Bruce Rutledge

What was it like for an Irish Catholic American man and a Japanese woman to get married during the Occupation? Mike and Tsuchino Forrester’s story about getting married in the 1950s in Japan and moving to the US in 1960 reminds us of how far we’ve come when it comes to accepting international marriages.

Mike wrote a book called Tsuchino: My Japanese War Bride to record what the couple went through. In it, he tells the story of their love affair, marriage, and subsequent move to the US. The couple, married for more than 60 years, seems content ...

More than one thousand people of Japanese descent were shipped to incarceration camps from the Yakima area in 1942. The central Washington community, which supported Japantowns in Wapato and Yakima, was not supposed to be evacuated because they were far enough inland. But once some local farmers realized they could wipe out their competition by stoking racist fervor and insisting the local JAs also be incarcerated, the gig was up for Yakima’s Japanese-American communities. After the war, only 10 percent returned to the area.

Patti Hirahara has made it her mission to keep the memories of those communities alive ...

“Jazzed about the Future”

Harold Taniguchi said goodbye to a 35-year career in public service at the end of 2018. The longtime Director of Transportation at King County is now looking at unlearning old habits and finding a new path that may or may not include voice acting, life coaching, and who knows what else? The only sure thing about his retirement, Taniguchi says, is that he will be able to spend more time with his 94-year-old mother. Taniguchi is affable, self-deprecating, quick with a joke, but also a person who can commandeer a major public department that oversaw the ...

Dr. Marie Rose Wong of Seattle University is one of our foremost chroniclers of life in the International District. Wong published last year a groundbreaking and exhaustive history of Seattle’s residential hotels (Building Tradition) and is working on an equally extensive work on prewar Japanese American baseball leagues that she hopes to finish by the end of the year. Doc Wong, as her friends call her, has served on and advised many nonprofit boards in the ID and elsewhere. With the Mariners headed to Tokyo in a few weeks to open the Major League Baseball season, we decided to ...

Former Seattle Superintendent of Schools John Stanford was a visionary who saw diversity as a strength, not an obstacle to be overcome. His legacy lives on at John Stanford International Elementary School in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood, where 468 students are enrolled in the Spanish and Japanese immersion programs. Since the language immersion programs started in 2000, Seattle Public Schools have educated hundreds of students in the Japanese Dual Language Immersion program. Students spend half the day with an English-speaking teacher and the other half with a Japanese speaking teacher. The North American Post sat down to chat about the ...