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

Okasaki,Robert (Bob) Kiyoshi

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

Looking at your country from the outside

As I say, if you travel, and you meet the people, they’re all the same. So when I have a chance to talk to school children here, I tell them during your school years, you have time to spend studying in a different country. So if you can do that, please do that because it not only—when you look at your own country from the outside, you see it in a different light. You see the good things and the bad things. So I tell them to be proud of their good things and change the bad things. So, looking at America is the same for me—looking from the outside. So not everything is good about your country. But Japan, also—not everything is good about Japan. But you try to make it a better world, your part of the world. You try to make it a better place for everyone.

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)