Isao's comments at the building naming ceremony for the Colleges at La Rue, UCDavis, Sunday, December 15, 2002

Bob, Jim, Alice, Nancy (and hopefully Joe, Grace and Susan pretty soon).

This is wild!

Thanks to Alice for surfing the net on a hunch and getting us launched on this trip. That's a great home page Jim.(By the way , in which file is the photo of the Santa Rita team that Alice found?)

This is a rim shot but if anybody is in California two Sundays from now,there's a building dedication ceremony on the UCDavis campus which can provide a venue for a meeting. In this day of speed and internet bookings, things are possible that weren't fourty year agso. It's at 2pm Dec l5 at The Colleges at La Rue in Davis, 20 miles from Sacramento. I'm attaching the rationale behind this.At first I thought there was a catch because these things happen mainly to dead people. Yesterday I learned that students are already living in these residential quarters so I asked if it was okay to wander over there without shocking people seeing someone live associated with the building they're in.

The attached photo is my 9 year old daughter Esumi and me at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan where I have been teaching a UCDavis course each summer for Univ of California students from all the campuses like Berkeley , UCLA,etc. She's named after the village where my father emigrated from. It translates as "living on the high waves". In California lingo, it's another way of saying "surfer girl"

Let's keep this up and good idea, Alice, to share all our emails with each other.

Isao

...and later...

Thanks for the response and the additional information. You're right about the destruction and the impact of the violence in Central America. People have had to escape and they are right here in Davis as well other parts of the California Central Valley. When we were getting immigrant groups to get counted for the 2000 census, calls came in for interpreters since after finding people living in doorless back yards, chicken coops, sheds , etc missed by census takers instructed to "start by knocking on people's doors" , the next challenge was to communicate. I got calls for interpreters who could speak Kanjobal , Mam and Quiche -languages from the Guatemala highlands.

I recall getting a letter from you when I was in the Philippines about one of your close friends who was on the team that went back to Santa Rita and some concerns about various people we knew getting framed on trumped up charges. Today I'm meeting with a graduate student whose parents are Lebanese Hondurans. Her family name is Saca and I'll check if there is any connection to the store owner Saleh Sacan known as " El Turko" in Santa Rita Did you go back or stay in touch with some of the Santa Ritans or through buddies who went there? What were the names of the Cornellians who followed up in Santa Rita?

That's a neat business you have. About 25 years ago, I was the associate director of the National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte ,Montana and was in touch with all the alternative energy folks all over the country. The Northwest had a lot of energized people and the area you're living in now still must have a critical mass of folks with an ecological orientation . I'm somewhat familiar with Washington since I grew up on the Yakima Indian Reservation area around Wapato . My father came to America by getting off the lumber ship on which he was a carpenter, walking 18 hours from Anacortes to Seattle and eventually finding people from his village in Japan 180 miles to the east farming on land leased from the Indians in the Yakima Valley.

Isao

Hi Alice,

This is pretty impressive stuff you started! Great to know Joe is on board now. We would do well for each of us to print out brief chronologies of our lives or at least for the last 40 years and see where the connections are. For example I went to the 92 NGO part of the UN Conference on the Environment in Rio so that makes at least three of us in Brazil. What are the dates for the Cornell gathering? Once I know that, I can see if it it's possible to join all of you.

I have the Central Valley Partnership meetings to run in mid June and then I'm off to Japan with my daughter who will enter the Esumi village school where my father attended some 90 years ago. We've worked it out with the school so she can enter when school finishes in California and join the last month of the school year which ends mid July in the village.

During my father's school days, the village school was packed with several hundred kids. Today's enrollment is down to 33. The village sits on the southwest tip of Honshu island with the Pacific ocean hitting its shores and behind it are mountains full of monkeys and wild boars that come down to raid people's gardens and rice paddies. Almost every house in the village has someone who has emigrated to Brazil, Peru, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Hawaii or the West coast of the USA. .There's an Esumi village association in Los Angeles that gets together for New Year and a summer picnic drawing a couple hundred people each year. I'm in an ironic position of being the emisarry filling in people with talks at the California gatherings with stories about the village. and checking with people in the village about their relatives and what's going on in America.

Isao

Hi Jim,

This is Cosmic! You're going to drive through California right about the time of the dedication ceremony Just in case you do make it near Sacramento and Davis Sunday afternoon,take the Woodland 113 exit off of Interstate 80 going towards San Francisco. That whole area is part of the UCDavis campus. You;ll soon see the Hutchinson road exit off of 113 and this will take you to La Rue. The building with my name is within the Emmy Werner Courtyard at the Colleges at La Rue. With your rig, you can park along Extension drive which you can get on as you turn left before Hutchinson hits La Rue or go on La Rue and turn left at Orchard and there is another big parking lot there. The ceremony and reception is between 2-4. If you come on MOnday, try calling my cell phone 530-219-5112 as the home phone is tied up with the internet too often .(Just in case it's 530-753-3148). If things speed or slow down and your schedule or itinerary changes, give a call and leave a message on the cell phone with your contact number. Repeat the number slowly as my hearing is pretty shot.

Isao

Hello Alice, Joe, Jim, Nancy, Bob,

Thanks for the dates of the Cornell Reunion. This helps in working out some possibilities. I'm on the boards of several organizations including Food First and Global Exchange which have scheduled semi annual meetings overlapping the Cornell dates. These do get changed so keep me posted as I'll be on standby.

So we have a direct link to Teddy Bears! As we get caught up with each other, don't be surprised if we discover many other places of commonality . Picking up on the story of Alice's forbear's letter to Theordore Roosevelt, my " letter to Roosevelt " experience involves FDR. I grew up on the Yakima Indian reservation in eastern Washington" where 125 immigrant families from Japan were farming on land leased from the Indians. When World War II broke out, the FBI appeared one night not long after Pearl Harbor and took my father away . This left us in a dilemna with everything up in the air. My mother and I were wondering what to do come spring when it was time to put in the crops. We were farming with horses then and it was obvious that we needed our father back but how were we do that. That's when my mother told me "Write to the President".So I did . Needless to say, I never got a reply and instead FDR put out an executive order that directed our family to a series of concentration camps -First to the Portland Oregon livestock pavilion, then to Heart Mountain ,Wyoming and finally to 'Tule Lake California.That was my introduction to California. This letter writing episode plus my other reflections on the camps is included in " Through the Eyes of Innocents: Children witness WW II" by my colleague Emmy Werner . She was a teenager in Germany during the war and one day discovered she could no longer visit her cousins in France. She recently completed another book :Conspiracy of Decency about the Danish coming to the defense of the Jews in Denmark.

After 40 plus years, each of us have accumulated tons of stories including those of our families and our lives before Honduras that we may never haven't gotten around to sharing.

Isao*