Today I made my annual trek up to Corvallis to visit my dear friend, Christine Gough and her third-grade class at Letitia Carson Elementary School. This continues a twenty-eight-year history of a visit around my telling of an American story, of one family of Japanese ancestry who experienced the forced evacuation from their home to imprisonment in a concentration camp in Colorado during World War II in a place called Camp Amache.

     The back story here dates back to 1998–I had been visiting the fourth-grade class of my close friend, Diane Lohman, for some ten years telling the story of my family’s experiences in a concentration camp during World War II as part of a curriculum she had developed around one of the worst Civil Rights violations in our nation’s history. From our relationship Diane was aware of my family’s experiences during the war, and further was aware that curriculum materials in California state curricula about this event in our nation’s history was pathetically non-existent and she wanted to remedy that for her students.

     I visited her class and shared several stories from my experience in camp, and the kids asked me questions–I told more stories and answered more questions, and this went on for a short time. It was for me a fun and rewarding time, and from Diane’s comments it was an illuminating time for her students. 

     Then a devastating thing happened, Diane died on the second of January of 1998 from a burst aneurism, a shock to all her friends and a disaster for her students. In that moment my arrangement with her for my visits to her class to share my family’s story ended. Then, a very young new teacher, Christine Julian, was assigned to take over her class mid-year. Christine was aware of the arrangements we had for my visits, and she asked me in honor of Diane if I would continue to visit Diane’s students, now her students. I agreed, and the new arrangements with Christine carried on my visitations. We shared this arrangement for the next nine years when we were interrupted by my family’s move from our home in Berkeley to Eugene, Oregon in June of 2007.

     Soon after our move to Eugene, in 2008 I established a relationship with a teacher of a fifth-grade class at the elementary school where my eldest grandson, Casey, was a student. I in addition arranged visits to a social studies teacher’s classes at a middle-school, a teacher of another fifth-grade class in another school, and followed with presentations to the social studies classes at a local high school, and one to a history class and an anthropology class at the University of Oregon.

     By this time, I had prepared a full PowerPoint presentation with slides in place of my story telling. I also gave presentations to adult audiences in some eight settings here in Eugene.

     In today’s presentation with Christine’s students, I began with teaching them a number of Japanese words that crop up during the PowerPoint presentation–then we played the presentation over the AV system and followed that with a question-and-answer session.

    We ended today’s session with me sitting with a group of five students who had read the book, Two Faces, that I co-authored with a friend about our experiences during World War II to answer any questions the students had and talk about the issues from the book.