sitting there and I’m having a drink with him. And all of a sudden he just kind of snapped. And he’s like, ‘give me my f#$%ing credit card.’ And I’m like, ‘You just asked me to hold on to it’. He said ‘Give me my f#$%ing credit card, b%@#’, you know, just out of nowhere. And I’m like, ‘oh, great. I see where this is going’. Just like that in a blink of an eye. One minute, he’s just like, so happy, ‘I love you’. The next minute, it’s “Give me my credit card b@#$”. And so I’m like, ‘okay, here’s your credit card, I’m going home’. I get on the bus to our neighborhood. And when I get there, I realize I don’t have the keys. We have been sharing a set of keys, because he lost his keys and some other drunken night of his, you know, with all this drinking that he was doing at this point. I’m like, great. Now what am I going to do, I’m calling him I need the keys. He’s not picking up. I go to a bar in our neighborhood. And I just sit there and I wait. I run into someone who was one of my best friend’s boyfriends from about 10 years ago. So I see him there. And I sit down and I start talking to this guy. And we’re kind of catching up. We hadn’t seen each other in a really long time. Finally, my ex contacts me, and he tells me that he’s coming home, he’s got the keys, he’s with his brother, and his niece. And he’s gonna come meet me at the bar that I was at. So I’m waiting there at the bar sitting next to this old friend of mine. And he shows up, very, very drunk and very, very angry. Especially when he walked into the bar and saw me sitting next to a guy. A guy I hadn’t seen in 10 years, the guy that was just an old boyfriend of a best friend of mine. He comes in. He had a look on his face. It was as if his whole face had changed. his jaw was tight. His eyes, they were like boring holes in me. They were so intense. And his face was just dark and tense. Everything about him was just really overwhelming. He decides he wants to stay at the bar. He gives me the keys, his brother’s waiting outside. I go outside. I asked his brother, can you please go in there and get him because he needs to come home. He does not need to be out here drinking more in the state that he’s in. Can you please try to get him to come in. I sit outside with his niece who was probably two or three, while his brother goes in to try to get him to come out of the bar. He comes back out in a few minutes. And he’s like, No, he’s not coming. He wants to stay. So I’m like, whatever. Just take me home. I get home and I’m with his brother and his brother’s daughter. I start making her sandwich, you know. Then my ex calls and he goes, ‘Hey, I’m going to bring home a pizza, I’m coming home. Tell him to come pick me up. I’m going to grab a pizza. Just tell him pick me up at the pizza place.’ And I’m like, okay, now he’s gone from really happy to really angry to now he’s really happy again. His brother goes to pick him up, he brings him home. At this time. I’m on the phone with my mom, when he walks in the door. My grandpa had just passed away. And that was the day of my grandpa’s funeral. He walked in the door. He saw that I was on the phone, he grabbed my phone from my hand, and he throw it across the room. I was really angered by that, also stressed because my grandpa had just died. I wasn’t able to attend the funeral because I didn’t have the money to fly out to Milwaukee to go.
Unknown Speaker 6:07
And so at that moment, I kicked him. And he grabbed me, threw me across the room, threw me to the ground. And he at this point violently attacked me. While I was laying on the ground, he stomped my head repeatedly. And he was wearing shoes at the time. So he just kept stomping and stomping and stomping on my head and his brother, and his niece who were in the room witnessing this. Meanwhile, my mom is still on the phone, she can’t tell what’s going on, she can hear this altercation going on. And he stomped me unconscious at that point in time. And so my mom remained on the phone. And what I think she remembers hearing the most is me coming to when you’ve gone unconscious from a violent attack. When you come to, it’s like you have moment of you don’t know where you are, you don’t know what just happened. So I started screaming at the top of my lungs, his brother was telling him to stop, ‘you need to stop, you need to stop, man, stop this’. And I think when he realized that there was nothing that he could do, he just decided to get his daughter out of there and get her safe, which I can imagine that his daughter was the first person on his mind at the time. But his brother didn’t do anything to help. He didn’t call the police, he didn’t do anything. So you know, we’re kind of, at this point, alone in our home.
Unknown Speaker 7:52
And I remember hearing footsteps, and I remember him coming back into the room with the gun. And he was pointing the gun at me. And it was like he was getting ready to do an execution. He was like, ‘stand up. I’ve got three bullets in this gun. And it’s enough to take your life right now’. And so at that point, he had decided that he was going to kill me. I am, you know, trying to reason with him. And I’m, I’m just kind of repeating the same things, ‘I love you. Don’t do this’, you know, ‘Put the gundown. Let’s talk about this.’ I’m just scrambling my brain for any possible thing that I could say that would snap him out of it or anything that I could possibly say. Nothing’s getting to him at that time. And I’m pressed up against the wall of our bedroom. And he’s standing about five feet away from me, blocking the door with the gun pointed at me.
Unknown Speaker 8:59
He fired off a shot into the air above me and it just rang. My ears just rang the flashing light of the bullet in the room. The next two shots that he fired the first one, went through my left arm, shattered my bone into a million pieces and then went into my abdomen. But at the time, I didn’t even know I had a bullet in my abdomen. The pain of my arm – That was all I could think about. It felt like someone had set my arm on fire. Everything was burning. I all I could feel was fire throughout my whole entire arm. And I started screaming and I think he was shocked. He didn’t say a word. I just remember crying and saying ‘you just shot me. You just f$%^ing shot me’. You know at some point. I told him ‘You need to call 911. I need help .I need to go to the hospital.’ And he refused. He said ‘I have one bullet left in the gun and I’m going to kill you right now and you’re not going to need an ambulance’. I told him ‘Get something. I need a tourniquet. You need to tie something around my arm because I’m losing a lot of blood here’. And I had a downcoat on so I’ve got you know blood mixed with feathers and, and everything else I couldn’t move my arm. I’m like holding my arm by the edge of my jacket just so I cann’t move about the house. And I managed to get into the bed. He grabbed something, a T-shirt or something, and ties it around my arms so that at least to kind of try to stop some of the bleeding.
Unknown Speaker 10:53
You would think that the neighbors would have heard the gunshots and probably called the police. No, Boulevard Park is in the flight path. All of the houses in that neighborhood had been made with soundproofing windows. So no one heard a thing. So that leaves me and him there having these conversations – this back and forth. ‘No, I’m not gonna call an ambulance’. He said ‘You just got shot in the arm, you’re going to be fine. Seriously, you don’t need an ambulance.’ And I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, please, just anything.’ So he says, ‘okay, you can call my mom’. So I get on the phone with his mom. And I’m trying to be cryptic, because I’m like trying not to say anything too alarming or anything like that. I don’t know, I say to her um. ‘Hi, I’m losing a lot of blood right now. And I need to go to the hospital immediately’. I don’t say your son just shot me. I don’t say anything like that. I just say I’m losing a lot of blood, I need to go to the hospital. And she was aware that something was going on. Because a few nights beforehand, I had asked her to come spend the night because his behavior was escalating, and I was afraid. And I told her that I said ‘I’m afraid to be here alone. Can you please come stay with us?’ And she stayed a night or two with us. And she said, you know, ‘Are you okay for me to go back?’ And I was like, okay, sure. And so she knew that things were escalating. So when I called her to tell her that I was losing a lot of blood. She knew what I was saying she knew that it was because something that he had done to me. Her response was, ‘If I call an ambulance for you, my son’s going to jail’. And so we got off the phone, and I just started praying. Because at that point, I felt like I I had exhausted all of my options. I had been begging this man for help for probably about an hour, hour and a half. Now. I’m thinking nothing’s helping. Nothing’s going to work. His mom’s not going to help. No one can hear me. No one knows I’m in here. No one knows what happened.
Unknown Speaker 13:23
And so I asked him just hold my hand. Because I didn’t want my final moments in life to be screaming and crying with this person. I just needed someone to hold my hand so that I could just go peacefully. I prayed that if it was my time to go, that it will be peaceful, that God would take me. And at that point, the police knocked on the door. He cocked the gun, had it to my forehead. And he said, ‘Don’t you say a word’. And I wanted to scream and let them know that I am in here, come get me, save me. But I had this gun to my head. And he was like, ‘don’t you say a word. If you say a word, I’m going to pull the trigger’. And so they’re knocking and they’re knocking. And then the knocking stops. And at that moment, I’m like, ‘Oh sh54. I’m done’. Like this is it that was my last hope.
Unknown Speaker 14:22
Probably about ten more minutes goes by and I hear them bust the door down. And I’m like thank God, you know, just rejoicing. But at the same time, I’m really scared. Because I’m laying on the bed, the bed’s in the corner of the room, he’s in between the door to the bedroom and me. He had mentioned to me that if the cops ever came for him, that they would have to shoot him first before they took him to prison. And so in my mind, I’m thinking, oh, no. There’s going to be another shootout like he’s gonna shoot a cop. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. He’s so crazy right now. I’m back over here, I might get shot again by an officer, I had no idea what was going to happen. Like, I just really was afraid that this is going to become even more escalated at this point in time. And so the police come in, and they say, you know, ‘Get down on the ground’. He gets down on the ground, drops the weapon. they handcuffed him and he says, ‘I love you’. And they haul him off. It was the weirdest thing. He just was so calm about it all. And ‘I love you’ like ‘I’ll see you later’. That was the last thing he ever said to me in the course of our relationship. And then um they put me in the aid car. And I said ‘can you please call my mom’. And they said what’s her phone number, and I go, I don’t know, but just call the number back who called the police for me. And I knew that there was her.
Unknown Speaker 16:02
I often think about the woman who was in the aid car with me. There was a lot of people in the aid car. But there was one woman there and and I don’t know her name. She was a hero for me that night because she held my hand and I told her I’m in a lot of pain. She looked at me and she said,” Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of you now”. And then at that point, I don’t know, I just passed out. That’s all I remember.
Unknown Speaker 16:27
When you think about having a breakup that happens in one night with a violent shooting like that. You can imagine that, you know, the next day, waking up in the hospital, I woke up to a completely different life. I didn’t have a place to live. I mean, I suppose I could have gone back there. But who would want to live in a place where something like that it just happened to them. So I didn’t have a place to live. My family, you know, this, this man and his children, this was my family. My family was gone. The man that I thought I loved or I thought loved me, just tried to kill me. And not only did he try to kill me, but he refused to help me.
Unknown Speaker 17:15
It’s been a long, five years – Being in an abusive relationship – and I’ve talked to a lot of other survivors as well – It’s like an addiction, you know. You get addicted to feeling bad you’ve been having, you’ve had somebody, take the person that you were – educated, self confident, beautiful, very strong friendships. You’ve had someone, take that person, and slowly chip away at you and slowly dig a hole in your soul to try to take pieces of you little by little, until you get to the point where you’re in the relationship and you don’t know who you are anymore. It’s so psychological. And it’s so emotional. A big part of the healing from that has been to regain who I am as a person – to figure out who I am now, who I was before. How does the person that I was before, meet the person that I am now. Now that I’ve survived this, now that I’ve come up from the underworld. I got used to feeling bad about myself. I got used to being called names, I got used to racial slurs and put downs. Every little thing that he could think of that would affect me, he would use that against me. Any if you had any sort of past, sexual past, he would take that and he threw that in my face, repeatedly over and over again. Those were the types of things that he would use against me to just try to break me down and make me feel really insecure about who I was. Make me question, you know, everything that I thought that I knew about myself and my identity, He would try to take that from me.
Unknown Speaker 19:28
As a survivor, I took to doing things to make myself feel bad – eating foods that made me feel worse, getting into the habit of just bingeing on sugar and you know, drinking , and doing things that heightened my anxiety and made it worse. Because I knew that it would make me feel bad. What I didn’t realize was it was a continuation of me not loving myself and me not treating myself in a loving way. So when I was able to make that transition into giving my body healthy foods, giving my body things that were actually helping build myself back up, and helping myself heal from within on a physical level. It then came out into the emotional level, and was able to, to really, I mean, the holistic healing, I think has been a huge part of me getting to where I am today, doing the therapy, doing the EMDR. EMDR. is Eye Movement, Desensitization and Reprocessing. Basically, you go back to that moment, wherever the trauma occurred. And you revisit that moment, over and over and over again. And I can tell you, there were days where I did not want to step foot in that therapist’s office, because I didn’t want to go back to that moment… But I’m glad that I did. Because now I can sit here and I can have this conversation, and I can tell this story to people so that people know, what survivors of domestic violence can go through. I can revisit these traumatic memories without having the impact of what happened that night still affect me in this moment. you revisit that and you are able to take control of that memory in that moment, you’re able to revisit it and you can go up to the person, the perpetrator, the abuser, whatever it is for you or for myself, I was able to go up to my abuser and to say to him, ‘No, you need to leave now. You need to walk away. This isn’t right what you’ve done. You’ve hurt me, and you have taken something from me, and I’m taking it back now’. And you’re able to have these conversations in that space. When you’re doing EMDR so that you can transform the memory, take your power back. And then in your regular day to day life, when something that will trigger you occurs, you come at it from a place of strength and empowerment.
Unknown Speaker 22:20
If you think that one of your neighbors, one of your friends, someone that you work with is being abused by their partner, get them aside. When they’re by themselves, when this person is not around and ask them. Just tell them. ‘I support you. I’m concerned about you. Let me know what you need so that I can help you. what ways can I help you?’ Because calling the police isn’t always the best idea, you know, you just don’t know if that’s going to make the situation worse for someone or not .What’s going to trigger the abuser. What is going to cause more repercussions and further more violent abuse. We don’t know. I don’t know someone else’s situation. And it’s hard for other people to determine that for someone else. If you really feel that someone’s life is in danger, someone’s screaming ‘help call the police immediately’. Don’t hesitate. If you think you hear fights and things like that. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Is this violent or they just you know what’s going on up there. It’s hard to tell. If you can at all have that conversation with that person.
Speaker 1 23:44
That was Emy Johnston sharing her story with me in 2017. Johnston is now a proud mom and volunteers with the Seattle Police Department’s victim support team, using her experience to help other survivors of domestic violence. If you have a loved one experiencing domestic abuse, you can visit the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence website at wscadv.org/resources and click on the printable Friends and Family Guide. If you think you’re experiencing an abusive relationship, you can contact 1-800-799-7233 for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Special thanks to Jesse Callahan for help with editing the story. This is KBCS and I’m Yuko Kodama.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Adverse Childhood Experiences and Long Term Health Impacts
A study on the impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), including exposure to emotional, physical, sexual abuse, or household dysfunction on adult long term health was published in 1998. The study found a relationship of ACE exposure to increased heart disease, cancer and chronic lung disease in adulthood. Since this study, many public health agencies have had an eye on this issue as they strategize for better health outcomes in our communities.
Dr. Benjamin Danielson is a Medical Director at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in Seattle. He describes ACEs and its impacts with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama.
Produced by Yuko Kodama and Jesse Callahan
Photo Credit: Seattle Children’s Hospital
0:00
Adverse childhood experiences or ACEs are difficult events that happened during infancy to youth. Studies have found a correlation of exposure to ACEs and long term health problems in people. Odessa Brown Medical Clinic’s medical doctor, Dr. Benjamin Danielson, speaks with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama about the study on ACEs.
0:20
The ACEs story goes back to studies done by a physician in the Kaiser Healthcare System in Southern California, who was wondering why the health outcomes for many of his adult patients were just not responding to the interventions that he was suggesting and doing. And so he started to cast this broad net and ask more and more questions. And over time found that these tenthings kept coming up in people’s backgrounds, especially large combinations of these ten things. And the most important part to me is that this was a community that was socio-economically actually relatively well off. This was community that was majority white. It was the background of these economically comfortable, mostly white, adult people who then related their stories and their experiences as children, and included these elements in them. And from that, a number of different researchers at different sites, including Harvard, and out in California, started to look at those correlations and do some of the regression analysis and the other fancy math, that then turns that into a pretty strong relationship that you can measure, count and create expectations based on.
1:37
what are some of the examples of what an adverse childhood experience could be?
1:44
The mostly things that you would recognize as unfortunate events for a child to experience, like the exposure to domestic violence in your home, the experience of having had neglect or physical punishment be a big part of your life, maybe living in a home where parents struggle with mental health conditions in a way that really adversely impacts your well being, things like that. the seriousness of adverse childhood experiences is important to think about, partly because I believe before we had much language around ACEs, many people, of course, sort of inductive knew that the hard experiences that you had, could have this impact on you, long term. But the ACEs studies actually brought that into a very, very clear light. And it’s pretty unusual, in some ways, to find something where there’s this direct correlation between the number of events and the step-wise increase in risk for illness. So I feel like it was the first time that you could pull these ideas of social exposures, things in your life happening around you, even if they’re not to you, and long term health outcomes. It’s a pretty remarkable and powerful and painful, full of a deeper story, though, than just a score, or a specific risk for heart disease, or depression.
3:13
So ACEs, does that also include things like historical trauma and epigenetics kind of things?
3:22
ACEs themselves do not include the epigenetic impacts themselves. They’re really specifically talking to the experiences that a child had, I think the continued thinking about ACEs has started to speak about community ACEs and broader generational ACEs, which does start to bring this conversation about historical trauma into scope. However, the original studies were really about what does an individual experience in their early years, how does that translate into their lifelong health? The other two important things to remember that ACEs does not speak to in any way at all. One is the impact of poverty in this country, on your health, and the other is the impact of oppression like racism on your health.
4:10
So that’s one thing, to understand it as a medical professional. And, you know, be aware of it as you’re working with people, right. But then there’s the other aspect of it, which is, medical professionals usually come into things when someone is feeling sick. So where does that put medical professionals then, in looking at this?
4:34
Such a good question. Where does that put medical professionals? Or what is where does it imply that maybe some of our training and preparation should be directed in a different way. I’m a primary care pediatrician. So I have a huge respect for prevention, and supporting wellness, not just intervening when someone is ill. Also working within those young age groups, I feel like it puts pediatricians in the space to be potentially especially impactful, on terms of affecting lifelong health. So suddenly, as a pediatrician, I feel like, I might be able to help someone who’s in their 80s down the road because of the work that you do during their childhood. The second thing for me is that as a pediatric primary care provider, among nurse practitioners, and doctors, and PAs, and all of the other wonderful types that are out there, we are all also very much involved and invested in supporting children’s social determinants, the world of exposures and experiences around them, not just their bodies, even if you think about their whole bodies, which is a stretch for some healthcare systems to think whole body, whole mind, it’s also important to be thinking whole family, whole community whole of experiences, and perhaps even the timeline of experiences, the life course, if you will, then you start to think about maybe the ACEs that mom experienced when she was a child, maybe you start to think about the genetic components that go into the creation of a child. And what ACEs those genes are exposed to. I’ve come to believe that ACEs exist within a circle of toxic stress experiences that happen in your life.
6:27
As I’ve already mentioned, the original studies were done in people with a fair amount of security economically, and who didn’t face as much racism as other people do. And so that tells me that anybody can experience a number of ACEs and they can affect your life. It also tells me that there’s a separate circle, maybe called oppression, toxic oppression, that has its own impact on your life, even if you could say that you never experienced those ten ACEs, racism and the other oppressions out there have their own impact on your well being, you can’t solve an oppression problem by saying you’re going to fix ACEs problems. But there is a huge amount of overlap and people who have to face both racism, and an ACEs score of seven, really deserve as much attention as you can provide.
7:16
And there’s a third circle, I call it toxic capitalism, other people would call it poverty. But those are all separate circles, and they can affect your well being independently or together. We’ve heard stories of Serena Williams having a near death experience in giving birth, that really almost cost her her life as a black woman in this country, not because she was socio-economically deprived, because she is in the well-to-do categories. But the racism and oppression that we have in our country have an impact on her health and her chance to have a healthy birth experience. We’ve seen plenty of folks also in low income communities who are strong together and have wonderful community experiences, and low ACEs experiences, and those communities are thriving, we should reject the idea that you have to be well off in order to thrive as a community.
8:12
So I feel that there are these three intersecting circles in our lives. And some of them overlap and some of them don’t capitalism, toxic capitalism anyway. Oppression, like racism, and marginalization, able-ism, all of those isms, the way we treat the LGBTQ community still in this country, the many different ways that we um… we other in a way that is degrading and detrimental. And then there’s a circle called toxic stress. ACEs is an important one of those. Just to make it slightly more complicated, I think there are two others in that circle too. Because I think ACEs by themselves doesn’t do justice to the stress that some people feel, you may not have had those ten things happen in your life. But you might have every single day, the trickling constant mini-crisis experiences that then wear you down that weather doesn and wear down your ability to withstand illness, to hold off emotional stress and trauma. And I think that day to day drip drop, drop of the stress hormones in your body. And those experiences in your environment also have this detrimental effect on your health. And so I don’t want to say that you only get to talk about bad health outcomes from stress if it’s in the frame of ACEs, because there are other stresses that happen.
9:36
I hear too many times a mom say ‘My car broke down last week. I had to figure out how to get alternate transportation. My job does not give me the chance to have paid leave off. And my grandmother lives far away from me now. So for me, in order for me to get to this clinic, even… to even start getting care for my child, I have to deal with all of these many crazies. And now I don’t know when I go home, whether we’re going to have food on the table that’s healthy, or whether I’m going to have to make some necessary but harder choices about the nutritional content that I’m feeding my child’ . None of those are ACEs, right? And yet, they all have a pretty important effect. And if you live through your life with those going on every day, that’s pretty hardcore.
10:18
There’s a third set that I think are mild stresses that happen at critical times in your life. And the most important example to me is childbirth. Where just something mild and unexpected happens, but it sets inside of usual sense that something else more deeply is going on, something else is wrong. I think of the mom who goes into the hospital expecting a vaginal birth, and then has a C-section occur, and everything could go great with that C-section, everything could go fine. But that is traumatic to have that change in your expectation. And I thnk there are lots of parents who then leave that experience thinking something else is wrong, something else is going to go wrong with this child because I didn’t expect that first thing to happen. And now there’s something else going on there that I think it’s not quite doing it honor to call it worried-well. There’s something in there about you’ve had an experience, not a serious, serious one. But it happened at a key time, and it changed the way you felt about how secure you are about the well-being of your child. And all of that means I think our healthcare system should be addressing those things, instead of waiting till someone’s sick and trying to treat them.
11:33
You know, medical professionals could then become advocates for the entire family, do you find yourself in that kind of position from time to time?
11:41
Yes, we’ve actually tried to structure our clinic around really thinking more environmentally more holistically about what a child needs to thrive and be happy. One example is that we’ve created a special fund that is not designated in any particular way. We call it a basic needs fund. And it’s really there to respond in the moment to the kinds of stressors that a family might experience. Just before this interview, I was weighing in on a special fund request from a family that was trying to get other family members closer to this family. They were going through a lot their child has sickle cell disease, and they really needed their whole family to kind of be together and be able to embrace, and a grandmother is living in another state. And they needed help getting that grandmother transported here. That’s so funny that ties together so many parts of what we are talking about already, but we’re able to make a contribution to the transportation needs to get grandmother into closer connection with this mom and this child, as they are managing this really hard diagnosis called sickle cell disease.
12:54
What are some of the ways that you interact with the family and your interest in the environment of a child?
13:01
I’m going to speak maybe from our best intention, best hope, best heart optimistic view. Because I don’t know if we ever get it right all the time. But I’ll share what our intentions are and how we try to make sure those are impactful.
13:17
One is that we keep trying to build more and more time into our visits, our encounters. There’s so much more to the experience and health and the well being of a child than could ever show up in a 20 minute visit, right? So we try to intentionally build a lot more time into visits, even ones that on the face of it should be brief. ‘ Can you recheck my child’s ears to make sure that ear infections getting better’. That should be you know, five minutes of peeking in an ear and talking to a mom. However, what happens so often is right near the end of that five minutes is this, oh, by the way moment, we call it, where a mom might say just’ oh, by the way, we are about to get kicked out of our apartment’ , or’ Oh, by the way, I haven’t shared this before. But we’re survivors of domestic violence. And I’m getting more worried that a threatening person is trying to, trying to find me and get back into our lives’ . And it’s , I think it’s a horrible moment in healthcare when someone would say something like, ‘ Well, good luck with that your ears are fine and see you next time’ . That would be the worst, the worst kind of care possible.
14:33
We try to make sure that we have a moment to listen, hold that space. And also, if possible, start a path of support in the, in those moments. So that takes time first. The second thing it takes is being unafraid to ask, I will share that healthcare professionals, especially young ones, come with this worry about ‘ Please don’t ask me something I don’t have an answer to’. And I get it on the one level. But it’s there’s a lot of hubris and saying I only want to have conversations when I know the answers to them. And I think that’s pretty unfortunate. Th ey’ll say stuff like I feel like It’s a harm to a family for them to share something. And for me not to be able to do something about it. And I kind of understand that. But boy, what would it be like if we all went through the world, only having conversations that we knew the end of?
15:27
Anyway, we try to build a different mentality into our clinic and say,’ Wow, that looks tough’ . And that I can only sit here and feel this with you and hold this with you. And maybe we can start to build in different kinds of responses. I mentioned our basic needs fund, which is sometimes important. We think about our care as a team. And sometimes it’s our social worker who has a connection and ability to listen in a way that is especially important and they can be part of that visit. Sometimes we need different expertise. And we have a program called a medical legal partnership, which is kind of amazing. Just what you can do, and you bring different kinds of minds together to help work on challenging problems. When it comes down to housing rights, or educational rights or access to services, the partnership between a medical person, social services person and a lawyer…that can be really powerful. So I hope that we continue to stress and push and stretch ourselves to be able to take on problems that today that feel really difficult because I think their solutions tomorrow that are going to be pretty amazing. That’s a piece of the model that we’re trying to build. We’re trying to live out where we talked about when we say that healthcare should be more integrated with lots of team members coming together in the name of supporting a child and their family and the community around them.
16:55
And then the last thing for now I’ll say is that we also try to get outside our walls as much as possible to make sure that we’re sometimes more conveniently in the spaces that feel more comfortable and safe to families in order to be good listeners in those spaces instead of on our own terms. It’s important for it not to always be a home game, right? Can I have some away games? Oh, and one other things I’ll say that structured into our visits, especially in the first year or two is we try to incorporate more of an understanding of things like parenting confidence, and the social services and support that come with that.
17:37
We try to look at more for things you would expect, like maybe postpartum mood concerns. But also we try to get a little more deeply about like, how do you feel about being a parent? How hard does it feel right now, who’s there to support you what’s important to you… em..culturally, or from a community perspective in order to, to do that as well as you want to. There are actually some evidence based screening tools that we use. One we stole from Australia. And there are some other tools that we use that are just more responsive to what the community tells us they need. We really do need to reform our healthcare training process. I feel like I experienced many, many students who came into their medical training as wonderful listeners and caring human beings full of compassion. And then the listening skill gets squeezed out. The sense of compassion sometimes gets blurred and blunted. And you see people requiring almost a period of recovery from their training in order to regain their souls. I’ll say it that way. And I think that’s just a shame.
18:49
On top of that, we create a health care system that is American, and it’s worst ways the sort of solo cowboy who’s trained to be this hero who’s going to swing into town, fix those poor deplorable people and make them better. There’s so many bad messages and the way we verbalize and don’t verbalize what we’re saying to people who go into training and healthcare. Healthcare is at its best, such a team sport, and it’s so much better actually when it’s people from many different circles. You know, take that lawyer, take that teacher, take the social worker who’s skilled in those ways, take the mental health provider, take the… maybe the health care provider hasn’t been exposed to medical school quite so much. Put them together. You’re gonna have a much better clinic or whatever you want to call it. Then you had before uncommon partnerships are so important.
19:40
That was Dr. Benjamin Danielson speaking with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Nature – Juvenile Bald Eagle
Juvenile Bald Eagles are learning to make a living this time of year, while adult eagles feed them. Follow Seward Park Audubon Center’s Lead Naturalist, Ed Dominguez and KBCS’s Yuko Kodama on a trail in Seattle’s Seward Park as they listen for the young eagles’ calls for food.
Producers: Yuko Kodama and Jesse Callahan
Photo: Juvenile Bald Eagle by Rick Leche Photography
Unknown Speaker 0:00
91.3 KBCS music and ideas-listener supported radio from Bellevue College.
Unknown Speaker 0:06
The KBCS’ s listening to nature series, takes you to local parks and beaches to explore the natural neighbors living among us. Join Seward Park Audubon Center’s Lead Naturalist Ed Dominguez and KBCS’s Yuko Kodama as Juvenile Eagles fledg from their nests in Seattle’s Seward Park.
Unknown Speaker 0:22
As you were talking, I heard the Eagles doing the (sounds mimicing eagles) thing. Did you hear it too?
Unknown Speaker 0:27
mm-hmm- These two eagles were hatched late April early May. They’ve been in the nest as youngsters being fed continuously by their parents, and just fledged within the last week. If eagles hatch around the first of May, it takes till mid or late July, before enough feathers grow in on their wings, their primary feathers, as they’re called. And their pectoral muscles become strong enough that they can lift up out of the nest. And so they’ve been kind of lifting off a few inches at a time up in the air for a couple or three weeks now. And now they are able to leave the nest and so they’re hanging out and some tops of some trees like this bleached out white snag we’re looking at, that’s only maybe a quarter of a mile from their nest. They’re waiting for mom and dad to come around and bring them fish. Because even though they can fly, it takes a lot of skill to be able to catch a fish out of the lake. I mean, eagles have great vision, they can be 150 feet in the air and with their eyes see fish down in the water as easily as you and I are looking at one another here on the trail. But to judge the distance down to the water and the fish, to get the right flight speed, to be able to pull up and brake right above the surface of the water and extend their talons at just the right time and get them in the water and successfully nabbed the fish. Well, as you can guess, there’s a lot of misses before they have their first successful catch. So there’ll be dependent on mom and dad to be bringing them fish all summer long. Usually by the time Labor Day rolls around, early September, the adults will stop feeding the eaglets and kind of let them know that it’s time for them to be on their own. And hopefully by that time they’ve developed their hunting skills well enough that they’re able to catch fish and be able to make it through the winter on their own and add to our ever-growing eagle population here in Western Washington.
Unknown Speaker 0:38
And do you get to watch them practice?
Unknown Speaker 2:25
It’s delightful to watch them practice. They come down, wings expanded, talons come out.
(the call of an eagle for food)
I think that means” I’m hungry bring me a fish”, an eagle talk. That’s one of the Juveniles begging for the adult to come in and bring him something to eat. It was just last week, I watched an adult bald eagle one of the parents of these two. And the adult bald eagle saw another fish eating bird called an osprey catch a fish out of the water. And in the bird world. If you can make somebody else give up their fish, you don’t have to worry about catching it yourself. So it was like Snoopy and the Red Baron, a dogfight in the air with the eagle in the ospray turning over one another and flying in tight circles. And finally the eagle got the osprey to drop its fish. The eagle flew down and snatched the fish out of mid-air as it fell down towards the lake and made off towards the nest to feed these youngsters you’re hearing right now. And the poor Osprey had to go back to try to find another meal. So in the bird world, if you can steal someone else’s fish, it’s a lot better than having to fish for yourself.
Unknown Speaker 3:36
And can these birds – they can get back to the nest, okay, right? They’re not just stranded out here until they’re strong enough to go back.
Unknown Speaker 3:45
No, they can get back to the nest easy. In fact, I would say by now they may go back to the nest because it’s been their location for feedings if the adult brings a fish in. But you have to remember that a nest, although we think of it as a place for refuge and nurture. When a bird is in the egg or a bird is very young. A nest is also a target – because all the predators that like to eat eggs or young birds know that there’s a concentrated food supply in that nest. So for all parents, whether it’s Robin’s owls, eagles, any kind of bird, the goal is to get your young out of the nest as soon as possible and disperse. So everybody isn’t all concentrated in one space. So I think these two eagles now that they’re free to be out of the nest will behave like adults, and will just find the evening to perch on a branch of a tree and sleep in the tree -probably in close proximity to one another, these two youngsters. But they won’t be using the nest regularly at all anymore. Also added to that is that, you know the nest, it gets to be a pretty nasty place after several months of these youngsters being fed. So it’s full of fish bones and there can be wing mites.
(the call of an eagle for food)
You know, he wants his dinner.
Unknown Speaker 4:59
These young eagles are they going to stick around Seward Park. Or are they supposed to find their own turf?
Unknown Speaker 5:05
Many times they will stick around. The two young eagles that were fledged last year have still been hanging around and you can see him regularly around the park. So these will probably hang around with their parents and kind of an extended family group all through the winter and into next spring and through probably a lot of next summer. And usually by then they’ll start to move off and be interested in finding their own territory and finding their own mates.
Unknown Speaker 5:32
Hope he gets dinner soon.
Unknown Speaker 5:40
That was Seward Park Audubon Center’s Lead Naturalist Ed Dominguez on the trails of Seward Park for any questions for Ed contact KBCS at news@kbcs.fm.
Taking Sanctuary : Jaime Rubio and Keiko Maruyama
Jaime Rubio Sulficio faces deportation, and took sanctuary at Seattle’s St. Mark’s Cathedral at the end of March. Rubio was a business owner, Latin dance instructor and active member of the community. He and his wife, Keiko Maruyama describe their experiences adjusting to this chapter in their lives in this series on their experiences.
Producer: Yuko Kodama
Photo: Whitney Hardie
Lights for Liberty – Seattle Wisteria Park
The Japanese American Community organized a Lights for Liberty event on July 12, in Wisteria Park, across from the Seattle Buddhist Temple. This is a collage of sounds and impressions from people who attended.
Producers: Gol Hoghooghi and Yuko Kodama
Photos: Yuko Kodama
Alice Ito with a photo of her friend, Fumiko Hayashida and Hayashida’s daughter, Natalie on the day she left Bainbridge Island for the concentration camps in 1942. Hayashida was also pregnant at the time.
Attendees
Cranes on cyclone fence