Old stories open new chapter of Ikeda's life

By Florangela Davila
Seattle Times staff reporter

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES Tom Ikeda is executive director of Densho, a Web-based history project.

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

Tom Ikeda had taken an Asian-American-studies class in college, as well as a couple of quarters of Japanese. He married a Japanese-American woman. He converted from Catholicism to Buddhism.

He didn't, however, carry a full appreciation of his heritage.

Ikeda wasn't aware of that. He was young, successful, a husband, a father and, at the age of 35 in 1992, newly retired thanks to cashing out some Microsoft stock options. Back then, he was a full-time dad coaching youth athletic teams and pondering whether he should learn to play the piano.

What changed him, making Ikeda a more sensitive man, a public figure and a proud Sansei — third-generation Japanese American — was a digital storybook called Densho that chronicles the Japanese-American internment during World War II.

Ikeda invented Densho. He had a scientist's mind and the courage of a techie, which is to say he wasn't afraid of the new or the unknown. The Web hadn't become popular yet when Ikeda, who helped develop Microsoft's first reference CD-ROMs, saw the possibilities and power of digitizing oral histories of the internees. And in the process, he uncovered a passion he had not known.

"It wasn't until I did the project that I felt more comfortable being Japanese American," Ikeda says.

Tom Ikeda Age: 47 Education: chemistry and chemical-engineering degrees as well as an MBA, all from the University of Washington Family: married to Sara Yamasaki; father of Casey and Tani Humanities Washington Award: Given annually by the nonprofit Humanities Washington, formerly known as Washington Commission for the Humanities. Past recipients include the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, Ron Chew of the Wing Luke Asian Museum and Nancy Pearl of Seattle Public Library.

"By training, I'm an engineer. A chemist. And science often looks at things (as) black and white. But I now understand the gray areas. The stories help me look at life. The stories, in a way, are the soul of my existence."

Take the different paths followed by the Nisei, Ikeda's father's generation, when it came to deciding how best to prove one's principles in the face of war. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. forced some 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes, businesses and schools into camps.

Initially classified as "enemy aliens," some of these citizens eventually were allowed in the military and served in the legendary 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team. Others resisted the draft, arguing they couldn't serve a country that had incarcerated them.

The different actions caused a rift within the Japanese-American community that wasn't publicly mended until two years ago, when the Japanese American Citizens League, which once had said the draft resisters should be charged with sedition, formally apologized to them.

Ikeda knew and accepted both perspectives. His father, Victor "Junks" Ikeda, is a WWII veteran; his father-in-law, Frank Yamasaki, resisted the draft.

Ikeda layered this pair of stories with the other things he had learned about the internment: his parents' tales about being teenagers in a camp, trying to date or play sports; the isolation of internees housed at Minidoka in Idaho, where his parents later took Ikeda and his siblings on a family vacation.

Born and raised in Seattle, Ikeda knew about the internment experience; it was meaningful to him, but not tremendously profound.

"I really didn't get it," he says.

Information To view Densho, the Japanese American Legacy Project online: www.densho.org.

Neither did another Microsoft exec, Scott Oki, who hadn't spent much time reflecting on the internment until he saw an exhibit at Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum.

Oki approached Ikeda with a plan to preserve the stories of internees by creating a sort of museum without walls. He seeded $1 million for Densho, the Japanese word meaning "to pass on to the future."

Ikeda accepted the unpaid position of executive director and got to work. With his technological background, Ikeda envisioned recording internees' stories on digital audio and video and making them widely available through a then-emerging tool called the World Wide Web.

He figured interviews could be directed through scripted questions — and that made it easier to create a database and organize large quantities of material.

"He had a huge amount of foresight," says Tom Corddry, a former Microsoft colleague of Ikeda whose Web service is now used as Densho's publishing tool.

But in researching the internment, in prepping for interviews, in listening to stories and then in figuring out how to present them, Ikeda became increasingly conscious of the Japanese-American community and, in turn, who he is.

"It wasn't that major," he says about how he regarded his Japanese heritage while growing up.

"I'm more open and available now. I'm more comfortable and, when you know that, it's real easy to be proud."

Oki says about Ikeda: "It's one thing to be intellectually tied to something, but once your heart is into it, it takes on a whole different life."

Ikeda is a slim man with salt-and-pepper hair, a boyish face and a genuineness that comes across easily. He says he has always been a good listener. Colleagues say he helps people relax and open up — a valuable quality when interviewing octogenarian veterans or business folk who have long felt ashamed to remember a painful past, much less talk about it on camera.

"He's a true archivist," says Walter Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington who has worked with Ikeda on some grant projects. "He believes that the truth helps set people free."

That truth is collecting a variety of interviews with different perspectives in order to present a nuanced and complex portrait of a tumultuous chapter that, as recently as 10 years ago, wasn't widely mentioned in school history books.

The Densho Web site attracts some 60,000 visitors annually and includes more than 4,000 photos, 400 hours of recordings, an educational curriculum and a multimedia exhibit in English and Japanese.

Under Ikeda's direction, the project is also collecting histories from white residents who lived through the internment years, as well as from people with post-Sept. 11 stories about civil-liberties issues.

Not long ago, Ikeda drove to Tacoma to interview a historian; in Seattle, he lectured about the internment to college students; in Toronto, he shared his expertise with Japanese-Canadians embarking on their own oral-history project.

"I feel so much more alive," he says.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More local news headlines...