Storyteller Megumi keeps Japanese internment stories alive to offer a lesson for new generations
Photograph by Paul Myers
Paying Respect
Megumi honors her ancestry by telling stories of Japanese internment, fairy tales and ghost stories
By Mary Ann Cook
Photographs by Paul Myers
It's a mighty long way from Tokyo to Turlock. And not just in miles. That's the transition Grace Fleming had to make at age 10. "There I was, a Japanese girl with a blond, blue-eyed father--in the turkey capitol of the world," she says, explaining all the discrepancies in her situation.
In school in California, she was taunted by classmates. It was hurtful, but she could still be appalled at the ignorance her tormentors were displaying.
"How could they be so stupid as to confuse Japan with China? Their ignorance was unbelievable." She shakes her head in disbelief some 33 years later.
Today Grace Fleming of Los Gatos is a professional storyteller, concentrating on Japanese fairy tales and Japanese internment stories. Her business card reflects this duality: On one side she is pictured in simple Japanese garb, pants and jacket; on the other she's dressed in veiled hat and black dress as a middle-class American woman, circa 1942.
Known as Megumi, her Japanese name, she enacts her various roles at schools, museums, libraries and clubs. The product of a Japanese mother and Caucasian father, she is the oldest of five siblings. Although she has had no formal dramatic training, she credits her days in Toastmasters for providing the experience she needed.
She was doubly blessed when Dee Popat, a professional storyteller and a member of Toastmasters, took her under her wing. The two practiced together in Belgatos Park.
In teaching her to project, Popat would say, "See that horse over there?" Megumi could barely make out the horse. "Tell your story so that horse can hear it."
Megumi's latest project is a multimedia presentation called "The Heart No Longer Silent." Artist Elaine Sayoko Yoneoka of Boston is creating a video to accompany Megumi's storytelling about the years spent in internment camps. The two met at the Tule Lake internment camp reunions.
Pilgrimages to the former campsite are held every other year. The collaborators have received grants from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program and from Silicon Valley Arts Council.
"Now that I've been to Japan, I can see how very uniquely Japanese Megumi's gestures [in her storytelling presentations] are," Yoneoka says.
Megumi's stories tell how the internees "lived through adversity with their pride and spirit intact. These stories are so powerful they need to be told. I'm glad to pay my respects to the older Japanese-Americans who so generously shared their internment stories," Megumi says.
"They bent like bamboo when the winds of adversity were blowing so that, when the winds died down, they were able to stand straight and tall."
She also honors her ancestry when she tells Japanese fairy tales or ghost stories. Her stepmother's mother is one of those she credits with her desire to hang onto and embrace her Japanese heritage. "I honor my grandmother by telling and retelling stories from her culture."
Others she says have inspired her are the group of older women in the community near Turlock called Cortez, whose settlers were nearly all from Japan. These elderly women befriended her in her early years in this country.
Before the family left Japan to relocate in California's Central Valley, her father had remarried. Her birth mother stayed in Japan, while Megumi and the rest of the family came to California. The family was forever moving. "It was a turbulent childhood," she says.
That terse appraisal indicates that it is said with considerable understatement. Her father was from a military family, but chose missionary work. Unfortunately, he had trouble relating to people, and this abrasiveness translated to a new job and a new town every few years.
Megumi went to three different high schools. "Sure, I had friends," she says. "But I can't say I ever had a coterie of friends while I was growing up."
Fleming entered the field of psychotherapy in an effort to understand her father and the machinations of her dysfunctional family, she says. She attended UC-Berkeley on scholarships, earned a degree in Japanese language there, and met her husband, Nathan Hoover.
Hoover works at Movaris, a software company in Campbell, and they have a 10-year-old son, Beau. The whole family is avid about cycling: there are perhaps 20 bikes in their Los Gatos garage. They often unicycle together, sometimes accompanying Beau to Daves Avenue School.
Nathan Hoover isn't just a cyclist, though--he's an Xtreme cyclist, performing feats on wheels most people can barely imagine. They also love travel and combine the two enthusiasms. Before Beau entered the scene, the couple went island hopping.
They took a cycling trip through New Zealand, then through Japan, settling there for about three years. Because she was fluent in both Japanese and English, Megumi landed a translating job, but her husband's job was not so satisfying. So they moved back to the United States.
Slipping into their adventuresome mode, they made the trek back to the States by land, taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
"We're vegetarians--fishaterians, actually--so what could we find in the northernmost reaches of Russia, a Russia that was disintegrating? Beer and bread was about all. I almost died," says Megumi, looking back. "You know what it's like with an infant. [Their baby was 4 1/2 months old.] You don't get enough sleep. You don't get enough to eat." The journey took two months. From England, they took a plane to the United States, and settled in Los Gatos.
That was 10 years ago. Megumi resumed her practice: her master's degree in clinical psychiatry is from San Francisco State University. She practiced psychotherapy in both countries for 10 years, but is now retired from the field.
Throughout her practice, particularly in hypnotherapy, she used fairy tales extensively as a problem-solving device. "I love hypnotherapy. Stories are incredibly powerful," she says. From storytelling in hypnotherapy sessions, it was a natural progression to enacting Japanese fairy tales as a performer.
At Hakone Gardens recently, Megumi acted out a trio of Japanese ghost stories. She assumes the mannerisms of either gender of varying ages with facial expressions, arm movements, and tone of voice, creating a one-person show that can be offered in either Japanese or English.
At one of her first professional storytelling gigs--at the Discovery Museum in San Jose--she met a woman who had her own story to tell, and in so doing expanded Megumi's repertoire.
Karen Scarvie, who owns The Wooden Horse toy store in Los Gatos, was the instigator.
It was the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb invasion of Japan, and Scarvie had been involved in raising money for the peace memorial that schoolchildren in New Mexico wanted to have built. The toy store owner encouraged Megumi to tell the story of Sadako and the 1,000 Cranes at the Discovery Museum as part of the commemorative effort.
The tale is based on a true story. Sadako, dying of leukemia brought on by the atomic bomb, begins to make cranes as a symbol and prayer for her continued health. Gradually, realizing she isn't going to live, she continues to make the paper cranes, this time as a prayer for peace.
After the presentation, a woman in the audience came up to her and told her of her parents' incarceration in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. "I was so moved by her story that I decided that these stories must be told while the people who lived them were still alive."
And she was just the person to tell them. Starting with this woman, Megumi began acquiring names of internees and listening to their stories. Most were reluctant to talk about those traumatic times--being whisked away with only the possessions they could carry, to live in isolated, dusty areas behind barbed wire.
Often they didn't want to resurrect those grim memories, feeling they were best put behind them. Perhaps one-third of those she met couldn't be persuaded to share their memories. "But I convinced most of them of the importance of their stories--that a new generation should hear them before they were lost," Megumi says.
Thus it was that the storyteller began to include Japanese internment tales in her repertoire. She uses the format of a granddaughter trying to cajole tales of internment camp life from her grandmother. The stories are an amalgam of those she has heard. Former internees usually accompany her.
At the end of the dramatization, the internees answer questions about camp life. At a recent presentation at Lynbrook High School, Aki and Art Okuno of Saratoga and Jimi Yamachi of San Jose took part. Aki was high school-aged when she was interned; Art and Yamachi were young men.
All three were luckier than most in that they were able to get jobs. They were paid $16 or $19 monthly. Art worked as an electrician; Yamachi did carpentry; and Aki worked as an office administrator.
The worst thing about camp life, the Okunos say, was the uncertainty about what was coming next. Rumors were rampant in camp and often were dire and threatening, such as one that made the rounds saying the camp would be bombed any day.
There was no way to tell what to believe.
When they were rounded up, Japanese-American families had two or three weeks' notice before having to report to a central location to be transported to a camp. They were only allowed to bring in $300. Since they were to pay for all personal items, having a job was a decided bonus.
Internees organized schooling and crafts for the children, but privacy was impossible. It was said that those who drove delivery trucks were often bribed to forget about their vehicles for a while, so that sweethearts could gain some private time together.
After their release from camp, many young people became house boys or house girls, because it was one of the few jobs open to them and they couldn't afford to continue their schooling. In most cases, all the family goods had been confiscated, so finding paid work immediately was essential.
Art was drafted into the Army in his last year of internment and was thus able to continue his education through the GI Bill. Years after the internment, through legislation enacted in 1990, those confined in camps were given $20,000 each in reparations.
"Please see that this never happens again--to anyone," Art Okuno urged the high school audience. Yamachi said he has been in constant demand to talk to school children since the Sept. 11 tragedies, for fear that Muslims would be discriminated against in the same way the Japanese were in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
Hoping to counteract discrimination is one of the reasons Megumi tells her stories.
"She's a passionate and inspired storyteller," toy store owner Scarvie says. "I'd call her a consciousness-raising storyteller." She gives presentations at the Wooden Horse and teaches origami in children's programs at the Los Gatos Library.
When asked to describe herself, the first attribute Megumi mentions is "grateful." She also feels she is daring and innovative, and she is always looking for role models.
Her housekeeper in Japan when she was a youngster is one of her early role models. "One day I said to her, 'My parents are better than you because they are educated.' The housekeeper replied, 'If I were a man I would slap you.'" Megumi regretted her words almost instantly.
But she learned the lesson of tolerance of everyone's inherent worth that day.
"My father comes from a long line of military people. My maternal grandfather was in the Japanese Imperial Army and died during the war. So my grandfathers were at war against each other," she says. "That boggles my mind."
So Megumi tells stories ... in the hope that if the stories are kept alive, maybe the catastrophe of the Japanese internment camps, and the fear, hatred and injustice that they bred, will not be allowed to occur again.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
