“Basically, over the years, this has become Grandpa’s story.”
Season 1 Episode 5 — October 26, 2024
This episode is supported by Pacific Mercantile Company.
Alyssa Nilemo’s mother Donna Inouye steps me through their family tree. Alyssa has ancestors from Japan who settled in Colorado over a century ago, and tracing the threads that weave through California, rural Colorado, and Downtown Denver, I learn about the multiplicity of the Japanese American experience within Alyssa’s family history. Herb Inouye, who experienced the caravan journey in 1942, became a cornerstone of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist community and a force that shaped Alyssa’s kindness worldview.
Featured Guests
Donna Inouye
Alyssa Nilemo
References
Herbert Hideyo Inouye Discover Nikkei Author Page — discovernikkei.org/en/journal/author/inouye-herbert
Alyssa Nilemo Ballotpedia Page — ballotpedia.org/Alyssa_Nilemo
Transcript
[Advertisement] This episode of Middleweight is supported by Pacific Mercantile Company. For 80 years, Pacific has provided essential goods and services for Coloradans. Pacific Mercantile Company: Finest Asian Foods and Gifts.
Donna Inouye: I did a family tree for you because I only had a vague idea of what was going on.
Toshiki Nakashige: Oh my gosh, this is amazing.
Donna Inouye: I don’t know how much JA history you know.
A few weeks ago, I met with Donna Inouye. She showed me a family tree that she made.
Donna Inouye: So I did our family. This is my dad’s side. This is my mom’s side. And here’s Alyssa down here. So it was neat for me to map it out. And then I made notes about what was going on in the current world, so if you want to question along those lines, I’m kind of prepared. So.
Toshiki Nakashige: Yes, I love this.
Donna Inouye: OK, we could take it down.
Donna is Alyssa Nilemo’s mom. She lives in Parker, and one evening, Alyssa and I went over to her place and brought boxes of old photo albums to look at together. As Alyssa wrote thank you cards to campaign donors, Donna helped me piece together the details of her family’s story.
Donna Inouye: One thing that I caught on to when Alyssa got into politics is realizing how much history plays a role in it. But I’ve never been a history person, you know, as far as following social climate and how it affects family and stuff. So this has been really fascinating for me. Alyssa took the route of, I guess, mainly stories that we tell in the family, and they oddly all kind of follow my dad. And there’s just tidbits about my mom’s side. That’s when I got to fill in all my mom’s side and how it comes together. And what’s really weird is how it does come together because all of the branches, we’re all Jodo Shinshu Buddhists. So we really have ties—the temple ties both families together before my mom and dad even met. It’s kind of neat.
It was neat to see Alyssa’s name near the bottom of this poster-sized piece of paper with hand drawn lines connecting Alyssa to names that I’d only heard about from stories. I’ll talk about the role that Alyssa’s father’s side of the family played in her life a little later. But it was Alyssa’s maternal side—Donna’s side—that really influenced Alyssa feeling like Colorado was her home. Whether it was because of what they learned from religion, or their leadership negotiating the needs of a perpetually evolving minority community, or maybe feelings toward a governor who stuck his neck out to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens, Alyssa’s maternal grandparents provided her with the moral framework that led her to value kindness. Alyssa’s maternal grandparents had different paths to finding themselves in Colorado. Her grandfather experienced the caravan. His family was in California in 1942, and at the age of 13, they traveled to the San Luis Valley in Colorado. On the campaign trail, Alyssa credits her grandfather’s caravan journey as an inspiration for her to make everyone feel welcomed in Douglas County. Alyssa’s grandmother’s side of the family, though—they were already in Colorado in 1942. They had been here since 1909. Alyssa Nilemo is a fourth-generation Coloradan running for the Colorado House of Representatives District 44. By narrating her story, I reflect on my own civic duty as an American citizen.
Imagine a physics classroom demo on space-time. A heavy object is placed at the center of a stretched-out bedsheet, and as marbles roll across the warped fabric, they follow circular paths around the weight in the middle. What if every part of ourselves was one of these middleweights that attract other bodies in the universe toward us? Welcome to Middleweight, a podcast about the interlacing connections that create communities and cultures. My name is Toshiki Nakashige. This is District 44, Episode 5: “Basically, over the years, this has become Grandpa’s story.”
In 1909, Nihei Yamaguchi and Sode Motoyama immigrated to the US. They traveled from Kumamato Prefecture to a town in Weld County north of Denver.
Donna Inouye: They ended up in Eaton, Colorado, so I have a map somewhere. And the only place that I could find information about how they got to Colorado is general history sites. It’s not family information, so they probably were with railroad workers or farmers.
Donna says that she hasn’t been able to find that much information about her maternal great grandfather, Nihei Yamaguchi. Instead, many of the family stories revolved around the matriarch of the family, Sode Motoyama.
Donna Inouye: Sode was the youngest daughter of an all-girl family. So when she got married, they had her husband take her last name.
In Japan, because family name is an important way to keep a family lineage intact, parents without a son traditionally ask a son-in-law to take their daughter’s surname upon marriage. In Japanese, surnames are listed first, given names second. I’d typically refer to the names of Japanese people by their surnames. But to stay consistent with how Donna refers to family members and to acknowledge that many family members effectively became or legally were Japanese Americans, I’ll call family members by their given names. Most of the time, that means their legal first name, but in some contexts, family members were known by their middle names. Sode, Donna’s maternal great grandmother, ran a pool hall in Eaton. And it’s assumed that the pool hall customers were men—perhaps Japanese contract laborers and farmers who would’ve been in the rural areas of Colorado by the 1910s. Nihei and Sode’s first daughter was named Hatsuko Florence Motoyama, who was Donna’s grandmother. Florence was born in 1911.
Donna Inouye: She is kibei. When she was six and her little brother was a few years younger, for some reason the mother decided to send him back to Japan because she felt like she ran a pool hall. So she thought that she was not getting enough culture, and she was learning really rough habits for a female. So she sent her back to Japan for—how many years is that? Like seven years or so.
In Japanese, kibei translates to “return to the US.” And it’s a term in the Japanese American community that refers to individuals who were born in the US, sent to Japan during childhood or adolescence, usually for their education, and they subsequently returned to the US. Florence was in Japan from ages roughly 7 to 14, returning to Colorado in 1924. Florence’s parents had ten children total, five of whom were born while Florence was in Japan, so the American life she came back to was considerably different from when she left. Florence now had to help raise her siblings, the youngest of whom was born when Florence was 18 years old and when Florence actually had her own first child. Florence was technically nisei, born in the US to Japanese immigrant parents. But she was also kibei, different from most of her siblings who were born and raised in Colorado. Florence spoke Japanese, becoming proficient in English in her teens, and likely related more to other issei of that generation. In 1928, Florence Motoyama met Shigeo Yanaru. Shigeo was issei, immigrating to a town in Weld County called Fort Lupton in 1919. Shigeo’s mother died during childbirth, so while Shigeo was being raised by his maternal grandparents in Fukuoka Prefecture, his father had moved to Colorado with his stepmother and stepbrother. At age 16, Shigeo left for the US to be with his father’s new family. They worked on a farm there, and as Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, they participated in temple activities. Shigeo had an unconventional upbringing, and based on stories told within the family, he’s been remembered as having a temper when he was younger.
Donna Inouye: The family stories are—Shigeo had a horrible temper. He didn’t like rules, and he was constantly just having fights. But he also settled down. He went to school. He went to DU.
Shigeo and Florence had an arranged marriage with the help of a matchmaker, or baishakunin.
Donna Inouye: And so by baishakunin, the story is someone decided that to settle him down, because he was such a hot temper and, you know, just didn’t have any focus, that he needed to settle down with a nice, quiet woman. Which is funny, because maybe she was a quiet woman, but as a grandma, what did they say, “yakamashii?” And he was very, very quiet.
The grandma Florence whom Donna had known was yakamashii, which means noisy or talkative in Japanese. And grandpa Shigeo was known to be quiet when he was older. Perhaps the matchmakers did an excellent job pairing two personalities that would balance each out in the long run. Donna reflects that it was funny to hear about Shigeo and Florence’s early relationship.
Donna Inouye: So he was, I think, 25. She was 18. And they got married. She didn’t know him at all. And in fact, she said the wedding night, she was really, really nervous because she didn’t know what he was going to do. And that’s when it came out how mean he was because he got their little lamp or lantern, and he had spent all their wedding money on paper. And he made her sit down and write thank you notes to everyone for coming to the wedding. And she had to write them because he said his writing was so bad. And so she had to stay up all night until he decided it was a good job.
The lore that Shigeo was hot-tempered or mean eventually transformed into a Romanticized version of the man. Family members perceived him to be a rebellious guy who challenged traditional expectations. Still, Shigeo and Florence proved to have an effective partnership raising a family. A year after their marriage, they had a daughter named Natsuko Dorothy Yanaru, born in Denver in 1929. Based on various sources of information, including a booklet about the family’s history as recorded by Dorothy herself, I gleaned that the Yanarus had a pretty challenging life throughout the 1930s and 40s. Shigeo’s father, stepmother, and stepbrother eventually returned to Japan, leaving Shigeo and Florence without a vital support system. The family also moved between Denver and Granby, a mountain town in Grand County where they were tenant farmers. Shigeo farmed during summer months and took on odd jobs in the city during the winter, like working for a Japanese newspaper. There was a lot of back and forth, but the Yanaru family felt grounded thanks to Shigeo’s involvement with the Tri-State/Denver Buddhist Temple.
Donna Inouye: Meanwhile, he made really good friends with the Buddhist minister, who was Tamai Sensei.
This Tamai Sensei that Donna refers to is Reverend Yoshitaka Tamai, the namesake of the residential complex Tamai Tower in Sakura Square. I could fill a whole episode about the life of Tamai Sensei and what he did for the Japanese Americans not only in Colorado but across the region. But one of the many ways Tamai Sensei was influential in Donna’s family history was helping Shigeo, his wife, and three daughters settle into a Japanese American community. Tamai Sensei moved to the US in 1930 and spent a lot of time commuting to rural areas where Japanese Americans lived. He and Shigeo were about the same age, and Donna described how they would bond when Shigeo accompanied the reverend on long drives. There were more opportunities in Denver, so Dorothy and her two younger sisters largely spent their school years there, summers on the farm. However, during World War II, the family moved to Granby year round because of food rationing and restrictions imposed on people of Japanese descent. After the war, Florence, Dorothy, and the sisters would eventually move to Arvada for the children’s high school education while Shigeo stayed in Granby. In 1954, Shigeo would eventually stop working at the farm, and he and Florence moved to a northern neighborhood of Denver. When I asked Donna what her mom Dorothy’s life was like when she was a child, Donna shared with me this story.
Donna Inouye: My mom. She’s this very, very mild-mannered person, very quiet, very non-assuming. And that’s how I grew up with this woman, thinking that she just didn’t do anything and took everything. And it wasn’t until I talked to my aunties. They were younger sisters of her. And so you know how sisters get together. And so they’re all middle-aged. They must have been in their 40s or 50s by then. I was in my 20s. And they were laughing about—they always talked, and they always flirted. They always had the boys. And Dorothy was always quiet. And I said something like, “Yeah, she’s still like that. She doesn’t do anything.” And so one of my aunties got kind of upset with me. And they said, “Well, then you just don’t know your mom.” Because during the war, she was in charge of her younger sisters. She had to get them to school and away from school. And I guess at one point a little boy was following them home and kind of calling them names and bullying them. And my mom kept these kids and just kept trudging. And finally he came up, and he was bumping her on the back or bumping my auntie on the back. So my mom just dropped their hands. She turned around, and she whacked him right across the face. It put my aunts in shock. But she just grabbed their hands. She didn’t say a word and just went home. And they never said a word. But that boy just stopped following them. So that’s what my auntie was cautioning me that I didn’t know my mom. And really I wouldn’t. And I tried to get my mom to verify that story, and she wouldn’t. She goes, “Oh, you know your aunties.” Well, I do so, but I don’t think they would totally make that up.
Dorothy was a quiet woman, but she was forceful if she needed to be. It’s worthwhile mentioning here that, because they were in Colorado in 1942, Dorothy and her family weren’t incarcerated in the camps. But based on this story, you can get a glimpse into how anti-Japanese feelings manifested in Colorado. Dorothy finished high school in Arvada and went to the University of Colorado Boulder, graduating with a nursing degree in the early 1950s. While in college, Dorothy Yanaru met Herbert Hideyo Inouye—Donna’s father, Alyssa’s grandfather. And in 1953, they would get married. Now, I’m going to rewind about 50 years to catch you up on how Herbert Inouye ended up in Colorado in the 1950s. The Inouye family has a history in America just as long as the Motoyamas. In 1907, Yoshiye Frank Inouye and Shio Inouye immigrated from Kagoshima Prefecture to the US, first living in San Francisco and then spending some years in Stockton. Between 1914 and 1924, Yoshiye and Shio had four children: from oldest to youngest, Helen, Roy, George, and Ted. I had known that the Inouyes were part of the caravan from the West Coast to Colorado in 1942, so it was surprising for me to learn that the family had actually moved from Northern California to southern Colorado years earlier. The Alien Land Act of 1920 had restricted people of Japanese ancestry from owning or leasing land in California. And after failed farming ventures in Oregon and then in California again, Yoshiye and other Japanese Americans he’d known and worked with were looking for something new. A representative from Gibson Land Company came to California to recruit individuals to operate farms in Colorado. After visiting Colorado a couple times, Yoshiye was motivated by the fertile lands in the San Luis Valley and moved the family there. Several other Japanese American families also migrated with the Inouyes. In 1926, Yoshiye, Shio, and their four children settled in a town in Conejos County called La Jara. And two years later, in 1928, Herbert, or Herb, was born. I was also able to read a booklet about the Inouye family’s history, this one written by Herb himself. Regarding the first decade or so of his life, he wrote, “Through this trying and difficult period, the Inouye children grew up, completely engulfed and experienced in a life of frugality.” Despite economic challenges, his father Yoshiye fostered a more social and cultural environment for the Japanese American community in the San Luis Valley. For example, he helped to establish a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist youth organization. Another way that Tamai Sensei was influential in Donna’s family was that he frequently drove between Denver and La Jara to help establish a Japanese Buddhist community there. In 1934, when Herb was five, Yoshiye passed away. Tamai Sensei would also perform Yoshiye’s funeral. To support the family after their father’s death, Herb’s brother Roy, who was older by about twelve years, gave up his college education in Denver to work on the farm in La Jara. Likely because of the stress of raising five children as a single parent, Herb’s mother Shio had been experiencing high blood pressure over the years. And after being hospitalized, she was advised to move to a lower elevation for her health. In 1939, the family sold all the assets of the farm and moved back to California. This time, they settled in Southern California, reuniting with Herb’s sister Helen, who’d been living in Los Angeles with her husband. Herb remembered these years as “the good times” because his mother’s health improved and the family had recovered from financial hardships, but he also describes them as “short-lived.” The family spent about three years in Los Angeles. In a series of articles on the website Discover Nikkei that he wrote in 2008, Herb documented the tumultuous transition from California back to Colorado when he was thirteen years old. In late January 1942, a Los Angeles County sheriff warned Herb’s brother Roy that the government had plans to convert horse stalls at the racetrack into facilities where they would imprison Japanese people. The officer advised Roy to leave California as soon as possible. Within about two weeks, the family prepared for a move back to Colorado. They had ties to the San Luis Valley, and of course, the Governor of Colorado Ralph Carr promised Japanese Americans that they could live freely in his state. Members of his immediate family and a few family friends left Los Angeles on February 8, 1942, which was actually 11 days before the signing of Executive Order 9066. The “transport,” as Herb called it, included three vehicles: a 1941 GMC truck, a 1939 Dodge sedan, and a 1939 Dodge pickup. After days of grueling travel, Herb and Roy pulled up to a patrolman at the Colorado border. He greeted them. “Welcome to Colorado. Governor Ralph Carr and the State of Colorado welcome you. How can I be of service to you?”
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In total, nearly 2,000 Japanese Americans traveled to Colorado as part of the voluntary migration from the West Coast to avoid imprisonment. Most of Herb’s family resettled in the San Luis Valley, again, as free citizens. But his sister Helen didn’t partake in the caravan. Helen and her husband had a young child at the time and decided to stay in Los Angeles until they would be forcibly relocated later in 1942. Serendipitously, Helen, her husband, and her son ended up in Amache about four hours from the San Luis Valley where the rest of the family was. Herb, his mom Shio, and three brothers started another chapter of their lives in La Jara. The eldest brother Roy would work on the farm again.
Donna Inouye: My dad was still a kid at school, but they would go and visit the sister and the little boy in the camp. And sometimes the camp would let them check the kid out, like a library book or something. So that was kind of weird.
Herb wrote about how distressing his visits to Amache were. Even though he himself wasn’t incarcerated, I know that those memories had a lasting impact on his outlook on fairness and compassion. Decades later, he would take his grandchildren, including Alyssa, to Amache to honor those who were incarcerated. After the war, Herb completed high school in La Jara and went on to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he would meet Dorothy Yanaru. He graduated college in 1950 and served in the US Army in the Korean War. After returning to Denver, he married Dorothy in 1953.
Donna Inouye: And then when he came back, my brother was born. And they stayed in Sacramento, California, just for a brief period, and then they came back to Colorado.
After Herb, Dorothy, and her brother Nathan came back to Colorado, Donna was born in Denver in 1955. From the 1910s to the early 1940s, only about 10 to 25% of Japanese Americans living in Colorado were located in Denver. The vast majority of Japanese Americans had been living in smaller towns, like the Inouyes in La Jara and the Yanarus in Granby. In 1940, it’s reported that about 2,734 Japanese Americans lived in Colorado, 323 of whom were in Denver. In 1944, as Japanese Americans were starting to be released from concentration camps, there were about 10,000 Japanese Americans in the state, with about half that number in Denver. And by 1947, many Japanese Americans eventually returned to the West Coast, leading to their population in Colorado to decrease to about 6,000, with again about half that in Denver. Immigration from Japan was virtually non-existent between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965. I’m not sure if it’s really considered immigration, but there were some exceptions, like Japanese nationals brought in as illegal aliens during these four decades. So as I see it, there were largely three groups of Japanese Americans in Colorado after World War II until the 1960s when new immigrants began entering the country. First, Japanese Americans who endured life in concentration camps, either incarcerated at Amache and stayed in Colorado or incarcerated elsewhere and moved to Colorado. Second, Japanese Americans who were living on the West Coast but avoided incarceration by voluntarily migrating to Colorado, like Herb. And third, Japanese Americans who already lived farther inland than what was defined as the West Coast in areas such as Colorado and weren’t displaced by Executive Order 9066, like Dorothy. I wasn’t able to find precise data on the number of people representing these three groups within the entire Japanese American population. But based on the fact that the Japanese American community in Colorado was relatively small—like, even individuals who lived in rural areas would regularly commute to Downtown Denver where the Temple was—I imagine that there were interactions between individuals from these different groups. I asked Donna whether her parents ever talked about specific instances with people in the community who’d been incarcerated.
Donna Inouye: The feeling that I got is—and a big reason my mom and dad and my aunties never talked about this is because—being inland in Colorado, it was assumed that they were not looked at as—they weren’t as Japanese as the Japanese people that had to endure the camps. They had to endure other things, but they didn’t have this life-altering event. So they, you know, they just never talked about it. Yeah, just wanting to keep quiet, wanting to, and it was a feeling too, like if they did talk about it, they didn’t want to be seen as bragging, like, “Oh, I didn’t have to go.” You know, “I was already in Colorado.” So all kinds of perceived slights, I think.
The camp experience had become synonymous with the Japanese American experience.
Donna Inouye: For people that went to camp to assume that people that didn’t go didn’t face racism is totally erroneous. But then again, I think—and this is my own personal thing—I think Japanese Americans view racism kind of askew. Like, something could be said or done to them, but they don’t classify it as racism because it’s not overtly physically dangerous. But there are so many layers that, I’m sure, could’ve been.
The concentration camps represent an institutionalization of systemic racism. Japanese Americans who lived freely were also victims of systemic racism, but as Donna believes and I agree, the perception of prejudice within the Japanese American community, because it went to such an extreme, became warped. I’ll note that, during the Redress and Reparations Movement, Herb’s family and others in the caravan received reparations just as those who were incarcerated. Many who voluntarily resettled in Colorado lost property and their belongings, too. I’ll also note that Dorothy’s family, and presumably others who were already in Colorado, didn’t receive reparations. At this point in our conversation, Donna and I had gone through the entire family tree. As I studied the lines connecting familiar names with familiar names, I noticed that Alyssa was on the fifth row of the tree. She had ancestors living in Colorado four generations back, making her fifth-generation.
Toshiki Nakashige: We keep emphasizing that Alyssa’s fourth-generation Coloradan, but she’s fifth generation in some capacity.
Donna Inouye: Oh yeah, so she can be a—what do we want to say? Yonsei-han.
Yonsei-han, or halfway between fourth- and fifth-generation. Alyssa looked up from her thank you card writing and chimed in.
Alyssa Nilemo: But like, grandma and grandpa, like, if I did take extra credit for being one more generation, they were like, “No you’re not.”
Donna Inouye: Oh, I know, I know, I know. But yeah, because basically, over the years, this has become Grandpa’s story.
Alyssa’s great great grandparents Nihei and Sode Motoyama immigrated to the US and settled in Eaton, Colorado, which technically, in the most inclusive definition of the term, makes Alyssa a fifth-generation Coloradan and gosei, a fifth-generation Japanese American. But the important distinction I think Alyssa’s making here is that her Japanese American social and cultural identity was shaped by her grandfather Herb’s influence and thereby most aligns with the yonsei generation. Another way to describe it is that, when Herb, a nisei, and Dorothy, a nisei-han, started a family, their children—Donna’s generation—effectively reset to sansei. As complicated as I’m making it out to be, my take home is that the mixing of generations and migration history even within Alyssa’s own family underscores the multiplicity of experiences of people in Colorado who consider themselves Japanese American. One of Donna’s motivations to do research into her family history was not to forget her mom’s family’s contributions to the Japanese American community. For example, she told me about how her maternal grandfather Shigeo earned an Emperor’s Award from Japan for serving on the Japanese newspaper in Denver. But because her mother Dorothy was quiet, her dad Herb became the stronger presence in the family. Donna and I continued to talk about her upbringing in the Denver area. In addition to her older brother Nathan, she had three younger sisters, Cathy, Sharon, and Cynthia.
Donna Inouye: Dad was kind of a linchpin. Because he grew up without a dad—he was five when his dad died. This is what we assume about him. He decided that he had to do the job of father.
Donna had, in total, six aunts and uncles and numerous cousins, and Herb would take it upon himself to make introductions and organize family reunions. Herb had experienced anti-Japanese prejudice because of the war, so he emphasized the need to be as American as possible.
Donna Inouye: My dad, and I assume my mom, too, but she was very quiet, placed a lot of importance on us assimilating and being American. So we were one of the few Japanese American this generation. We didn’t attend Japanese language school. My cousins did. We weren’t given Japanese middle names. My cousins were, and most of our contemporaries were also. He just felt it was really important that we assimilate.
Herb is part of the Silent Generation, born during the Great Depression, and Donna attributes Herb’s parenting style to this generation’s desire to conform.
Donna Inouye: It’s what made me kind of weird, or I felt really different. Like I’ve grown up feeling like I’m not as Japanese as my other sansei friends or even parts of my Sansei family. And the biggest piece is we really were not—“allowed” is kind of strong—but we weren’t allowed to learn the Japanese language. And most of the kids were encouraged to.
As you go from nisei to sansei to yonsei, the Japanese language becomes less prevalent. Nisei might learn Japanese at home from their issei parents, and beyond that, children typically learn Japanese at school, speaking English at home. Donna felt less connected to Japanese culture than her peers, but even though she grew up in the southwestern outskirts of Denver, she still spent time with Japanese Americans because of her family’s involvement in the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist community.
Donna Inouye: I was exposed to it through the temple. My dad also moved us out to the suburbs. And so I had my school friends who were all Caucasian, we went to all white schools. Sorry, they’re public schools, but that’s just how the demographics worked out. And then I had my church friends, or my temple friends, who were all Japanese American. So I was kind of a different personality in each one. So I loved my temple life, my temple friends, just running around. All the things were cultural, but I don’t know if we would have still been friends had it not. But, you know, all the Japanese, or all the Buddhist holidays, and everything generates around food, so all the food things we would just have in common. Plus, my dad was a bigwig at the temple, and so was my grandpa, so I felt really comfortable there. So maybe that made me sort of a—just by generation—a big shot also. So in my circle of friends, I was kind of the bossy one, the leader. I was really talkative, and we used to have lots of fun. In school school, I was really quiet. I think there’s people that probably didn’t even know, and if they do know, it’s because I’m the one that looked different. That’s how they knew me, but nobody really, really knew me.
Like other sects of Buddhism, Jodo Shinshu or True Pure Land Buddhism espouses compassion and gratitude. But what sets it apart from other forms of the religion is that it’s designed for simplicity. A core principle is that all beings are equal, equally capable of reaching Enlightenment. Therefore, Jodo Shinshu Buddhism was essentially designed to make it more accessible for everyone to practice. Herb wasn’t a religious leader in that he wasn’t a reverend at the Denver Buddhist Temple, but he was a religious community leader.
Donna Inouye: Well, my dad was important in ways, the non-religious ways. Like, to get a temple running, it’s so much temporal things. So my dad was like—he served in different positions, like president, treasurer, superintendent. And he was pretty creative, so at one point, like when he was superintendent, and there’s a time of year that all the kids put on shows for everyone, like we do dances and songs and whatever. So my dad decided that the teachers should be role models, and they should do something too. So he wrote a musical. I’m not kidding, he wrote a musical. So it was a play, and then so everyone would know the songs, he used contemporary songs of, you know, like, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” like those old folk songs. And he even did a few musical, like from Sound of Music. He knew all the songs. And so he’d write the words, and then have people—so I guess a lot of it was personality and leadership. He brought people together and, you know, made them do stuff like that.
Herb Inouye passed away in 2015 at the age of 86. To say that he left a profound legacy is an understatement. On Herb’s online memorial page, friend and former Temple Board member Ted Tsumura writes, “Herb was a quiet, unassuming leader who distinguished himself by getting the job completed no matter how long or how difficult the challenge. Whenever board members had difficulty making decisions about voting for or against a project related to church matters, Herb always clarified the debate and made everyone aware that the future of Buddhism in Colorado depended on our wisdom and not on personal bias or pocketbook.”
Donna Inouye: At the temple, people can be very religious and very loyal to the temple, and it’s usually through your crowd or how you grew up. But it also is a pattern at our temple that you come and you get your kids through it. And then for some reason you want to take a break, and you stop coming. But my mom and dad were very rare. I mean, they did take a break for a bit, but they definitely came back when the grandkids, when I started bringing the grandkids back. And so in that way, my dad and my mom, just because of their elderly presence and their history of serving through the temple, and that’s how they came to be known. And when new people come to the temple, when introductions are made, “Oh, Herb is like this foundation of the temple.”
Because of his lifelong presence in the Denver Buddhist community, Herb became someone everyone looked up to.
Donna Inouye: The one thing I noticed about my dad is—we had a 100-year celebration or something, and they interviewed a lot of people that have only been there for ten years or five years, and you know, thinking that’s a lot. And so they would ask them questions—“Well, why are you here? Why do you think you stayed?”—because we get a lot of newcomers, but they don’t necessarily stay. And I can think of two instances. Well, one, they were early Caucasian people. And those are usually the people that come and go because we’re kind of clannish or cliquish, so it’s really hard to break in anyway. But it got to a point for a few years where if you weren’t Japanese or Asian, it’s like, “What are you doing here? Are you spying on us? Are you trying to be one of us?” And so it was really hard. But so one of the first early Caucasian people said, “You know, Herb Inouye was so friendly. He always came and talked to him. He always tried.” And what my dad actually did was made him join the board. And so, you know, so that I know. And then even as my dad got older—because sometimes private conversation dad doesn’t come across as public dad, and so one thing that I’m really, really pleased about is—much later in life, we had a gay couple come and join our temple. Well, actually quite a few in a small break, but she said Herb would come over because after temple we all have baking sale, and when you sit down, you start sitting in your familiar place, you don’t change. And so it gets set up that—this lunch table is the cool kids, this lunch table is the weirdos. And she goes, “Herb actually got out from his table and came over and sat with my wife and me. And, you know, he didn’t say anything, he didn’t acknowledge that we were gay, but he would just keep coming until we finally felt brave enough to go sit with him.” So that, in my eyes, in my private dad, that wasn’t my dad. But, I mean, I could see him doing that.
Herb didn’t explicitly talk about his worldview or try to teach his grandchildren specific lessons about what it means to be a compassionate and grateful human. But Donna suspects that Alyssa learned about kindness from Herb by observing his actions. Herb wasn’t a politician in the traditional sense, but he was an expert at mediating community politics, assessing and advocating for the needs of the group, even if he didn’t necessarily feel that it would benefit himself personally. As Donna describes it, the idea of “private dad” versus “public dad” resonated with me as I’ve learned more about Alyssa during this election season. I think politicians are sometimes criticized for acting a certain way in one setting and acting differently in another. But to me, context is critical. Rather than taking what a politician promises in an isolated instance at face value, it’s more about trusting that person to make decisions for me when the circumstances do matter. I’ve witnessed Alyssa navigate a crowded room, speaking with voters, inspiring them to see her vision of bringing kindness into politics. As I go back and forth from this podcast studio to the kitchen, I’ve also seen Alyssa sit on her living room couch for hours on end talking to no one. Knowing how introverted she is, I’m in awe of “public Alyssa” sometimes, but I also know that “private Alyssa” is also striving to bring nuanced conversation into Douglas County politics, even if she might not want to right at that moment.
Alyssa Nilemo: This is the photo I don’t have that I was looking for, actually.
Donna Inouye: Oh, you can have that.
Alyssa Nilemo: That’s my baachan. My great-grandma, my grandma, my mom, and me.
Donna Inouye: We’re all eldest daughters.
Alyssa Nilemo: We’re all the oldest daughters from four generations in one picture.
As we were flipping through photo albums, Alyssa showed me a picture of Florence, Dorothy, Donna, and her when she was a baby. Herb often overshadowed the women in the family, but I know that Alyssa’s proud to be a descendent of a line of strong women. Later in the podcast, Donna Inouye and I will talk about her experience raising two children in the Japanese American community. But after this quick break, I sit down with Alyssa to discuss a couple other important pieces of her family history.
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If you’re trying to find out more about a candidate or a particular election, there’s a helpful resource called Ballotpedia. This website brands itself as the encyclopedia for American politics and concisely organizes important information like election results and campaign finance data. It also provides an opportunity for candidates to fill out a survey called Candidate Connection. One of the survey questions is about a book, essay, or film that the candidate recommends to demonstrate their political philosophy. Alyssa Nilemo recommends a book by journalist Adam Schrager called The Principled Politician: The Story of Ralph Carr. Ralph Carr served as the Governor of Colorado from 1939 to 1943, and choosing equality over politics and his party, he was a hero for the Japanese American community in Colorado. Ralph Carr’s bust is one of the three statues in Sakura Square, alongside Reverend Yoshitaka Tamai and civil rights attorney Minoru Yasui who challenged the constitutionality of the Japanese American concentration camps. Governor Carr had an immense impact on Alyssa’s family, providing a place where her grandparents could live free. I wondered whether her family had any personal interactions with him.
Alyssa Nilemo: When we started talking more about Governor Carr and what I knew about him from researching the history a little versus what I had been told in my family, I realized internally on the family side, he was more a character of, like, lore. And I think that comes from the fact that that pivotal moment happens in my grandfather’s life when he’s a young teenage boy. And so the way he saw or understood this man is the same way I might understand more a figure. And so for us in the family, what I knew of Ralph Carr was that he was a rising star after his term as governor and what he did for the Japanese Americans. He tries to run for the Senate, and he loses. And that loss is credited to the fact that he took the stance on the internment camps that was not popular. And then he does eventually try to run for office again, but very close to the election date, he dies. And so some folks argue that he was on a redemption run and that, in that short lifespan, history had proven he was right and that he could run again and that he would have won. I think what I understood from my grandfather was that it doesn’t matter whether or not you get rewarded in life, because as I knew it, Ralph Carr just loses. In the end, he loses. But at the same time, growing up at Temple with the bust of Ralph Carr, just back in Sakura Square, I knew he was really important, even from such a young age, because of how much attention and care and time was focused on the statues that are in there. And it is kind of strange that it is such a Japanese, Asian block. And the biggest statue there is of, you know, a Japanese man. And then right next to it is this bust of this very white man. And so in my head, I think I just knew this person was emblematic of what we should strive for, like the absolute epitome of allyship.
Alyssa’s grandfather Herb was on the redevelopment committee that established Sakura Square in 1973, so he was involved in installing that bust of Ralph Carr. But because Herb was only 21 when Ralph Carr died in 1950, Alyssa wonders whether Herb’s older brother Roy would’ve had a closer connection to Ralph Carr.
Alyssa Nilemo: I think what I understand more as an adult, and even just recently in these interviews of talking is I knew that Governor Carr also was a little bit different because he had grown up very poor. He came from a mining family. He was bilingual and spoke Spanish and was very close to the Hispanic community in the San Luis Valley, and then known to be very close to the Japanese American community in La Jara. And so I kept trying to think the link must be my grandfather. But as my mom pointed out, his brother was much older and was farming, and he was a political person. And so the real connection that I wish I could go back in time and ask the stories of is—my grandfather’s brother probably did work with and know governor car. And I get the feeling was probably a driving force between the political action he chose to take in his own community, fighting for his farm and fighting for farmers and fighting for water rights. And my grandfather greatly admired his older brother and really put him on a pedestal. And so it is more the way my grandfather talked about his brother and looked up to him. And that is the lineage of sort of Governor Carr uplifts one brother. And you’ve still impacted this whole family and somehow impacted me. And so maybe the lesson is more from that uncle, which is you fight for community. You work hard, and you love your family. And that’s that’s what my grandfather cared about were those things.
One of my favorite things about making this podcast and asking Alyssa questions about her Japanese American heritage is that I get to see her make new discoveries in real time, make new connections. Colorado’s a middleweight, bringing together Alyssa’s family and thousands of other Japanese Americans. And now me. The surnames of Alyssa’s ancestors include Motoyama, Yanaru, and Inouye. Alyssa’s last name is Nilemo. Even though it has a sort of foreign-sounding syllabic structure to it, it’s not Japanese. Nilemo is a Swedish name Alyssa acquired when she got married.
Alyssa Nilemo: Nilemo is only a few generations old, and so my father-in-law, who we all very lovingly call “Crazy Old Man,” so that’s how I will refer to him, so when crazy old man’s father, or Farfar, and his brother immigrated to the United States, as I understand it, they sort of just get told, they can really put down whatever they want on this paperwork, which I have never heard of. That seems kind of insane to me. But these two brothers decide that it’s going to be “Nilemo,” and one brother ends up staying in the United States, and one brother goes back to Sweden. And so if you ever meet a Nilemo, odds are they are the children or grandchildren of these two brothers.
This is an audio medium, so hopefully by now, you know it’s pronounced “Nilemo,” or at least that’s the way Alyssa pronounces it.
Alyssa Nilemo: The fun part of Nilemo, because it is a name that everyone pronounces quote-unquote wrong, is even within the family there is this joke that Crazy Old Man says the name wrong, and he insists, “How do you know? My father made it up. You have no idea.” And so as a joke, sometimes around the holidays, we’ll call his different voicemails. So at his job he has a desk phone, and then a cell phone, and then his personal phone, and if you get through to the voicemails, he says his name different on every single one. So as I understand it, and how we all feel about it, it’s Nilemo, but I of course have heard ni-LEH-mo, NILE-uh-mo, NEE-LEH-mo. I mean, sometimes people are really just, I think, making up their own letters somewhere in there, but I love the name because it doesn’t have that long of a history. But it has sort of this magical one to me, in the sense that these two brothers just make it, and then it becomes this deep part of the family, and family pride.
I think it’s ironic that, for someone who’s proud to have Japanese heritage going back more than a century in Colorado, Alyssa now has a last name with a relatively short history and an ethnically ambiguous origin. But perhaps this ethnic ambiguity is perfect for Alyssa. There’s actually a twist to all of this that I haven’t explicitly mentioned yet in this series. Prior to getting married, Alyssa didn’t have a Japanese surname either. Until 2018, she was known as Alyssa Holland.
Alyssa Nilemo: And also just jokingly for me, as a person who grew up with Holland, like a very straightforward, easy, very white last name Holland, I never had to go through the difficult part that I saw a lot of my Asian American counterparts go through, which is that no one can say your last name. And now I have this Swedish last name, so still a very sort of white last name, and no one can pronounce it. And I think they think they can’t pronounce a Japanese name, but also Japanese nationals tend to be the only people who, right off the bat, will say my last name correctly.
A Japanese way to pronounce Nilemo is Niremo. Alyssa’s mixed race, Japanese on her mother’s side and Caucasian on her father’s side. Alyssa’s mom, Donna—her surname is Inouye. Donna’s now divorced from Alyssa’s dad, but even before that, Donna had kept her last name when she got married. Alyssa’s father’s surname is Holland. Alyssa and her older brother Chris were born with the last name Holland. The ethnic origin of “Holland” is surprisingly confusing, but more than that, growing up mixed race was a challenge for both Alyssa and Chris. They straddled two worlds and were often pressured to choose one half or the other. I delve into Alyssa’s mixed race identity. That’s next time, on Middleweight: District 44.
Donna Inouye: If we were at Temple, and so most of the kids there around were Japanese in appearance, then my kids felt they were total Caucasian.
Chris Holland: And I think just when we hit our teen years, the cycle of looking more Asian or more white as you grow just happened to land at that time where I looked more, a little bit more, not only when you say Asian, just like a minority. I looked a little more minority, and she looked a little more white. And I feel like that caused us just to lean into whatever one we happened to look more like at that time.
Middleweight is produced by me, Toshiki Nakashige. The art for the podcast was created by Yoko Takahashi. Music was composed by Tim Greer and performed by Steve Denny and Gary Tsujimoto. Special thanks to Stacey Shigaya. For more information about the podcast, please visit middleweightpodcast.com, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. My name is Toshiki Nakashige. Thanks for listening.