AACP May 2020 Newsletter

Welcome everyone!

Yes, we’re still here and, after nine years, our newsletter is finally back.

When we ended our newsletter in January of 2011, I mentioned that we would continue with other avenues and asked that you follow us on Facebook. Many of you did and many new followers found us there.

Now that we have some time on our hands and have some new members with our organization, we thought it was finally time to fully utilizing social media (Twitter and Instagram now too) and revamp our website.

The website is still undergoing renovations, but we’re happy that we can now offer you books through our bookshop.org presence.

One of the things that we’re going to try to do is utilize social media to better communicate with you and to let you know of things that we will be posting on our website. So stay tuned, and give us your feedback and suggestions.

With your interest and kind support (through purchases and donations) we’ll try to make our efforts interesting for you. In this way, we hope that we can help each other survive these tough times.

Thank you to all of our contributors – Pia Ceres, Angela Zhao, Florence Hongo, Frances Kakugawa, Philip Chin, and all the others for helping with our online work.

Happy 100th birthday Mas (Hongo)! Wish we could have properly celebrated with you. We look forward to celebrating your 101st birthday when we can all be together again.

For those of you that don't know Mas, he's been one of AACP's main members. Click here for a short video of him working at an event six years ago.

Everyone please take care.

Leonard Chan

“WHAT DID YOU SAY? YOU WERE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP FOR THREE AND A HALF YEARS?” Irma raised her voice in disbelief. The four of us were sitting in a small circle at the first meeting of the San Mateo Elementary School District community advisory committee in 1969. I was embarrassed that this was so surprising. After all it had been 34 years since it had happened. But then again, even amongst many Japanese Americans, it had often been treated like a shameful secret.

“Florence,” Irma said in a more normal voice, “this story must be told to the students—they need to know that racism is more than African American slavery.” The group nodded in agreement.

Transcending the

Burden of Living

In the Age of COVID-19

An Interview and

Poetry Lesson with

Frances Kakugawa

Interviewed by Leonard Chan

When I thought of topics for the first edition of our new newsletter, I was hoping to have something that would fit with National Poetry Month and something that might pertain to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis at hand. I didn’t really think of connecting the two until I thought of Frances Kakugawa.

Readers to our old newsletter may remember Frances Kakugawa (see our January 2009 newsletter ).

Frances is an author, children’s book author, poet, educator, blogger, advice columnist for the Hawaii Herald, and has conducted workshops on poetry writing for caregivers. She even did a haiku writing lesson for us at the Foster City Library back in 2012.

I was just rereading parts of Frances Kakugawa’s wonderful book Mosaic Moon: Caregiving Through Poetry: Easing the Burden of Alzheimer’s Disease and began to realize just how well she fit with the original theme I had in mind for this newsletter.