BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, Washington – In Corinne Nakagawa Gooden’s kitchen, overlooking Mount Rainier and bald eagles fishing in Puget Sound, 16 relatives danced among themselves as they prepared for a Japanese-American New Year’s Eve party.
Mrs. Gooden’s daughters, both in their forties, worked in tandem: Amy brought a pot of rice to Sydne, who cut sweetened vinegar into the hot grains. Some cousins in their early twenties cooled the rice with broken paper fans that belonged to their grandmother. Everyone gathered to fill the rice on tofu skins over low heat with sugar and shoyu for inari-zushi. It was a general test of what they do on December 31st.
“We all know our parts,” Ms. Gooden.
In Japan, the first three days of the year, a national holiday called Oshogatsu, they spend time with the family eating an elaborate variety of New Year’s Eve food, called osechi ryori, from large lacquer boxes. Osechi dishes are prepared in advance, seasoned with shoyu, sugar and vinegar to preserve them (without refrigerating) through Oshogatsu, when the focus is on the union. Open a box of osechi in the Kanto, Kansai or Hokuriku regions and you’ll find several candied bean gems, pickled vegetables and fish stewed or cured with salt, each symbolic dish of next year’s luck and fortune.
Casech osechi meals have become rare in Japan, where most women now work outside the home. They don’t have time to prepare complicated food, so they buy it at a supermarket or department store. Some young people use the holidays to travel instead of spending time with family.
But Mrs. Gooden’s family, who refer to themselves as Sasakis, are engaged in preparing to prepare osechi, as it has been many years since her ancestors came to Seattle (a short distance by ferry). ‘here) from Hiroshima in the early twentieth century.
The history of their tradition echoes that of many Japanese-American families: immigration, assimilation, and, for a time, imprisonment. the entire Japanese-American population on the west coast, about 120,000 people.
When Mrs. Gooden, 73, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, her parents avoided talking about camps or internment. “They didn’t want to teach us to hate anyone,” he said. “They wanted us to be good Americans.”
In 1908, when his grandfather, Shunroku Sasaki, arrived in Seattle, the city’s Japantown was moving with businesses serving young people who had been immigrants since shortly after Japan opened its borders in 1868, with the hope to make a fortune in the timber factories and fisheries of the American West.
Like many of these men, Mr. Sasaki planned to return to Japan rich and fluent in English, the language of commerce and science. But after barely escaping a wood disaster, his best friend let him influence him to open a tailor shop where they sewed dresses for fellow businessmen.
Mr. Sasaki returned to Japan long enough to find a girlfriend. Perhaps it was her good looks or her desire for adventure and independence that convinced Hisaye Katayama, a college-educated woman from a well-to-do family, to arrange a arranged marriage with a young stranger.
“I had never met him, I had only seen him,” Ms. Gooden. In Seattle, Mrs. Sasaki ran a small hotel.
The couple raised four children in America. The first was Yemi Sasaki, Mrs. Gooden’s mother. Hisaye Sasaki brought his two daughters back to Japan when they were in elementary school, with the intention of leaving them there during their schooling. Mr. Sasaki mailed them American cookies and copper powder for cakes. But they missed him too much and wrote to his wife asking her to take the girls home; they returned after six months.
Back in Seattle, the girls attended tea ceremony, ikebana (flower arrangement) and Japanese language classes. At school, teachers assigned Sasaki children new names, so Yemi became Mary Catherine; Yoshiko became Teresa; Hiroshi became Hiro and Takashi became Henry, nicknamed Hank.
The maids had made them at their mother’s house in Hiroshima (when Mr. Sasaki died at the age of 84 in 1974, Mrs. Sasaki still did not know how to wash clothes), but a friend taught her how to cook. In Japantown, you could have found familiar ingredients and condiments for osechi, if not fresh, at least canned or dried. He put his daughters to work in the kitchen, peeling sato-imo (taro) and renkon (lotus root) for nishime, simmering vegetables in a sweet shoyu dashi and boiling black beans in syrup with an iron nail to give them color.
In those years, Oshogatsu was a traveling party in Seattle. On New Year’s Day, men and children traveled from house to house visiting family and friends, while women were accommodated. Even after Yemi and Yoshiko grew up and had children of their own, their mother called them home to help cook osechi.
Yemi Mary Catherine Sasaki recently married Noboru Nakagawa when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, two months after the Japanese air strike on Pearl Harbor. The order, motivated by fears that the Japanese Americans would help the country’s war effort, led to the mass arrest.
“My mother was six months pregnant and they didn’t know where they were going,” Ms. Gooden. They were transferred about 35 kilometers south of the city, to a quickly built detention center at the Puyallup fairgrounds, which the government, pointed out with a sardonic laugh, preferred to call Camp Harmony. “They were there for six months, living in animal stalls.”
When Yemi Nakagawa’s belly swelled, she was forced to use group showers and a latrine dug into the ground. She was taken to a hospital in Tacoma for the birth of her first daughter, Sherry, and then returned to Harmony Camp.
Later that same year, the young family was taken on a train, unaware that they were heading to Minidoka Camp in Idaho, where they would live for three years in a barracks. The thin interior walls did not extend to the ceiling, so the seven families who shared a barracks with the Nakagawas were left awake at night by the crying baby.
Mr. Nakagawa had left behind his grocery store at 14th and Jackson streets; a white friend took care of the store supplies and his dog, King.
“The dog died of a broken heart,” Ms. Gooden. When Mr. Nakagawa received the news, he burst into tears. It was the only time the family saw him cry.
They ate all the meals in the living room (hot dogs, pancakes and macaroni) and did not have their own kitchen to prepare comfortable foods such as miso soup and rice, let alone the elaborate osechi dishes for the new year.
While the government was trying to determine who to trust, detainees had to fill out what was known as a “fidelity questionnaire.” A low score could be obtained for answering that they spoke Japanese fluently or that they practiced martial arts.
Mr. Nakagawa’s brother would not promise to fulfill it if he were sent to the U.S. Army and, out of a sense of duty to his parents, would refuse to “abandon any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor” (question 28). He was detained at the McNeil Island Federal Prison, where many resistant to Japanese drafts were imprisoned, from 1944 to 1946.
The Nakagawas and their young child, Sherry, were released from Minidoka in 1945 and returned to Seattle. Homes, farmland, shops and restaurants had been taken over by Japanese-Americans, who then faced discrimination and sometimes harassment and violence while looking for new homes and jobs. Teenagers like Mrs. Nakagawa’s brothers, Hank and Hiroshi Sasaki, had been robbed of the chance to finish high school or save money for college. With few job prospects, Hank enlisted in the Air Force and Hiroshi in the Army.
The family patriarch, Shunroku Sasaki, lost his tailoring. Mr. Nakagawa lost his supermarkets and would spend the rest of his working life as a product manager at Tradewell and QFC supermarkets. Ms. Nakagawa worked full-time in an adoption agency, starting as a file clerk and retiring 30 years later as an office manager.
Mrs. Gooden was born the year after the Nakagawas were released from Minidoka. He did not know the internment at school; he was not in the encyclopedia and his parents only acknowledged that it had happened.
“They never talked about the difficulties,” he said, only with fond memories of baseball games and cards on the fields.
The Nakagawas loved to entertain. They took dance classes and partyed in the basement. After retiring, Ms. Nakagawa played golf almost every day and was champion of the Tokiwa Women’s Golf Club. She and her mother, Hisaye Sasaki, continued to practice ikebana.
At the house on Bainbridge Island, where Mrs. Gooden lives with her husband, Bill LeMire, Mrs. Gooden has an iron kettle from Hisaye, bamboo spoons, and lacquered natsume (wooden drums) for the ceremony. has. Her mother’s silk embroidery, of pine branches, and a crane and turtle, hang on the wall.
But Mrs. Gooden and her sister, Sherry, among the third generation of Sasaki women in America, were not trained in Japanese arts and never learned the language. Ms. Gooden did not visit Japan until she was 70 years old. The family believed they would not be welcome because they were too Americanized and did not speak the language.
It was Mrs. Gooden’s daughter, Amy, who got her grandparents to talk about the fields. “It was a source of embarrassment, questioning his loyalty,” Amy Gooden said.
She and her sister, Sydne Gooden, grew up curious about their heritage. They both chose to study the Japanese language. Growing up, Amy traveled to Japan with her job as a naval architect. Sydne traveled to Japan to learn at a sushi bar while working at BondST, a Manhattan restaurant where she was the first woman to cook at the sushi counter.
As everyone remembers, Oshogatsu has been the only Japanese party for which the Sasaki family gathers. In addition to the typical osechi dishes, they prepare food that would normally be prepared for festivals and other important occasions, such as sekihan (sticky rice with red beans), maki-zushi (fat sushi rolls stuffed with vegetables and egg) and saba-zushi (mackerel in vinegar pressed into rice with vinegar).
After Mrs. Gooden’s grandmother died and her mother developed dementia, there were a few years in the 1990s when the Sasakis did not make osechi ryori. It was the idea of a cousin, Ron Sasaki, to relive family recipes.
It can’t be that hard, he told Mrs. Gooden. “Are you kidding?” she replied. “Do you know how to do any of these things?”
As in Japan, women had taken responsibility for Oshogatsu’s preparations. To keep the tradition alive, the Sasaki family found a modern solution: each person is responsible for preparing some dishes at home. On New Year’s Eve they get together to finish cooking together and on January 1, they celebrate with family and friends.
Ron Sasaki cooks a cod or a cod with a lively, swimming posture and prepares nanbanzuke, fried and pickled herring. His father fished and always brought salmon to the party, symbolizing his return to his homeland.
Another cousin cooks Seattle-style teriyaki chicken, with ginger and garlic. Since Mrs. Gooden’s sister lives in Hawaii, junk musubi (rice balls) and peanut butter mochi have become part of the party. This year, for the first time, the family passes more of the responsibility to the fourth generation: younger cousins will make tamagoyaki (rolled tortilla) for maki-zushi and bring sashimi.
They always start eating with ozone, mochi soup, their red and white Naruto fish cake depicting the rising sun, the symbol of Japan.