Gil Asakawa
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This article was part of a package of articles that ran in the Denver Post on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2003. I've also included the main story in the Post's package, as well as an extra article that the Post didn't have room for.

Japanese American leaders keep Amache's memories alive

By Gil Asakawa
Special to The Denver Post

Sunday, February 16, 2003 - Among those working to keep alive the memories and messages of Amache are the following six community leaders.

Derek Okubo

Derek Okubo inherited an interest in preserving the memory of Camp Amache from his father, Hank, who died a year ago.

Hank had been interned at Amache, while his wife, Aiko Jane Okubo, had been at Minidoka in Idaho. Hank was a familiar Colorado spokesman about the injustice of internment.

After his death, son Derek took over. "My role is to help move this process along and to bring in new blood to make sure this thing continues," he says.

Okubo, 42, is the director of the Denver chapter of the National Civic League, which he describes as "the oldest good government organization in the nation." A graduate of UNC, he has always been involved in community affairs. He worked at Big Brothers, then as a community specialist in then-Gov. Roy Romer's office, but says he always had the Japanese American experience on his mind.

"I didn't appreciate how awesome it was that my dad and mom spoke out until I got older and saw how the others didn't want to." Even so, he didn't visit Amache until last year.

"After Dad died, I went down there. When I saw those grave stones of those babies, it crossed my mind why my Dad was so passionate about it. They're just out there in the middle of nowhere. The site was like hallowed ground. I told them I would not let them be forgotten."

***

Mariagnes Medrud

When Mariagnes Medrud was just 17, she was faced with a difficult decision. Interned at Minidoka with her mother and brother, she was given a Loyalty Questionnaire along with all the adults in camp.

Medrud, now 76, struggled with two questions in particular. Question 27 asked, "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?" Question 28 asked, "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or organization?"

"I was home here, I was American," she remembers, "so I signed, 'Yes,' 'Yes."'

Both her parents had answered no to both and had renounced their citizenship.

"Everyone put a lot of pressure on me to withdraw my form," Medrud remembers. "My father thought the whole family would get sent to Japan in a POW exchange."

A teacher of the Japanese martial art kendo, her father had been picked up by the FBI and spent most of the war in Justice Department prisons. But since his daughter stubbornly refused to change her "yes" answers, he changed his instead to keep the family in the U.S.

As it happened, Medrud was the one sent to Japan, voluntarily after the war. She signed up to work for the Occupation Forces in Tokyo, met and married her husband, then moved to Boulder, where she taught until her retirement.

She's now active in the Boulder Asian Pacific Alliance, the Japanese American Citizens League, Asian Roundtable of Colorado, and various Boulder community organizations and commissions.

***

Tom Migaki

Tom Migaki is the third in command under Mayor Wellington Webb. Since 1999, he has served as manager of general services for the City and County of Denver, in charge of five agencies: Purchasing, Theaters and Arenas, Public Offices/Facilities, Utilities and Central Services.

Migaki met Webb while working as an accountant in the city auditor's office when Webb held that position. A Denver native, he attended South High School, graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in accounting and earned an MBA from Regis.

His father, who lived in Portland before WWII, was interned at Minidoka. His mother lived in Nebraska and was not interned. "The irony is that some of my relatives in Nebraska had German POWs working for them during the war," Migaki says.

He's involved with organizations that include the Japanese American Citizen League and the Japan America Society of Colorado and credits his boss with inspiring city employees to be involved in their communities.

Migaki grew up in a culture that was both Japanese and American, partly because his Japanese-speaking grandparents lived in Denver. "I guess I was raised with Japanese values because they worked as a baseline you live by, how you work hard and do your best."

***

Carolyn Takeshita

Carolyn Takeshita, 65, was 4 when she was interned at Poston, Ariz. While there, her father got permission to move the entire family to Colorado to work as farm hands during the sugar beet harvest season, and after the harvest they were allowed to stay.

"We settled in the Japanese section of Denver, where the hotels and group homes were all Japanese. Along Champa, Arapahoe, Curtis, Lawrence, it was sort of like a ghetto," she recalls. "There were lots of Nihonjin (Japanese) there. And when Amache closed everybody came up here too. I remember as a kid that Denver had its own Little Tokyo. Then gradually people left and moved back to where they came from."

Takeshita spent her teenage years attending Cole Junior High and Manual High School (where many of the area's Japanese Americans graduated), then earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in education and speech pathology from the University of Denver. She worked for Jefferson County Schools for years and now works for Frontier Airlines. She often speaks publicly about internment.

Her husband, Mickey volunteered to help dismantle a former barracks from the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming so it could be shipped and reassembled at the Japanese American National Museum.

"He called me that first day and was so emotional about it. He said, 'This is the most important thing I've ever done in my life."' She later joined the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which bought a piece of the land on the former camp site and is trying to re-create the camp.

***

Kerry Hada

Hada, a Denver native and an attorney, graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in 1967. "I remember a lot of discrimination," he says. "I'd have kids come up to me and say, 'Hey wow, here's a Jap!' and they'd point their finger at me and go 'Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh" - you know, like the sound of a machine gun."

In 2002, Hada applied twice for judgeships in the District Court and was turned down twice. He is now waiting to hear about an appointment as presiding judge for Aurora Municipal Court.

Although his parents spoke some Japanese when he was growing up, Hada considers his upbringing that of an all-American kid. His father never wanted to visit Japan, but after his father's death last year, Hada and his mother went on a 19-day trip to Japan.

"I was really awestruck by the beauty of Japan and its people," he says. "I was embarrassed to have waited until I was in my fifties to go. It made me want to get closer to my cultural heritage, and to get to know the rest of the world."

***

Marge Taniwaki

Even though she was only 7 months old when she arrived at Manzanar, Marge Taniwaki has vivid memories of her internment years.

Now 61, she says she has a suppressed memory of the internment camp's hospital, where she was quarantined for three weeks with chicken pox. She remembers being in the hospital room and can describe the room, her sister singing a lullabye to stop her from crying, and even "the dust particles in the sunlight over my head." Her mother later confirmed that the hospital rooms had cracks in the walls where the dust swirled in from outside.

Taniwaki grew up in Denver's postwar Japanese community near downtown Denver, where her father worked in a restaurant at 35th and Larimer streets, but she wasn't raised speaking Japanese. "I never learned our language because of my parents' fear of what might happen to us. I regret to this day not learning at my mother's knee."

She was a cheerleader and head girl in Manual's class of '59, but in the decades since she has become politicized. In the late '60s she met a group of radicals in California, made the second-ever pilgrimage to Manzanar and learned more about internment. "It was difficult in those early years," she says. "There was very little available literature, and I found few people who would talk about it."

Now she talks freely about internment and also leads an Asian Pacific American readers' theater group called Making Waves. She and her husband, Leo Griep-Ruiz, also share concerns about politics and culture in Latin America on their bi-monthly radio program, La Luch Sicuge ("The Struggle Continues") on Boulder public radio station KGNU, 88.5 FM. At 8 p.m. Feb. 19, she will discuss the Day of Remembrance on "Drawing Line with Reggie Rivers," along with longtime Japanese American spokesman Bill Hosokawa.