Setting the Table

Journeys from Little Tokyo and a Central California family farm

Welcome! I am a fourth generation Japanese American fiber artist who lives in Phoenix, Arizona and Visalia, California. I was born in Los Angeles, California and many of my early childhood memories there are tied to the Little Tokyo community on First Street in downtown Los Angeles, where my father worked and his parents were very involved in church and civic activities. I remember at that time (in the 1960’s and 1970’s) the white spire of Los Angeles City Hall was the tallest building I could see.

We lived in the suburbs but spent a lot of time roaming the First Street storefronts on weekends. We always visited the man who sat peacefully in a darkened storefront full of wading pools containing colorful koi fish; sampled a colorful manju pastry or shaved ice with azuki beans; or stopped at the grocery store where the owner always slipped each of us a green and pink package of rice paper candy with a little plastic toy inside. We waded through piles of papers, catalogs and reference books in my dad’s always bustling travel agency and office supply store, full of heavy steelcase desks, travel agents talking loudly on telephones and all kinds of people from the neighborhood constantly coming and going. We explored the dusty display cases full of office supplies and played “office” by trying out all the different kinds of staplers and multi-hole punchers to discover how they worked and what sounds they made. For us, a good day’s “work” at the office consisted of making thousands of pieces of confetti with those hole punchers and putting them into a plastic bag to take home. In the back room of the travel agency, we watched the noisy teletype machine (look but don’t touch!) as it spit out reams of punched paper coded with mysterious messages. We helped ourselves to scrap paper in the wastebaskets to make drawings, origami or huge three dimensional forms held together with cellophane tape.

My mom walked us around the block to visit my grandmother Nana and her friends as they laughed together and made ikebana arrangements and bonkei (miniature landscapes, complete with live green moss and tiny houses). Then we visited Grandpa and a roomful of his friends who were constantly playing go with silent intensity, until someone would lose a game and break the silence with a shout, sweeping a hand across the board to send the smooth black and white game pieces flying with a clatter. The other men would chuckle, then return to their silent strategizing. We ate dinners with family and friends at the Far East Cafe, where wooden partitions blocked most of the view but none of the sound. We were small so spent hours on hands and knees crawling beneath the partitions, playing hide and seek or tag and spying on the people eating at tables around us, as the adults at our table talked and talked and talked.

I didn’t appreciate till much later that this close knit Japanese American community that helped raise us in Little Tokyo was something very special. As I later learned about the World War II evacuation of 110,000 Japanese Americans, which included members of both sides of my family, I realized that the community relationships forged during that time of hardship helped people persevere and - even more than that - rebuild, protect and celebrate Japanese American culture and civil rights on behalf of their parents as well as the generations that followed.

My father had volunteered to serve in the US Army during World War II while his parents and family members were incarcerated in the War Relocation Authority Japanese American internment camps. After the war his family returned to East Los Angeles, where they owned a liquor store. A few years later my dad took a leadership position with the local regional office of the Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights organization. As children we never thought twice about it when we saw my dad greet the Los Angeles Mayor and Councilmembers on a first name basis, or saw a black and white snapshot of our dad with a future United States President displayed in our home. But looking back now, I guess it was not too surprising that when I made my career choices decades later, that I chose a 30 year career working in public service at the community level where I felt I could really make the most difference. I grew up reinforced by the actions of similar role models around me.

My mom’s family influenced me with a very different but also significant way of life. My mom’s father, who we affectionately knew as Jichan, emigrated to the United States at age 16 and worked in so many different jobs that I still don’t think we know about them all. He was primarily a truck farmer in rural Cutler, California but I remember sitting on the floor at his feet for an entire afternoon, watching in wonderment as he ironed all of the family’s white dress shirts and clothing with perfect creases. My mom later explained that one of his early jobs was working in a laundry and as we observed his many other talents over the years, I realized that here was a man who could probably figure out how to do anything to make his way in the world. My grandmother Bachan was equally resourceful and talented. She was a young midwife who married my grandfather in Japan, but had to wait months longer to travel to the United States while my grandfather saved enough money to pay for her passage by ship. She told us that when she arrived at the port in San Francisco as an 18 year old bride, she was scared that no one would be there to meet her but finally found my grandfather in the crowd, awaiting her arrival. Her courage still astounds me.

My grandparents farmed together in Central California and raised a large, close knit family of eight children, four boys and four girls with a strong work ethic, optimism, kindness and compassion for others. My grandparents, uncles and aunts continued these farming traditions for 75 years. This side of the family has incredible longevity so my cousins and I have been blessed with many years of enjoying stories about our family’s adventures. All four of my uncles served in the US Army or Navy, some while their family was incarcerated during World War II in Poston, Arizona.

There is more to tell about Poston on another day, but for now suffice to say that my choosing to move to Arizona after college was not without some controversy as it was difficult for some in the family to understand why I would live in a place that held so many painful family memories from World War II. For me, that was one of the reasons to go. I did not intend to stay till the current day but found so many things to love about the desert, so many relationships and illuminating perspectives from the Japanese American community there, and so many opportunities to make just the difference that I hoped to make by trying to ensure that people impacted by institutional decisions have a voice in the decisions that directly impact them.

We live in an imperfect world, but the daily actions we take as individuals in the face of change can and do make incremental differences. It is a small lesson to remember daily but those increments do add up to significant change and progress if we persevere, as our elders have taught us.

These experiences and family influences play into the creative activities that will be the primary focus of my future Substack posts here. It feels right to anchor those posts in a bit of family history as a starting point.

Anna Akridge of the Arizona Desert Weavers and Spinners Guild is hosting a writing group that is providing prompts for some of my future posts. I started responding to Anna’s prompts in October, but soon realized that there was a preamble that I needed to write first so the writing group posts will start to appear, in time. Thank you to Anna and my fellow guild members for getting the self reflection ball rolling.

The photo accompanying this post is a handwoven tablescape that I made for the Tulare County Fair in September 2024. Dee Dee King of my Handweavers of the Valley Guild gave a presentation on log cabin weaving earlier this year. I grew fascinated with how the log cabin draft could be manipulated into different patterns so my tablescape includes three different handwoven log cabin variations. All were woven with red, white and blue cotton and wool on a Kessenich table loom (only four of the loom’s eight shafts are needed for the log cabin design). The Tulare County Fair officials created the theme of “Stars and Stripes” and I had my dad and uncles in mind as I wove this project, along with the many other veterans who have served our country. This tablescape was awarded first place in my category as well as the overall reserve Best of Show award in the Home Arts exhibit.