gotohealth's Blog

 Floyd Wilfred Schmoe (September 21, 1895 – April 20, 2001) was a Quaker, pacifist, author, college professor, marine biologist, and park ranger living in the Seattle, Washington, area for most of his life. He earned Japan's highest civilian honor for his peace activism and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times.

 

As part of my job of collecting documentation for the U of WA Suzzallo Library Special Collections, I had contacted Floyd Schmoe and Reverend Emery Andrews because of their major roles in helping with the Japanese community experience in the Pacific Northwest.

 

I was excited to be invited to lunch with Andrews by  Schmoe and his second wife Tomiko in their Juanita, WA, home. Floyd and Tomiko had met during his work with “Houses for Hiroshima”. His wife, Ruth Schmoe, died on March 15, 1969.

 

It was a usual busy 1970 morning with getting a baby sitter for my three-yr-old, who to be there when our kindergartener came back from school to Sam and my Seattle Capitol Hill home on 23rd Avenue East. 

 

Driving our white 1967 Chevy Malibu the 10 minutes to the Japanese Baptist Church on Seattle’s First Hill, where he was still the active pastor, I picked up Reverend Andrews. Then we headed down Boren and Rainier Avenues to I-90 and the Morrow Floating Bridge. Halfway across the bridge, I ran out of gas! By good fortune, there was a police car right behind me! In those days they carried a gallon container with gas in the trunk of their black squad car. He gave me some gas and I was able to fill up at the Mizuta owned station on Mercer Island. We were not late for our Gyoza & Tempura Bento lunch.

 

Most of the lunch conversation centered around Schmoe’s son-in-law, Gordon Hirabayashi and Gordon’s wife Esther, who was Schmoe’s daughter. That’s when I learned about Gordon’s activities and how Gordon hitch-hiked to his prison detentions for breaking the law with his defiant protest of EO9066 curfew. I was able to share with Schmoe that my mother told me, Gordon was her 5th grade classmate at the Thomas School in Auburn, WA, in 1928.

 

Reverend Andrews is remembered for his “Blue Box” that made several trips from Seattle to Idaho’s Minidoka with needed items from the storage items in the church gymnasium. He also moved his family to Twin Falls to serve his parishioners. According to Emery’s son Brooks, “We would always travel in what was called the “Blue Box.” The Blue Box was an old, I think it was a Ford truck body with a, with a, just a box on the back of it, and it looked like a bus. A very square–shaped bus. And it was blue and it was affectionately known as the Blue Box, because everywhere you went, you rode, rode in the Blue Box.” Someone must have a picture?

 

Schmoe and Andrews contributed far more than simple Compassion and Kindness to the Japanese people in America. They dedicated their lives to our community. The last time I visited Floyd Schmoe was in 2000 when he was105-years-old, and still sharp, at the Ida Culver House on 65th Avenue in north Seattle. He passed the following year. 

 In 1942 during WWII with Japan, about 9000 of us Japanese were put into prison in Southern Idaho where we lived in Block 5. I was eleven and my brother Ted was twelve. Dad, being a businessman, had to be busy all the time. So, out of sheer boredom during those bleak times of imprisonment, he went out for days into the desert with a crow bar and a helmet to look for rocks for a Japanese Rock Garden. I don’t know how he had the ability to go outside the barbed wire fences of Minidoka, but I think the authorities figured that even if we prisoners really wanted to escape, it was all a dry, too hot or too cold desert, and we would come back to the barracks to survive.

 

One day he discovered this one rock that looked like a stove pipe. It finally took him two months of digging to uncover the whole thing, and he found the hole went all the way from the top to bottom of the rock. It weighs over a ton. Then, Dad had the dilemma of how he was going to get it back to his rock garden, so he built his “Ox Cart”.

 

There were these piles of left-over wood from when the government had to quickly slap together the barracks to imprison us. I don’t know where Dad got the wheels. I think we could order them from farming equipment catalogs like the Sears Catalogs. Dad attached a rope to the front of the cart so he could pull it.

 

When Dad was ready, Ted and I were recruited to be the “Oxen”. We got up really early, while it was still cool, and walked about a mile into the desert with no roads. First, we had to get the rock on to the cart, so we turned the cart on it’s side and wedged the ton of the tall rock and cart upright. Dad pulled, while my brother and I pushed, laboring our way back around sage brush and over the rocks and ruts, back to his rock garden behind our barrack. 

 

When the war ended, the government had us list all our belongings. Dad listed the rocks as part of his belongings. For some reason the government didn’t question it and loaded all 68 rocks, several over a ton, onto a truck and brought them to Seattle. Now, I have them in my kind of secret Japanese Garden next to my house on Beacon Hill.

Auntie Chiyo will be 99-years-old next month, May 2025. She has moved at least 16 times in her life. She had just turned sixteen when she was rounded up with the 9000+ Seattle Japanese and taken by bus to prison at the Puyallup assembly center in May of 1942, during WWII. 

 

We get together to play Shanghai Rummy a couple times a month so I asked her, “Since you could only take what you could carry, what did you carry?” And by the way, Chiyo keeps score and wins a lot of the games.

 

Looking down and remembering that heart breaking time, Auntie shared, “The hardest part was to give up our dog, Junie! She was a smart and cute Toy Fox Terrier. We took her to a Vet. It was sad!! Otherwise, we didn’t have much anyway so it wasn’t hard to figure out ‘only what I could carry’”.  

 

“Wasn’t it hard to leave your ‘home’ and go live in one room at the Puyallup fair ground in the animal stalls you had to stuff bags with straw for a mattress and use the community outdoor toilets?” 

 

“Well, it wasn’t easy, but we made do! I had my friends!! And I still see some of these friends once a month because the Seattle Nisei 442nd Vets organization in Seattle, volunteers a lunch program for over maybe 60 of us on the first Friday of every month. Seeing friends is the best!”, she commented with her usual enthusiasm smile. 

 

Auntie, you keep saying, “‘Home is ‘where ever I am’ and I made the best of it!’ How could you say that when you were put in prison and discriminated against so much?”

 

“That’s right, we were made to feel like second or third class citizens, like even after ‘camp’ when we couldn’t buy a house in North Seattle. When the realtors found out we were Japanese they would say, ‘There are no houses available.’. But, everyone was having hard times. There is a Japanese saying: Shikata ga nai, meaning we have to make the best of what is happening! ”

 

“So Auntie, what would you say to school kids now when we tell them about all these terrible things that happened to all of us that have Japanese heritage?”.

 

“You know, sometimes we have to go through hard times to appreciate what we have! That’s so important. We never gave up and I’ve had a good life in America where I have the freedom to keep trying!! Home is not a place. WHEREVER I AM WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS IS ‘HOME’!”

According to Wikipedia, "Vision boards offer value by helping you clarify goals, boost motivation, and foster a positive mindset through visual representation of aspirations, serving as a tangible reminder of your dreams and encouraging focused action towards achieving them. " 
 

It's been fun this week to work on this!!

 

This morning I listened to Dr. Ethan Kross in the Psychology Department at the U of Michigan. Current 2025 research and podcast interview academics suggest, “It’s important to know ourselves for Fulfillment of Purpose in our human existence. Stories of our heritage give us 50% of the tools for managing our emotions which is the key to fulfillment." Therefore, I was lucky to have been inspired to start the OMOIDE writing group in 1991with four of us, Margaret Yasuda, Chuck Kato, Del Uchida and me, meeting weekly around my kitchen table. We started with just conversations about our growing up years. I had started collecting documentation on the Japanese Experience in the Pacific Northwest 20 years earlier, but I also decided it was time to create some of our own documentation with stories and writing. 

 

I was shocked to learn my Great Grandpa came to the USA as early as 1896. Even here on the USA west coast states our history books and education had nothing about Asian Immigration when I was in school in Oregon. Although I’m third generation and have 5th generation grandchildren, I'm still asked, “When did you come to America?” I’m thinking, “Even the Blacks are American.”

 

My Japanese Great Grandpa, Jitsumatsu Tsukamaki, came to America in 1896 when the Yusen Shipping Company’s Miike Maru established a trade route from Kobe to Seattle. The Japanese steamship carried to Seattle a cargo of teas, silk goods, raw silk, camphor, curios, matting, soy oil, and paper. The vessel steamed away with lumber, flour, raw cotton, heavy hardware, fish, leather, nails, beer, wire, and tobacco.  

 

Gr Grandpa “J” was a small farmer in the northern outskirts of Hiroshima. The fact that he was educated enough to know about America, had the connections and money to acquire the passport and ticket is amazing! He was required to have a return ticket to Japan, as well as paying an agent for the passport and a western outfit of clothing. It added up to almost a whole year’s average salary. 

 

My collecting of documentation on the Japanese Experience for the UW Suzzallo Library had started as early as 1970, which was funded by a two year grant and funding ran out. I remained on a committee Min Masuda Archival Committee, that met about once a year though the subsequent child raising years. After the girls left home, I was inspired to further get my master’s degree.

 

Completing a Master’s Degree in Psychosocial Nursing in 1989, my thesis was on the difference between our right and left brain. I learned that our Japanese/Asian heritage has a lot to contribute to emotional balance of the European/American left brain entrepreneurial dominant education. I also learned that we didn’t have a historical organization for our Japanese community in Seattle as other ethnic groups like the Swedish Community Center or the Polish or Hungarian communities. 

 

It feels great to continue learning, thinking, writing and publishing that contributes to the welfare of future generations!!

 "Uni" is kind of short for Unique. We are all unique individual humans. The podcast world is big on helping us find our "unique selves" and research says, we are 50% our genetic ancestry; 25% our early growing up and subsequent environment; as well as 25% the daily habits we have and practice over the years.

 

55-years-ago spring of 1970, I was a stay-at-home mom with two girls, five and two. I answered my white rotary wall-phone, hanging on our kitchen wall, as I was making dinner.

 

The person on the call introduced himself as Min Masuda. I had no idea who he was because I was new to Seattle. Later, I learned that he was a professor of Psychiatry at the UW. Masuda asked, "I got your name from your neighbor, Mariko Hayashi. I'm wondering if you might be willing to take a part-time job with our Suzzallo Library Archives to help start the "Japanese Collection"?

 

I was an RN with a degree in Public Health Nursing and had never thought of history or literature. Therefore, I answered, "No!" and hung up. But, my husband Sam, was in the living room entertaining the girls and wondered what the call was about.

 

Sam had started his own GOTO DENTAL LAB business at 423 Medical Dental Building, down town Seattle. He was always laden with deadlines, and we were busy raising kids. We had very little knowlege about our Japanese heritage, just that our Japanese community elders still wanted us to marry "our own kind!" But a couple days later, Sam talked me into calling Masuda back and agree to take the job with Rich Berner, who had created the archives at the U of Washington in the 1940s.

 

As I went through two boxes, already in Special Collections, I read the 1925 Nishinori Master's thesis. I learned that about 100 Japanese Dairy farmers in the first two decades of the 1900s had supplied as much as one-half of Seattle's milk supply! 

 

This was almost 10 years after Sam and I married. Starting to talk with my Grandpa Tsukamaki, I learned that he had stayed the night at the bedside of Sam's Grandpa Nakanishi as he died in 1934. What a shock! They had been leaders in the Dairy business and were best friends. That answered Sam and my questions of why we had gotten so many well wishers and presents from strangers when we got married. Sam and I thought we had found each other on our own because no one talked about their hard times as we were growing up - typical of most immigrants.

 

As my Grandpa told me his story, his words came out slowly and with anguish as he recalled the difficult times Japanese heritage farmers had faced with discrimination and being run out of the business. They knew they could not buy land because they could not become American citizens as Asians. But when Washington State legislators passed the 1921 Alien Land Law, they were no longer able to rent land. 

 

Sam's cartoon strip “Inu - doG” has shared many stories until he passed in 2017. Our OMOIDE writing group has shared memories for now 33 years and meets regularly on the 3rd Saturday of each month at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington.

 

Come share your "uni" stories!!!

 

I forgot that uni is also: 

"In Japanese cuisine, "uni" refers to sea urchin gonads, a popular and highly prized ingredient. It's known for its creamy, buttery flavor and is often enjoyed raw or lightly cooked in sushi and other dishes."  

I spent the morning reading about Aristotle after getting the email from Arthur Brooks and his Art and Science of Happiness organization. It reminds me of the Stories at the Panama that we had yesterday. Erica was there to share her story of being able to label her "anxiety"; deal with it and use it to further a career in fashion design. 

 

The following is Brooks' take on how "learning how to face our fears" is something taught by Aristotle after studying with Plato as early as 340BC. My take is that Plato was very left brain thinking. which is the heart of Western philosopy. I think Aristotle added the bigger picture which in today's world is more Asian thinking with the benefits I learned from my Japanese heritage. These are the things my parents and grandparents taught me as I was growing up - not so literally, but subtlely to fit in and be a good member of our communty.

 

1. Name your fears and face them head on.

 

2. Know your appetites, from substances to behaviors, and control them; you might need to eliminate some things.

 

3. Be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift with your time and money.

 

4. Give as generously as you can to causes you like and people you love.

 

5. Focus more on transcendent things; disregard trivialities. Yes, this means social media.

 

6. True strength is a controlled temper. Weak people freak out.

 

7. Never lie, on any topic, to anyone. Especially to yourself.

 

8. Stop struggling for your fair share. Doing so looks weak and petty, because it is.

 

9. Forgive others, and forbear their weaknesses. Even if they don’t deserve it.

 

10. Define your morality; write down your rules; live up to them. Even in private where no one else knows.