My paternal grandmother, Yoshi Tani, passed away one month ago, on Dec 3, 2022 at the age of 101. I archive here the remarks that I delivered at her funeral. My middle name, Yoshi, is a constant reminder of our closeness.
Good afternoon – I’m Ellen Tani, one of Yoshi’s many granddaughters. I hope to share some insights about her personality, character and values on behalf of me, my sisters, Karen Tani and Sarah Green, and my parents, Paul and Barb Tani. They center on persistence, independence, tradition, and connection.
Grandma Yoshi, whose name I carry as my middle name, and Grandpa George taught me how to play golf when I was 10 years old. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was the only grandchild interested in the sport, and spent countless hours with Grandma swinging a golf club (and most times hitting the ball), getting crusty with sweat as I hauled a golf bag nearly the size of my own body around the course (no cart-riding allowed, she said, the beauty of the game is that you can play it until you’re 90. And even then you should still at least walk). Those memories are marked with frustration, psychological torment, imprudent decisions, and blisters. But that is just the game of golf. The more lasting feelings include being cheered and supported, and sensing the warmth of Grandma’s pride as she watched me learn and improve as I went on to play on a division 1 collegiate team. I appreciated what it meant to be mentored by someone devoted to practice, growth, and honesty. When I would hit a bad shot, she would tell me, “Yes. That was bad. Hit another just to see if you can do it right, but you have to count the first one.”
Grandma Yoshi had a unique sense of humor: she could laugh at the silly things we did as children but also, in my sister Sarah’s words, could “gently, persistently, cajole us to do something she wanted.” Here’s an example: I used to attend summer golf camp at the Country Club she and Grandpa belonged to, and after our morning’s lessons we would all get to play nine holes with our camp friends. She would often join us for that round, and it was really fun to play with her and show her what I’d learned. Less fun was the fact that she reinforced the rules of the game as she walked with us, watching our every move. She believed in fair play, and wanted to make sure that others could trust that we honored the rules of the game. Sometimes I would get frustrated after missing a shot and blame her for making me nervous. “You need to get used to people watching you,” she said, preparing me for a future in which I would have to fight through frustration and scrutiny, often under pressure. With the distance of time, I came to understand her persistence as an outgrowth of her fight for independence amidst adverse circumstances. She finished her college degree in dietetics, despite the interruption in her junior year of World War II and her family’s incarceration at Minidoka in Jerome, Idaho.
This brings me to independence – for as much as she brought us together and cultivated shared values, she also cherished the idea that she was her own person, who could think for herself and had her own ambitions. I remember asking her about her engagement to Grandpa George, whom she met at the camp hospital. I asked her how he proposed, and how she replied, expecting a romantic story. She recalled that he said he didn’t have a ring yet but voiced his commitment to marriage; he was considering enlisting in the army and applying to medical school. Her reply was, “well, I’ll think about it.” Independence meant reserving space for her own thought process, her own ambitions, desires, and responsibilities.
And when it came to traditional gender roles, independence also meant “playing the part” when it mattered while reinforcing her commitment to gender equity through her words and actions. My sister Sarah observed this firsthand when she traveled with our grandparents and my mom to Japan before starting her study abroad program there in college. She saw Grandma bristle at the conventional roles that women were expected to play in both Japan and the United States, even leaving as soon as the essential family obligations were complete.
What Grandma modeled was an ethos that is present in each of my family members: putting family first while maintaining the flame of independence. Her independence was like a pilot light, the flame lowering when duty called but always ready to flare up again; she also used its energy to support the independence of others. I loved how she extended her passion for health and well-being from her decades of training in dietetics toward gerontology, shaped by the needs of her own aging mother-in-law. She managed numerous volunteer pursuits for seniors – from helping with their tax prep to teaching exercise classes – to ensure their physical independence in aging.
In 1994, she published her personal history as a book chapter in a collective memoir entitled Reflections: Memoirs of Japanese American Women in Minnesota. Curiosity, the wandering companion of independence, instilled in her a desire to learn many things, but especially to learn about the law and history of the internment. Her reflections on this inspired my sister Karen to study legal history, especially Grandma’s faith, as Karen writes, “that ultimately law and justice would intersect.” (she has written about this here) Karen now teaches legal history at the University of Pennsylvania.
I read her memoir again when I was applying to graduate school at age 23, barely older than she was when World War II marked, in her words, “my loss of innocence and my coming of age.” I was struck by how directly she discussed racism in that watershed moment, and also by the one thing she said she couldn’t part with when she and her family were incarcerated with only what they could carry: her Underwood typewriter, a high school graduation gift from her parents. She entrusted it to a college professor who later sent it to her in camp, and she toted it around forever. That object is my muse and in many ways, so is she. As an art historian committed to social justice, I write about and teach about how acts of human creativity tell stories about cultures, especially from the perspective of those whose voices may otherwise be silenced. Grandma’s typewriter was a prized possession, but also a tool of agency and communication.
Karen remembers being surprised that, while attending a Minidoka reunion with Grandma Yoshi in Seattle, she did not allow her memories of camp to become a well of trauma but rather rejoiced in reconnecting with friends she hadn’t seen in decades. If there’s anything we associate with Grandma Yoshi’s memory, it is in her remarkable powers of connection, from her faithful and regular correspondence practice to the magical newspaper clipping she always seemed to have stashed in her purse that illustrated your connection to someone you never imagined. My mom first noticed this about her—they both have a brilliant way of drawing lines between rather than around people—and we are all intrepid connector personalities.
Grandma fostered many other traditions in our family that helped strengthen existing bonds between us, build new bonds with those new to our community, and maintain connections to our heritage and history. She ensured that we gathered for every family member’s birthday to mark the passage of time and to celebrate individual growth, exchanged Christmas gifts in our growing family, and always had a seat at the Thanksgiving table for an extra guest.
Her involvement in the JACL, the Japan America Society, and the St. Paul /Nagasaki Sister City Committee held space for us in a community that would preserve the traditions of our Japanese American heritage that she so valued. I’ve moved around a lot, and really missed this. So on December 3, I went to a mochitsuki festival and luncheon put on by the DC Chapter of the JACL; I wanted my husband and one-year-old son to experience that feeling of belonging and connection. I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman who was sitting alone: Tom Kurihara. A former naval officer, he lived in Virginia, but spent his high school years in Minnesota. We’d both attended Stanford. He’d become really interested in the history of the Military Intelligence Language School at Fort Snelling, where Grandpa George had trained. And then! It turns out he knew Grandma Yoshi through his aunt, Ruth Tanbara, who supported the resettlement of many Japanese Americans in the Twin Cities; her involvement in the Twin Cities JACL, and his own involvement in the St. Paul/Nagasaki Sister City committee. As one connection followed another, I felt the power of Grandma’s presence. Later that evening, I learned that she had passed away.
She concluded her memoir with tanka poetry (a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7) that she had written, a cultural tradition she loved to share; so I will conclude my remarks with one as well.
A breeze through porch screens
A tunnel of fudge bundt cake
cold pools and fruit bowls
save some inari for me
I’ll have a little of each
I am grateful to the communities of the Twin Cities JACL, the Centennial Methodist Church, Mendakota Country Club, and many other organizations that fulfilled my grandmother’s penchant and purpose for connecting with others around shared experiences, values, and loves in the life she built in Minnesota. I am ever curious about the community she describes prior to her “loss of innocence and coming of age” during World War II, growing up in a predominantly Japanese neighborhood of Seattle.
