Interviews

1. Grandmother's influence on decision to go to Japan

2. Band-Aid realization

3. Japanese influence growing up

4. Looking at your country from the outside

5. Buddhism in America and Japan

6. Wife's family in Japan

Robert (Bob) Kiyoshi Okasaki

(b.1942) Japanese American ceramist, who has lived in Japan for over 30 years.

Japanese influence growing up

Both my parents were working—and basically our grandmother raised us and brought us up. She could speak very little English—probably could understand more than can speak. She would study the English with the textbooks that we brought home from grammar school along with us. But as children, she sang us the nursery songs from Japan, told us stories about the Momotaro. Once a month, they brought a Japanese movie, and usually it was the sword chambara, the sword play action movies. As a child, they were fun to watch, so I used to go with my grandmother to the church movies. So as children, we played cowboy and Indians, but also we played samurai with a stick in our belt serving as a sword. So unknowingly, there’s a lot of interaction with our Japanese background even though we felt in our school and in our upbringing that we were American.

Finding Home (film) identity

Date: November 28, 2003

Location: Saga, Japan

Interviewer: Art Nomura

Contributed by: Art Nomura, Finding Home.

Interviewee Bio

Robert Kiyoshi Okasaki, 61-year-old Yonsei (on his mother’s side) was born in French Camp, California, in 1942, just before his family was incarcerated during World War II at the Rowher concentration camp in Arkansas. After the war, Bob’s family lived in Stockton and later in Lodi, California, where his family had a vineyard.

Bob attended San Jose State College, eventually concentrating on pottery. Through the Study Abroad program, Bob became an apprentice to a potter, a Living National Treasure, in Japan where tableware is considered an art.

When Bob journeyed to Japan, he felt American, but now when comes home to the U.S., he does not feel American. He’s been married since 1975 to a Japanese woman and their first child was born in 1985. When he first arrived in Japan, recalls Bob, Japanese nationals treated him sometimes like “he was not all there” because of his lack of Japanese language. His relationship with his wife’s family has changed from an original relationship of caution to one of comfort, to the point where he now feels that her family is his family.(November 28, 2003)