In 2017, Kelly Goto found herself sorting through the belongings of a parent that she’d recently lost: her father, Sam. She was back in her childhood house living with her children and her mother. Among other things, her father had left a huge collection of books, a collection of samurai swords, and countless handwritten notes that she still finds in drawers to this day. But she had a few invaluable resources that helped her sort through these belongings, including the presence and knowledge of her mother, Dee Goto. Kelly quickly realized that she could compile a subset of these possessions into something others could enjoy: a book.
Seven years later, the beautiful result of Kelly’s efforts is Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience. It’s a compilation of comic strips that her father drew, but it’s also a wellspring of historical context with additional material, photographs, and captions. The contextual material provides valuable insights into her father’s artistry as well as the community that he portrayed for five years in his comic strips for the North American Post.
Printed by Chin Music Press, the book doubles as a fundraiser for the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Washington (JCCCW). The Goto family has a long tradition of commitment to the JCCCW (including its founding). The hundreds of comic strips that Sam drew were part of an arrangement that Dee made with Seattle’s Nikkei newspaper, the North American Post: Dee wanted to have free advertising for the JCCCW, and in exchange, Sam drew the comics for the Post.
According to Kelly, Sam started drawing them about six months in advance, having a backlog so that he wouldn’t run out, and then the North American Post published them each week.
The book is a wonderful labor of love by Kelly and her mother, who collaborated on the book. Kelly’s expertise in graphic design (and the hundreds of hours she spent on the book) is evident on each page layout, giving the material enough open space and visual interest. She has curated sections of the majority of Sam’s comic strips for the Post, organized by eight principles of the samurai code.
The comic strips cover aspects of the Nikkei history of Seattle and surrounding areas. Sam’s comics are often infused with a quiet and whimsical humor, many times using Sam’s alter ego, “Samurai Shigeru” (Shigeru was Sam’s birth name). A historical timeline covers the span of arrival and immigration up through the present-day. But there are also many reproductions of Sam’s handwritten Post-It notes, full-color family photos and portraits of his collections and workspace. It’s a multifaceted portrait of Kelly’s father, but also a multifaceted portrait of a community.
“I think one of the things that [my dad] really wanted to show was [the] everyday lives of all the people [my parents have] spoken to over the years—including his own history, and Shigeru Osawa,” Kelly told me in November 2024.
“These are stories of how the immigrants kept their culture, tradition, honor, all the things that they held for being Japanese, this push and pull between becoming American and maintaining your Japanese values. I think that these are the stories he put down on paper. My mom wrote about them, he illustrated them, and eventually they became this comic strip.”
“It’s not supposed to be just my dad,” Kelly continued, “because my dad had an extraordinary life also, but really what it is is that our family was very ordinary. Our family were farmers, they came from simple backgrounds…So in the end we’re kind of the story of the everyday immigrant family.”
Though Dee Goto’s name is not on the cover, Kelly says that her mother served as an essential collaborator in the process. They were originally going to write it together, but at some point Dee said to Kelly, “This should just be your book. I’ll help, but this can be your book.”
In addition to helping with electronic scans of the comic strips and materials, Dee had connections to the Japanese American community and was able to reach out to different subjects by phone or e-mail. Kelly says that Dee has an “encyclopedic knowledge” of the history, a near-photographic memory, and was able to pull together facts and stories around the comic strips and history.
Dee, who founded and still leads the Nikkei-focused Omoide writing group at the JCCCW, has had an important role in preserving Japanese American history. She also preserved oral histories of the Issei in the 1970s with the University of Washington, and played a role in the founding of Densho.
In the book’s acknowledgments, Kelly says that “[creating] this book has been a journey of healing and education.” In our conversation, I ask her to elaborate on this statement. “I feel more educated,” she says, “and I feel like I understand more to be able to talk about it, but I have so much left to learn.” While writing the book, she lost a large segment of her father’s family; after her father passed away in 2017, she lost three of her uncles (his brothers) as well. But she was able to record interviews with her uncles over Zoom as part of the writing process. “This book was written for them,” she says.
“I feel like [now] there’s a record. And so I think that was the healing part. That I actually feel like I have something to pull on and I’m not done pulling. Like there’s more, [with] my mom’s memories. And so the whole idea is [that] as a community and a culture—and it could be any culture—to try and dig into the stories that are the everyday stories because they are so impactful and meaningful. How do we in our everyday lives strive to maintain culture, maintain respect for our community, maintain tradition, how do we do that in our everyday lives, and not just in an extraordinary circumstance.”
Kelly is still finding notes from her father around the house, but her mother recently found another unexpected gift from the beyond. Several weeks before I spoke with Kelly, Dee found a box in the attic. It had a glass front and contained several sayings that Sam had handwritten with a cartoon of a samurai. On the box, Sam had signed it as “Samurai Sam.” “I didn’t know until I saw that a few weeks ago that my dad had actually called himself “Samurai Sam,” she said. It seems like a serendipitous confirmation that the book is meant to reach a wide audience.
For Kelly, using the book as a fundraiser is a natural extension of her parents’ devotion to the JCCCW. Working on the book, though, gave her the opportunity to understand this devotion in a new way. As she put it, she was able to ask herself, “Why was this my parents’ legacy? Why did they put in 50 years of time, of preserving? Why did they believe so strongly in the cultural center? This is their passion and their legacy and so I feel like I understand it. And I feel that I am helping to contribute to it in my own way to what they started.”
All photos are courtesy of the Goto family.
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Join Kelly and Dee Goto at JANM Book Club on Sunday, December 1 at 2:00 p.m. for a conversation about Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience.
Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience is available for purchase at the JANM Store.
© 2024 Tamiko Nimura
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