WHAT IS YOUR IMMIGRATION STORY?
I'm half Japanese, half white. My mom, who is full Japanese, her grandparents came from Japan to the US. They came around the early 1900s and they were farmers, and they had some land and were farming and had a bunch of kids. Then World War II happened, and their family was sent to concentration camps in the United States. And essentially all of the children ended up splitting up and moving all across the US to different places for school. And so, it really split up the family.
WHAT DOES YOUR CURRENT JOURNEY LOOK LIKE?
10 years ago, my grandfather passed down to me a journal. And he told me; this journal is from my dad. So that would be my great grandfather. The whole thing is handwritten in Japanese, and I have no idea what it says. At the time, I was starting to study Japanese in high school. He said, I'm going to entrust it to you in hopes that someday you can translate it. Well, 10 years went by, and I did study Japanese for 10 years. But I still don't think it's to the level of being able to translate this old handwritten Japanese. And so, I remembered it. And I thought, wow, my grandpa's getting older, and I never fulfilled his vision of having this translated. So instead, I decided to hire a translator. And the journal turned out to be a memoir of his entire life. And it captures the whole immigration story starting from his life in Japan in the late 1800s. It's basically a gold mine of information of family heritage, sharing what it's like to immigrate and that difficult life story and all the different events and challenges. And so that is a very exciting project that I'm currently working on. I mentioned that the whole family was split up during World War II. So, we don't really know most of our relatives. But I recently connected with my second cousin on Facebook, she is very interested in family heritage as well. And she was telling me that she is working on a family tree and asked if I would be interested in seeing it since her great grandfather is the same as mine. We're the same generation.
The biggest part of my identity is that I'm a Christian. My faith in Jesus is the most important thing for me. And what's really interesting is that my grandparents ended up becoming Christian in the middle of their life. My family always believed that the first people in our family to become Christian were our grandparents. But one of the fascinating things about reading my great grandfather's memoir is that he also became a Christian and talked about his faith. In his memoir, it's not just his life story. It also has random philosophical topics and also a lot of medical notes. Reading about that and getting a sense of not just his story, but also his mind and the things that he was interested in was really fascinating and really exciting to uncover and learn about.
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What are your hopes for the future?
Looking towards the future, I'm hoping to really refine and polish everything and hopefully publish a book and be able to share it with my relatives and family so they can read the story. And maybe there's more relatives I don't know about who would want to read it. Our family must have had a writing gene because one of the siblings of my grandfather, my grand aunt, apparently wrote an autobiography. It's only at a few libraries so I talked to my local library and they're borrowing it from another library from University of Arizona. So, in the next day or so I'm going to go to the library and pick it up. I'm really excited to read that and learn more about my family. So, it's really just this big mystery of like uncovering all of the history that I never knew about our family. It's kind of crazy how much history there is that we don't know about and have to put a lot of effort into learning about and researching.
