Russellville Lives TM

                                                                                                     

                                                                       Taka Mizote

Award-winning author Daniel Brown (The Boys In The Boat) has written a current best seller,  Facing The Mountain. It is a true story of Japanese American heroes in World War II.  Taka Mizote and her sisters, Aya Fuji and Lily Kiyokawa could have stepped out of the pages of Daniel Brown’s manuscript.  

Taka’s parents were in that wave of Japanese immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century in the 1900s, searching for a life better than the one of hopelessness in Japan.  The immigrants took low-paying jobs building railroads, working crops,  mining. But working for poverty level wages, Taka’s parents saved enough to take ownership of a 50-acre farm near Hillsboro, Oregon and send a daughter, Kate, to Oregon State College.  The American dream.

Then December 7, 1941 and the attack at Pearl Harbor that would change the lives of the Iwasaki family forever.

 Taka’s father had been aware of the growing hostility between Japan and America but the events in Hawaii brought a terrible shock to him and his family. Laws prevented Taka's parents from ever becoming American citizens, but she and her seven siblings were all born in America and so were citizens.  Be proud of your American citizenship, her father told them, and do everything you can to support your country.

Taka dreaded going to school the Monday after the attack, wondering how her classmates would treat her.  It turned out they treated her with kindness as the American citizen she was.  In most of America that was not the case.

Because of the curfew imposed on her family, Taka could not attend graduation with her classmates at Hillsboro High School but received her diploma through the mail.  The Iwasaki family soon was ordered to leave their farm and join other Japanese Americans in a temporary holding facility at a relocation center near the Portland stockyards (an old Civilian Conservation Corps’ camp).  A friend and neighbor leased their farm and took good care of it until the end of the war.

The family later was moved to a camp in Idaho, where they lived until the war ended. Oregon State Freshman Kate was given help transferring to Hamline University in Minnesota, where she earned her degree.

Taka did not let the horrendous dislocations of the war years define her life. Right from the start she set her mind to consider the relocation camps to be like the summer camps she had gone to as a young girl. She knew the war would end someday and she was encouraged to pursue an education until that happened.  She attended the College of Idaho for three years and then transferred to Pacific University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Reading was difficult for her because she had never had adequate training in reading skills from the start.  In high school and college she read only what she had to and it wasn’t until later working with students in the reading lab at Madison High School in Portland that she discovered the important role reading played in a person becoming truly educated.  Japanese Buddhist’s have a word for Taka’s enlightenment: Satori.  It was a career-changing experience as she trained to become a teacher.

Cancer took her daughter Laurie Jean in 1967 and her husband Jimmy passed away in 1976.  That was when she started her life in the schoolhouse as a counselor's secretary at Madison High school. She started working with emotionally handicapped students and a couple of years later  opened a class for those students while working for the Gresham Public Schools.  When a job teaching first grade for the Powell Valley School opened she began a 17-year mission of insuring that those young scholars would have a solid foundation in the skills of reading.

Then Taka retired. She lived in a retirement community in NE Portland for six years before moving to Russellville with her sisters Aya and Lily in 2014.  It's a long winding trail of laughter and tears from her apartment on Russellville's second floor to those pathetic raw-board shelters provided her family by the government of the United States.  Her country.

Taka's two brothers and her late husband, Jimmy Mizole, served in the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.  During the course of the war, 18,000 Nisei soldiers fought in that proud company of warriors.

 The treasure Taka has brought to her life is daughter Marilyn Jane Sholian and Marilyn's husband, Jeff, who gave her granddaughter Katie and grandson Peter.  The gifts that keep on giving.