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For many years, Olympia has hosted Obon festivals near Capitol Lake. These celebrations feature taiko drums, traditional Japanese food, dances, lanterns, and music. The event organizers are members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). It is a beautiful and fun event that allows people to experience a small part of Japanese culture. This isn’t the defining action JACL. But the Bon Odori festival is a high light of the year for some members.

olympia furnitureThe JACL is the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization in the United States. It was founded in 1929, and is an organization with chapters across America. The Olympia chapter has been around since 1983. As such, an integral part of its history is the monitoring of and response to threats against the civil rights of Japanese Americans and other marginalized groups.

Another significant part of the organization is connecting Japanese Americans across the United States with each other and helping them connect with their Japanese ancestry. This is particularly important in communities that lack geographic cultural neighbors, like Olympia. Geographic cultural neighbors happen when people from a similar culture or nation all come to live in the same neighborhood. This is something Olympia doesn’t have, though it is particularly common for big cities, like New York City, San Francisco and Seattle.

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The taiko drum group has been playing since nearly the beginning of the Olympia Obon tradition.

Annual events like the Bon Odori festival and Oshogatsu celebration help keep the traditions and culture alive. Although these events aren’t specific to Olympia, there are many Obon organized by other chapters and Japanese-American groups. Hanae Livingston attends many Bon Odori festivals in Tacoma and at the White River Buddhist Temple.

Reiko Callner, Hisami Yoshida and Livingston are three members of JACL who all have different backgrounds in and outside of the organization. They are all members of the JACL Olympia chapter, and live in Olympia, though Hanae is attending college now. I was able to interview these women and learn about their experiences in JACL and the history involved.

Reiko Callner

Reiko Callner, a member of the JACL in Olympia, told me the story of the Obon. A Buddhist monk became so enlightened that he was able to see his mother who had returned after death as a hungry ghost. She had lived a selfish life in her attempt to care for her son. Buddha told the monk that he could free his mother by living a life of perfect selflessness. When he finally managed to free his mother, they danced together before she departed. Likewise, the Bon Odori dances are a means to reunify with our ancestors and missing family.

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Reiko (right with her cousin and her daughter) was 17 when she participated in her first Bon Odori in her grandfather’s village. The village is the center of such celebrations. Thousands come to participate in the Obon. The lanterns the Olympia chapter uses were a gift from this village. Photo courtesy: Reiko Callner.

Another cultural event the JACL puts on is the Oshogatsu. The Oshogatsu is a New Year’s celebration, and JACL members and friends come together with a potluck of traditional Japanese New Year’s foods. Reiko’s hula group dances; they all make mochi with their machine and drink green tea. Mochi, traditionally, are little treats made out of pounded rice flour. They can be stuffed with many things, and it is common to find them stuffed with ice cream.

Reiko comes from Philadelphia originally. She is ethnically half Japanese. “JACL has been a way to connect with that part of my family, that part of my history, that part of identifying as a human being,” she says. It has a profound meaning to her, as it is an organization that stands for all civil rights. She has been a JACL member since she was 15, and was introduced to it by her Quaker school librarian.

Reiko’s fondest memories are not of specific events, but of specific people, particularly the elders who are no longer present. She praises the elders who practiced “steadfast positive endurance, which is one of the hallmarks of Japanese American cultural heritage which I admire, respect and wish to live up to.”

She moved to Olympia in 1985 after living in Hawai’i and stayed after law school. It was then that she heard about Olympia’s Bon Odori festival. She describes the Olympia chapter as being, “small but mighty.” She does a lot in terms of organizing events and the Olympia chapter.

Hisami Yoshida

Hisami Yoshida describes Reiko as the face of JACL, especially when it comes to organizing the Bon Dori festival. While Reiko does the organizing, the press releases and goes to all the meetings, Hisami prefers to help out. Her responsibility with the Bon Odori is running the food stand and selling items to help fund future Bon Odori events. She lets other members do the dancing and leading of the event.

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These three women are three generations of JACL members. Mimi, an elder, helped set up the Obon in Olympia. Obon is a festival which celebrates with specific dances. These dances incorporate simple steps and movements that are often hundreds of years old. Photo courtesy: Reiko Callner.

Hisami is one of the elders of the Olympia chapter. She is retired and also participates in the Asian Pacific Islander Coalition of Puget Sound. She also has “chickens, gardens and great grandkids.” Her first meeting with the JACL was just before the creation of the Olympia chapter. This is when the Olympia area was part of a northern chapter. She told me that the early members were primarily Nisei, or second generation, Japanese Americans. They had a lot of energy and would hold monthly potlucks and make tons of food. Now, however, there are not as many people and resources. The young people are not interested and have trouble seeing the relevance in their heritage and the JACL’s history. The Bon Odori festival and Oshogatsu celebration are the only events that continue.

The first Bon Odori was held at Sylvester Park, and Hisami says it must have gone well, because they were excited for it the next year. Not only that, many more people came and participated the following year too.

Cooking is more relevant to Hisami than the dancing. She is half Japanese, but was adopted by a white family in California. It was the women of the JACL Olympia chapter, like Miyoko Sato, who helped her connect to her culture through cooking.

Hisami believes that the JACL has two primary functions; to bring Japanese Americans together and to provide a place where members can be effective and change things, “an opportunity to be activists.”

Hanae Livingston

Hanae Livingston is a new member in the JACL community, joining officially only a little over a year ago. She is 20 and has been familiar with the JACL since she was young. She joined in part thanks to the Kakehashi Project, a ten-day trip available to Japanese American young adults to allow them to experience the culture of Japan. The JACL has a scholarship for this program, and Hanae was able to go to Japan in 2015.

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Obon is really important to Hanae, and she treats them like holidays. She looks forward to them every year and has been participating since childhood. Her favorite song to dance to is called Oyama Ondo. “It’s the happiest Obon song,” she says. Photo courtesy: Hanae Livingston.

This trip was significant because it allowed her to experience Japan and its culture as a foreigner and was unlike any of her earlier visits. It has inspired her to become an English teacher so she can teach in rural areas of Japan. She is currently attending Western Washington University. Her trip not only inspired her goals regarding her education, home and career, but also propelled her to join the organization.

One aspect of Japanese culture that really appealed to Hanae while she was with the Kakehashi project is the inclusion of old architecture in new development. She saw this particularly when she was riding the shinkansen, or bullet train. While watching the shift from the bustling metropolitan city to the rural buildings in the towns, she noticed that Japan does not destroy its old architecture, but incorporates it into new buildings.

Because of her history with the JACL and the Kakehashi project, Hanae can appreciate the dedication and grounded determination of JACL members, and it inspires her to follow their example. She agrees with the justice the JACL believes in and knows that “they really do want to connect the US with Japan. They really do believe in unity.”

Because she has been attending Bon Odori festivals since she was young, Hanae is a capable dancer. She enjoys working with the kids and helping with the instructing of the dances and putting on yukata. A yukata is a light kimono that is excellent for summer weather. Hanae also works with the kids during the Oshogatsu.

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“At Obon, people get to connect. It’s all just to have fun, to be people, to laugh and live together,” Hanae told me. Photo courtesy: Hanae Livingston.

One of her fondest memories with the JACL is at a festival at the White River Buddhist Temple. During a dance, there were two boys who were purposefully doing the dance incorrectly and going slowly. They were laughing and having fun, which spread to everyone who was watching them dance. Even though Hanae did not know any of the people around her personally, she was able to experience this connection.

The JACL means different things to different members, and they all have different stories and memories of their time with the organization. However, there are a lot of similarities, because it has provided them a connection to their past, their families and heritage and their future. The JACL’s greatest work was the redress for the internment camps during World War II, but its work is hardly over, and it is still making impacts in people’s lives today.

For more information about the JACL Olympia Chapter, check out their Facebook page. You can also read the JACL newspaper, The Pacific Citizen.

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