All in The Family
By JORDAN IKEDA
RAFU STAFF WRITER
Saturday, May 24, 2008

Furutani clan discusses family ties and the importance of talking at the dinner table.

Photos by MarioG. Reyes/Rafu Shimpo
Assemblymember Warren Furutani discusses family as his wife Lisa, sons Joey and Sei and mother-in-law Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga listen During a discussion at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday.

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga

Warren cringes as Lisa recounts the first time they met.

This past Saturday, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) held a program that featured Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga and State As­semblymember Warren Furutani along with his wife, Lisa and two sons, Sei and Joey, in a Q&A style discussion revolving around the theme, “From One Generation to the Next: Families Intersecting with History.”

“The Herzig-Yoshinaga, Furutani family,” said Mitchell T. Maki, the act­ing dean of the College of Health and Human Services at California State University Los Angeles, who moderated the event, “is a family that I look at as one that has affected history, and in turn history has affected them as well.”

The program was an opportunity for community members to get a candid look at the life of a newly elected as­semblymember and the influences he’s received and the influence that he has had within his own family. The influence and effect on history that their family has had all sprang life from the same place—conversation.

“I think what is special about our family and what has helped mold who we are is the open-minded communica­tion through every generation,” said Fu­rutani’s 23-year-old son Joey, an account coordinator at Nakatomi & Associates. “The dinner table. That was the forum of communication for our family.”

The seeds for this freedom to speak were first sown two generations be­fore.

Herzig-Yoshinaga, Lisa’s mother, of course played a pivotal role in the coram nobis cases, NCJAR’s lawsuit, and the redress campaign through her historic research at the National Archives.

“Lisa and I used to sit over the dinner/breakfast table and it was anti-Vietnam war days,” she said, “and we talked a great deal about that…We started to do a lot of talking.”

On Warren’s side of the family, the dinner table was less prevalent, but communication was equally valued.

“Despite being the same age as all my Japanese American friend’s parents,” said Warren about his own father, “he was totally different. I mean, he would talk to us for example. Most of the Nisei fathers at that time that we knew, if they grunted at you, you were lucky. My father would even engage my friends.”

Conversation. In today’s email, text-messaging, high-speed internet/television obsessed world, something that used to represent a basic funda­mental human action, has gone alarm­ingly absent in today’s families.

Saturday’s program was a step in reintroducing the idea of family conversation, about the importance of maintaining identity. Furutani spoke about a time when Japanese Ameri­can history and information were not available.

“There was nothing out there,” he said. “There were no books. There was no community organizations other than the JACL and a few others. There was no museum, that’s for sure. There was nothing. And so you had to start asking questions and finding information.”

And despite the growth in the Japa­nese American community over the past 30 years, those same questions still apply today.

“My JA identity is very strong and it comes through open communica­tion,” said Joey. “I think that’s what I really value is that communication with my parents.”