Touring Portland Japanese Garden
Last weekend, I met my high school classmate at the Portland Japanese Garden where I was treated to a private tour because he is on the board of the 12 acre garden. The esthetics live up to the claim they have created one of the most authentic Japanese Gardens in the world outside of Japan.
Proof of the garden’s popularity is that I drove around for half an hour before there was even one parking spot to be found. It seems that a large percentage of the visitors are from out of town.
Calvin Tanabe and I met at the ticketing enclosure and gate. What I found stirring is Calvin’s commitment for the sharing of our Japanese Heritage Values for the benefit of our larger American community. We entered the “Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gate”. The “Tanabe Gallery” adjacent to the gift shop provides the community with the year-round opportunity to deepen the visitors understanding of the art and culture of Japan.
We spent four hours sharing stories and reminiscing the path taken to this point in his life. I am humbled to know Calvin who, grew up and graduated with the 117 of us at OHS ’56 from the Eastern Oregon town of Ontario.
After medical school and training as a neurosurgeon he served in Viet Nam. His comments were that he kept himself totally consumed with work, as one of Portland’s top neurosurgeons, until his retirement and is currently enjoying his garden and fresh vegetables.
“Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Address” is a program established in 2014 with Oregon Health & Science and Portland State School of Public Health to offer differing perspectives on important topics related to public health. Each year a speaker is selected to bring diverse ideas to the community and encourage a free exchange of ideas.
The following day I toured the Japanese American Museum of Oregon on Flander Street. We toured the exhibit in the “Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery”.
What a privilege to know individuals like Cal and Mayho!
![Yuki Inagaki, Yuka Shimizu, Co...]()
Yuki Inagaki, Yuka Shimizu, Consul General Inagaki, Hiro Tojo
Dee Goto, Michi Hirata North
The newest Consulate General from Japan to Seattle is Hisao Inagaki. Three of us, Michi Hirata North, Concert Pianist and PianoTeacher; Yuka Shimizu, creator of the Bellevue Children’s Academy, and I were special guests to meet Consul Inagaki and his wife Yuki, arranged by Hiro Tojo.
Michi Hirata North and I are best friends because the Suzuki “Talent Education” for violin, cello and piano was first developed in Michi’s home in Tokyo. I helped start the Seattle Suzuki School at Holy Names Academy where I helped interpret when the first teacher from Japan, Mihoko Yamaguchi Hirata, came to develop the program started by Sister Annella.
Because of Covid-isolation there had been no large welcome events as usual for the new Consul General. We arrived at 6:30 pm and didn’t leave until after 11pm because we had such a good time talking and telling stories around the seven course dinner created by Chef Kenichiro Tsushima.
The story of this experience will certainly be retold for several years to come. There is nothing I enjoy more than person to person, in depth, discussions and sharing the stories of what brings each of us to our “present” circumstances.
![See all the fruit bulbs from wh...]()
See all the fruit bulbs from
which the flowers originally hung?
Where am I putting my energy toward a fulfilling life? I just spent the last hour redirecting the energy of the fuchsia plants hanging across the front of our house. What we want are thriving branches with flowers to show off beauty and inspire us.
Watering daily is a given, but in the month or two that we’ve had the plants, I’ve not paid attention to the beauty for the rest of this year’s growing. The first thing I do is to pull off the dead flowers and bulbs that become fruit if I want the energy to be redirected to new flower buds.
Similarly, in my life, I am thinking of where my energy is directed beyond the “watering” or daily essentials. I need to cut off putting energy into what I no longer want?
My goal is to develop inspiring Japanese Heritage related stories that are flowers, of a legacy of values for a better world, that carries on to the next generations.
![GOING TO SCHOOL ON A BUS]()
Our granddaughter started attending school “in person” this week after a year of Covid-Isolation virtual schooling. Our daughter is telling everyone how fortunate it is, the bus stop is at the bottom of our driveway. Our granddaughter is excited because part of the social experiences of school are the gatherings at the bus stop and the rides to school.
I googled for images of the early school busses and there are no pictures of anything similar to my experience seventy-five years ago when I started school in the farming community of Sand Hollow, Idaho.
School was eight miles southwest along the graveled roads to Notus, Idaho. I was at the end of the bus route. My playmates along Sand Hollow Road north, Patsy and Jerry Stewart, went to the New Plymouth, Idaho, school. The bus was a blue box on the back of a flatbed truck. We sat on the benches around the edges. History says that was the seating arrangements of the first busses.
I have a scar where my left knee got hooked on a nail as the bus came to a stop and I hurriedly stood to get off at my stop. It was no big deal. Mom put on a little mercurochrome. I don’t even remember a band aid.
Each school morning, the bus driver picked up Virginia Butcher first. She got to sit with him in the front cab. The Butchers lived closer to school, where the driver started each morning, than he drove to start his route at our house. Virginia was still in high school, but that’s the first love story I watched in real life because they also went to the Baptist Church in Notus and I think I remember when they got married.
One day in second grade, I missed the bus home. The Notus School had all twelve grades in the same building. Elementary kids got out earlier than the upper grades. Dickie Randall and I went out to the field behind the school where he decided to dig for some worms and we forgot the time. Dickie and I started walking home. About a mile later, one of the sons of a neighboring farmer, from over the hill from Dickie’s farm, came by and offered us a ride home. Mom had cautioned me to never ride with strangers. I didn’t know them. I refused to get in the car. Dickie got in. They drove slowly as I continued to walk. I walked and they drove about another mile when Dad came looking for me. I wasn’t scared, I just followed rules. There was no discussion in the car. When we got home, I had my usual chores. Dad went back out to the field.
Another time, the small bridge over a drain ditch, three miles from our farm, was out of commission. The bus driver let the ten or so of us students off the bus and we all walked the rest of the way home. Again, there was more discussion about the condition of the bridge than of wondering why I was late. That was all part of life.
Today, 2021, as I run an early morning errand, many of the mothers are out with their children at the bus stops. There is concern if the students get home a few minutes late.
On the other hand, I was fortunate to have a bus. Grandpa Sam had to walk the three miles to their school in Bully Creek, Oregon, in the early 1940s. My mother-in-law remembers going to school in South Seattle on a horse drawn wagon around 1915. The very first school buses, known as school hacks or school trucks, started out as horse-drawn carriages around 1886 — and most people didn't take them! Walking to school was expected, and these early buses only picked up kids who lived REALLY far away.
Going to school and riding on a bus has been the same for close to one hundred years.
![The picture is worth a 1000 ...]()
The picture is worth a 1000 words!
Mom and Grandma were banned from the kitchen on Mother's Day. 11-year-old found a recipe for Japanese Pancakes.
Here's what it looked like. I will post the recipe later.
It's my understanding that one can google Japanese recipes. I did so and found the Japanese Pancake recipe.
It's intimidating to use my electronic devices, but I'm working to do the best I can and keep learning. Exciting times ahead with the resources in my household!
![MY DAD THE FISH MAN]()
MY DAD THE FISH MAN
“Miya sama, Miya sama”, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s MIKADO was heard out of the Dodge truck as Dad loaded it each day - Japanese can goods from our basement cellar storage, Tofu from Amano’s, Gas at Kagi’s, Bread from Home Town Bakery, Dairy from Home Dairy and Fish and groceries from Ontario Fish Market.
The customers were the wives of Japanese farmers within a 70 mile radius from Ontario, Oregon, called the Treasure Valley on the Idaho/Oregon border. In the early years, 1940s and 1950s. We were all so poor we didn’t have time or cars to go in to town for groceries.
Dad liked playing his violin, his musical saw and singing in the church choir. He installed a musical horn on his truck with four notes. As he entered each farmer’s driveway he played a short musical tune.
Usually, the wife was out helping with something like weeding onions or thinning beets. She heard Dad’s music and came in from the field to do her shopping from the shelves along the walls of the van and the huge icebox that held the fish and meat products in the back. Soda pop was in crates in front of the shelves.
Dad bagged the groceries and carried them into the farmhouse kitchen and maybe had a cup of tea while he got paid and wrote out her order for his next delivery.
Dad was also the carrier of news and gossip. I often helped him in the summer, when school was out, so he could get home sooner. It was my job to close the icebox, clean off the cutting board and knife used to cut off the amount of fish or meat the customer wanted and take down the scale.
As I sat back down on one of the soda pop crates and went back to reading my Nancy Drew book, I could hear wafts of Dad’s laughter out from the kitchens.
On the way home on Thursdays, from Caldwell Ice Company, Dad loaded all the walking space on the truck floor with 100 pound blocks of ice for the Ontario Fish Market to put in their cold storage. We cut up the ice with ice picks for sale and for the ice boxes.
“The Fish Man” is unique to the Japanese Ethnic communities in America and mostly along cities on the West Coast where there were rural communities of Japanese Heritage residents. Japan is surrounded by the sea and my grandpa remembers the “Fish Man” walking to their farm houses, shouldering a pole with a basket on each end with samples of fish for sale.
In Japan there are still businesses with a fleet of vans with food items that supply households that are remote and sometimes the elderly that have a hard time going shopping. With Covid-Isolation we are experiencing door to door deliveries, but we don’t shop from a motor vehicle nor do we get serenaded with a musical horn.
![NOTRE DAME HIGH SCHOOL S...]()
NOTRE DAME HIGH SCHOOL SWIMMER
Our grandson, Zac, qualified for the Long Course Summer Junior Nationals. He did the 100 Fly with a smoking 56.35 at the Irvine Spring Cup Meet.
The butterfly stroke is one of the most difficult swimming strokes. It requires an exact technique, strength, rhythm and takes a lot of practice.
He goes to Notre Dame High School, not the college. I love their slogan: 'Educating Hearts and Minds'."
Swimming has been one of his family's main sports. Swimming develops flexibility in muscles and joints, strengthening muscles groups of both the upper and lower body without dangers of impact injuries. Mostly, it takes Practice, Practice, Practice - and many years of parent driving to practice and swim meets!
The USA Swimming Futures Championships and Speedo Summer Invitational will take place the first week of August 2021.
Go Zac!!!
![YIN - YANG]()
YIN - YANG
The Yin/Yang principle suggests, we are constantly influenced by good and bad choices as we live daily. The goal is to keep a balance. Yin (literally the ‘shady place’) is the dark area. Yang (literally the “sunny place’) is the brightly lit part of our lives. It is not the getting rid of the dark that will lead to fulfillment but rather an understanding of both dark and light.
A Japanese heritage example of this concept is the acceptance of elements of the Yakuza — Japanese Mafia. After both the 1995 Kobe earthquake and 2011 Fukushima Tsunami disasters reports were that the Yakuza were the first responders in helping.
One of the notorious Yakuza individuals in the Seattle area before WWII was a person referred to as “Kinpachi”. Two stories exemplify Kinpachi’s impact on our community.
As we gathered in Jack and Del Uchida’s kitchen in the early 1990s, on Seattle’s Beacon Hill, we shared our first OMOIDE stories. Jack told us about accidentally running into Kinpachi on the streets of Tokyo on one of his visits to Japan. He said, “I recognized him from a distance because he had an imposing body and his arms hung long like an ape.” Kinpachi had been deported back to Japan in the late 1940s because of his unlawful activities. Jack’s comments as he told us of the incident was that they met as friends.
Tak Kubota told me a story of when he was young and ran the movie projector at Nippon Kan Theater on 6th Avenue in Seattle’s International district. The Yakuza arrived regularly to get paid for being protectors before the show could go on. It is my understanding the same issue was true for a number of the early hotel and restaurant businesses owned by the first Japanese to immigrate and have businesses in Seattle in the early 1900s. There were incidents of racial harassment but Tak indicated the protection was extortion and uncalled for.
None of us were afraid of Kinpachi. His wife was a Sunday school teacher for Sam and my girls. His children are still upstanding members of our community.
Does that mean we approve of what Kinpachi did? No, that’s why we tell the story of a bad example. His career choices were wrong -- he was deported and he had to leave his family behind.
Every community and each social group have Yin/Yang elements. If you make bad choices there are consequences. Yakuza stories are “Yin” - colorful and fun to tell - for “Yang” results?!
Bio notes: Tak Kubota’s family were the creators of South End Seattle’s Kubota Japanese Garden and Tak also had a hand in establishing Kawabe House for retirement. Jack Uchida was one of the early Boeing Engineers and also engineered the famous Tsutakawa Fountains. He was likely on a trip to Japan to deal with one of the fountains.
![Drawn my granddaughter]()
Drawn my granddaughter
With the beginning of “in-person” Seattle Mariner baseball games, after a year of Covid-Isolation, I am encouraged and equally uplifted as I remember the experience of Kenji’s gift. It is also heart warming to watch NHK television and see how the Japanese value handicapped participants, as the 2021 Olympic torch is being carried around Japan in anticipation of the Summer Olympics.
It was the first of October 2013, the end of that Seattle Mariner Baseball season. My husband, Sam, and I were given front row Mariner tickets in right field behind Ichiro— still the heart throb baseball hero for those of Japanese heritage. While we waited for the start of the game, I chose to stand and dance around to keep warm because there was no one in front of us to shield us from the cold breeze. I began to introduce myself to the fans around me. There was a family of three behind our seats—a mother and her two sons. It looked as though they were from Japan and had made a special trip to Seattle to watch Ichiro, and they were carrying an Ichiro sign.
Since I speak Japanese, I struck up a conversation. Kenji exhibited “Down Syndrome” symptoms and the mother explained, “Kenji worked seven years to save money for this trip as a bus boy and a dishwasher in a restaurant. He insisted we include his older brother, Yosuke, on this trip.”
I decided to make it a party with a few more of the fans around us and Sam ran to get refreshments to share. We hollered to get Ichiro’s attention and he did acknowledge us once.
One of the fans with season tickets explained, “ Balls often come our way. I will give it to the boy if I catch one.”
Later, one ball did come our way. The people behind the Japanese guests caught it and gave it to Kenji.
I have no memory of who the opponents were or who won the game.
As Sam and I climbed the stairs to leave, the mother stopped us and handed me the ring she was wearing. It was a fad in Japan at that time to make beaded jewelry. This one had a cross hanging. The mother said it was a memento for me to keep.
The ring in still in my jewelry box and keeps reminding me of the ripple effects of Kenji’s heritage values and the gift of his story we can pass on.
![PICTURE CREATED WITH PRES...]()
PICTURE CREATED WITH PRESSED FLORA
by Mariko Maita
HURRAY! I had both Pfizer vaccinations over a month ago and the four of us at our house are getting out. We are still avoiding public gatherings so car trips is our choice.
Since March of 2020 our household of four and our cousin’s household of four have contained our socialization to our two households. The younger six are on a spring break RV excursion to Idaho. Day before, they drove past Sand Hollow where I grew up. Highway 84 touches a corner of my father’s farm.
Yesterday, I came back from Raymond, WA, after an overnight with Mariko-san. We spent 24 hours of almost non-stop conversation about our lives that includes both of us having lost our spouses in the last decade and what we want for our future.
Research confirms that talking and social support are the best ways to handle “Stress”.
Mariko is an artist known for creating pictures with pressed flora. For example, she looks at a hydrangea petal and it reminds her a bird head and then she layers other flora to complete a picture. One of her most impressive works is a large piece that includes a girl playing her guitar; all parts drawn with pressed flowers.
When she created the “Fish Picture” she says, “It was made by accident. I was making something else, then one petal came to my eyes to tell me ‘tiny goldfish’. One dahlia petal shows the fish’s mouth. I cut some petals for the body, tail and fin. Seaweed are horsetails.
Mariko’s art is available at the South Bend Riverside Gallery on the main road to the ocean on southwest Washington coast highway.
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