S3E2 The Architect of Community: Irene Hirano Inouye

"Irene made all of us believe that museums could be more than things that looked towards yesterday. They could be places that are central to today and tomorrow."

To celebrate Women’s History Month, we are dedicating this episode to a true titan of the Japanese American community: the late Irene Hirano Inouye. As the longtime CEO of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) and founder of the U.S.-Japan Council, Irene’s vision turned a "mess" of an old temple building into an international landmark and a permanent home for our stories.

In this deep dive, we explore Irene’s journey from a service-driven childhood in Gardena to leading national foundations like Ford and Kresge. We also get personal, discussing the "mundane" objects that connect us to our history.

Subscribe & Leave a Comment: If you were curated in a museum today, what mundane object would represent your heritage? Let us know in the comments!

Links & Resources:

·        Learn more about JANM:Japanese American National Museum

·        The US-Japan Council:Explore Irene’s Global Legacy

CREDITS

The music was created by Jalen Blank

Written by Koji Steven Sakai

Hosts: Michelle Malazaki and Koji Steven Sakai

Edited by Koji Steven Sakai

Produced by Koji Steven Sakai in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum

Transcript

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As we think today about what we're facing in the in the country and the significance of the museum and in points of time throughout since its inception, um, whether it was nine 11, whenever that, the museum was in a place that was important and that the staff and the board were willing to speak up and speak out. And so, as I think the museum looks to the future now, it's even more critical. And if the vision of having a museum like this had not come to be, then you wonder, I mean, there would be a huge void. And the founders and all of the people that that contributed, I think, should be proud that we all created a place that helps to convene, helps to allow other people to tell their stories, helps to bring people together. But I think, most importantly, helps to remind us Is that democracy is fragile. We have to really work at it. That what happened during World War Two to Japanese Americans could happen again. What happened in the war between Japan and the US could happen again. What happens when two distinct cultures become one lived experience? Welcome back to Japanese America. I'm Michelle. And I'm Koji. This month, we're celebrating Women's History Month by honoring the icons who built the foundations we stand on today. There is perhaps no name more foundational to the modern Japanese American story than the late Irene Hirano Inouye. Today's episode features a rare long form interview with Irene. It was originally recorded for one of JANM's annual dinners, where the community came together to honor her 20 years of transformative leadership. I'm especially honored to co-host this one because as many of our longtime listeners know, I spent a significant part of my career working under Irene at the museum. I saw firsthand how she turned big dreams into literal concrete and glass. But before we dive into her professional journey, Michelle, let's do our legacy question. I love these. Go for it. If you were curated in a museum today, what is one mundane object from your life that would tell the most about your heritage? I have too many mundane objects, so I don't know which one. But I have this, um, fudebaco. Kamakura Bori fudebaco, um, that once belonged to my grandpa. And that was handed down to my mom, and now she gave it to me. So I have this box, and it's beautiful. And I keep all my fountain pens in there. That's my mundane special object. What about you? I have so many things that I want that I would I would mention. Um, let me say this one. Uh, when my dad, he was in the camps, he got his $20,000 and the official apology. Um, those two things mean a lot to me. So he. Out of the $20,000 he bought, the. He put a down, he put a down payment on the home that he that he moved into with my mom, but also, um, he bought me this Dodger starter jacket that I still wear today when I walk my dog. So that always reminds me of kind of something that my dad went through, and that was really meaningful. Oh, and also, I remember that the letter that we got, the apology letter. I remember wondering where it went. And so one summer day, I spent an entire day during in high school just looking through every piece of file and my mom and dad's garage looking for that document. And, uh, if you knew my mom and dad's garage, you would know that it was madness. There's just stuff everywhere. So it did take me all day, but I did find it. So those are the objects, I would say. So do you keep that letter in a frame? Yeah, it's it's right above my desk. So I look at it every day, and it's something that it just reminds me that, you know, we gotta stay diligent and make sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. All right, Michelle, should we get into it? Yes. Irene's story begins in Gardena, California, in a home that was the definition of extended family. Her father was the eldest of eight, and her mother was the post-war immigrant from Japan. Growing up, she was a leader, yearbook editor, cheerleader, and founder of service clubs. But like many of us, her family's wartime history was kept in the shadows until she was an adult. Uh, when the war broke out, my father was already in the military. He was supposed to be actually a discharged on December 9th. Two days later. Um. And so he remained. And he served in the military in the military intelligence service. My grandfather and my aunts and uncles went to Rohwer, Arkansas. So they were incarcerated there after going to Santa Anita first. So I didn't know, like a lot of sanseis, very much about, um, what happened during World War two. And it wasn't until I was in college that I began to learn more about what happened. Irene went to USC during the height of the civil rights movement, which steered her toward the nonprofit sector. After a stint in D.C., she realized she didn't want a 9 to 5 government job. She wanted a passion project. She found the passion at the clinic, serving women of color in LA. It was there she realized that Asian American women needed their own networks to find their voices. As I looked around and as I talked to other Asian Americans, there weren't people in leadership positions. So when I would go to Washington for meetings or I would be involved at that time with health care or with women's health health care, and you'd look around and there weren't other others that looked like us. I think the other is, um, a recognition that at that time, the women's movement didn't speak to a lot of the same issues that some of us cared about. So certainly it was important to look at women's rights, but often it was from an individual perspective. And I think for a lot of us growing up and a lot of our values were the importance of family, the importance of having men involved in the issues that we cared about. And so bringing together Asian Pacific American women, um, became a an opportunity to, um, extend the conversations that was happening in the women's movement to engage Asian American women and to really create a new network. By the mid 80s. Irene was happily settled in health care, but the community had other plans. Founders like Fred Hirasuna and Bruce Kagey began knocking at her door about a museum project. She actually said no to them. For months, she didn't see herself leaving her health care coalitions, but their persistence and the state of the building itself eventually hooked her. So when I first took a tour of the former Nishi Honganji building after I started and it was, um, uh, there was, uh, it it was certainly a hollow place, but, uh, it was a mess. And so I thought to myself, oh my gosh, why didn't I take this tour before I started? I don't think I would have taken this job. This is going to be really a hard challenge. And so it needed a lot of work. It had been vacant, but then you began to hear the stories that people would tell. Oh, they got married there. Oh, there. Um, you know, they went to a funeral there. They remember going to the temple there. They went to see films there. And so it was imagining. So what could this be? And in some ways, it was a perfect place. It was a historic building. It reflected the dreams of the Issei who came. It was a gathering place for people that came to Little Tokyo and that was very much about what the museum was about. So as the more we talked about it, as hard as it was and all the restoration work that had to be done, it did seem like Bruce Koji and others who felt this was an appropriate place. Bob Volk was another one who was really active and who said, this is the perfect place for the museum to be. It did. It was it did seem to be the right fit. It was a lot of work, took a lot of people and a lot more money than I think we had originally thought, but it became the perfect home. Koji, you weren't there for those early years, but want to share any anecdotes from your time there with Irene? Yeah, I remember when I first met Irene, I didn't know who she was, obviously because I was so low on the totem pole, but. But when I found out who she was, she reminded me a lot of my mother in that she was she was such a strong woman. And, um, I remember just being afraid of her a lot, and I just didn't know, you know, like, I just knew that she was very smart and she had everything together, and she always seemed to know what she was doing. And I just remember thinking that I didn't know any of those things. And so I thought I was just very wowed by her. And as I got to know her, I found out that she was a very good leader, and she really got the museum over that hump of the first, you know, decade of of being a museum. Did you ever meet Irene? No, I never got to meet her. But, I mean, I wish I did. She passed away a few several years ago. Yeah, she passed away a few years ago. Yeah. Irene was a master fundraiser. She understood that for the museum to succeed, it had to belong to everyone. Not just the big donors, but the children in a courtyard, too. She also broke records by raising nearly $10 million in Japan. She explains how she managed to balance the local and national campaigns simultaneously. I should also mention that her raising money in Japan for Japanese American project is actually pretty big because at the time that she was running the museum, there wasn't as much connections between Japanese Americans and Japanese people. And so she really had to go out there and really broker and talk and network and really get them to want to give money. And also the for a buy in within the Japanese American community itself. Yeah. I think like donating money to museum is something that's not commonly happening in Japan. I really don't know. But that's how I feel. And especially giving money to Japanese American, somewhat a traitor, you know. Also within the community itself. I mean, the Nisei who were the ones giving the money for the museum, they were very much in the mindset that Japanese people were different than Japanese Americans. And so they didn't want any kind of connection to Japanese people. And so for her to go out and go raise money for a museum about basically about the Nisei was, you know, something that probably was a little bit controversial. I imagine I wasn't around, but I imagine it was pretty controversial. Um, I'll give you guys a story. When I first started programming at the museum, I remember getting blowback when I would do project or programs around Japanese culture that wasn't Japanese American. And I remember, uh, older folks, mostly Nisei, were kind of were not happy about it because they wanted us to focus more on Japanese, American and not really Japanese cultural stuff. And it all obviously stems from World War Two, when they had to choose between being American and Japanese and all of them, obviously, if they're around here, they were still focused on being American and not Japanese. And so it was a divide. That divide is much less now. Um, I think there's a lot more connections and, and, uh, things between both communities than it was back then. Well, that explains because I was working for a Japanese notebook company and I try to sell the Japanese notebooks at the museum, bookstore, the gift shop. And they said, no, we only carry Japanese, American stuff. Japanese, Japanese. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah, I remember that was very confusing for me because my mom was from Japan and I remember not understanding the differences between the two. And so I remember it wasn't until I started working there for a while that I really started to understand, you know, the differences between the two and how, you know, they're both they're not better or worse, but they're just different because of kind of everything that happened. And, um. Fred Machiyama for Sochi and many others were part of the campaign. And we decided in many respects that we had to do both. We had to get the large gifts because it was that was going to be the way we get to the goal in part. But we also knew that the building and the museum had to belong to everybody. Everybody that whose story would be there, but more importantly, who who believed it was important to have an institution like this. So we did the campaigns simultaneous and the volunteers, um, worked hard. They raised money. We did the children's courtyard. So we did it in a rather unconventional way. It was hard, um, and took a lot of of volunteers and a lot of people who believed, uh, that it could happen, but in a funny way, each one drove the other. So as a major gift would come in, it would come in part because they heard, you know, the volunteers were raising money, or the volunteers would get inspired when a donor made a significant gift. So it took believing that everybody saw this as their institution. That was a big part of that. And of course, with the second campaign, we turned to Japan. And fortunately, Akio Morita, who is a good friend of sig Um Kagawa, agreed to chair a campaign in Japan, and George Aratani helped to lead that effort. Uh, and I think most people couldn't believe that we could raise money in Japan. Um, we eventually raised close to $10 million, which was unheard of in those days. And the relationship between, um, between a Japanese Americans and a Japan, of course, had not been as close as many other ethnic groups to their home countries. Uh, and so it was, I think, a remarkable, um, coming together of both the Japanese corporate sector, many, um, of the government officials in Japan. Irene's leadership was truly tested during national crisis. The museum's opening in 1992 coincided with the LA uprising. Instead of retreating, she used the opening as a moment for racial reflection. Yeah. Did you know that, by the way, that when the when the museum opened, it was that weekend? It was supposed to be the weekend. It was the weekend of the riots. Isn't that crazy? That's so crazy. That weekend. It's madness. Um, Yeah. Then after nine 11, she reached out to the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan, long before it was standard practice for museums to do so. And so when September 11th happened, um, I picked up the phone and I called and I said, are you okay? Because we saw what was going on. Um, and, uh, they, um, really appreciated that. We reached out and, and we knew and I remember George Takei was, um, then the chair. We knew that we had to that we had to this, that the stories were linked. It was very much a part of what happens when, um, an event occurs and somebody gets blamed. And so we, um, did issue a statement, and we worked closely with the people forming the Arab American National Museum. Our board went to Dearborn to meet their board and to provide encouragement and support and to to learn what what was happening, what they were going through and what their experience was. Irene eventually moved to DC after marrying Senator Daniel Inouye, a joke describing it as marrying whole state. She used her new platform to launch the US-Japan Council and the Tomodachi initiative. She was in Japan during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which she says was a catalyst for her final major project. And that was, of course, then the, um, March 11th and the Great East Japan earthquake. Um, what grew out of that was um, then, um, our then ambassador, John Roos, asked the US-Japan Council if we would work with the US embassy in Tokyo to create, um, something that would support the area that was affected by the earthquake and the tsunami and nuclear disaster. Um, at the time right after the earthquake occurred was Operation Tomodachi, which was the US military supporting the Japan Self-Defense forces in the immediate relief that was required in the region, and we decided that taking the name Tomodachi, which means friend and what Ambassador Roos was hearing from people in the region, was we can rebuild the structures and we can rebuild our towns, but we need, um, help in investing in our young people. We want to be sure they have hope and that they can, um, have opportunities. Um, during the aftermath. So we created the Otomo Danchi initiative together, and it was based on providing, uh, exchanges, um, and enabling young people to experience the United States because it contributed to what we knew was also a major problem in, um, that existed, which was that there was a significant decline in the number of Japanese students studying in the United States and many of the Japanese business people and the Japanese diplomats, um, that had come to the United States were were the leaders of the relationship between our two countries. So with the decline and the number of Japanese students that had almost declined in half, from 40,000 to less than 20,000, we knew that this was a problem that was going to have a long term impact. So we made the decision to begin to create opportunities for young Japanese, initially from the region that was affected, to come to the US for short term exchanges, and also for young Americans to be able to go to Japan and to visit the region that was affected. And that's how the Tomodachi initiative began. It continues on today. We've had over 5000 people participated in exchanges. We've had another close to 40,000 people that have been involved in homestays and helping to support the various programs and raise significant dollars, mainly from the corporate sector, both the American and Japanese companies. Uh, and it has become an important way for not only exchange, but more from the standpoint of developing the next generation of leadership, who we hope will continue on the US-Japan relationship. Irene's final message in this interview is one of vigilance. She ends with a powerful call for the next generation to step up and get involved in public service. I think it is a time when everybody needs to do something. I think, you know, so Dan was, um, someone that believes strongly in public service. A lot of us grew up knowing that it was important that we get involved in, in a variety of organizations and a variety of work that we did. And so one of the things that I hope that, you know, whether people are older or younger is this is a time when we all need to step up and and to, um, do whatever we can. For some people, it's giving money, for other people it's giving time, for others, it's being involved in organizations. I just think this is such a critical time, and I hope that we'll find more people that will go into public service, whether it's, um, running for office, whether it's, um, working in the government, whether it's running for local, um, various seats on the local level. I just hope that we're going to find many more people who are willing to do that. Before we close, Michelle, I have one more fun question. Who's the favorite woman in your life? My favorite woman in my life is me. No. It's my grandma. She's she's she was just so funny. And she's not trying to be funny. She was just funny how she moves, how she does things. One time we were walking to the store and then it rained so hard and she got me a leaf from Sotoyomo from this nearby field, and we used it as an umbrella to come home. Wait, how big was this leaf? Oh, it was pretty big. It was like, I don't know, two feet wide. Wow. Yeah. Is she still alive? No, she's. She was 98 when she passed away. I'm old. What about you, Koji? Um. Can I say my dog? No. I'm just kidding. My dog is my favorite woman. No. Um, I think it's, you know, my my wife and my mom are probably my two favorite women. Um, oddly enough, and maybe not. Oddly enough, they're both very similar in that they're both incredibly strong and their strengths are different, obviously in different things. But I think that they both are people who I respect highly. You know, my mom for moving out of Japan and you know, with, you know, she comes from she came from a pretty wealthy family. She left Japan when they wanted her to do something she didn't want to do. And she left. And she came to America when, you know, it was probably pretty hard to be Japanese. And she married my dad and had a great life. And my my wife. Who who kind of. I mean, she didn't leave Japan or anything, but she she's really made her own path and I really respect that. And, you know, I always say that I couldn't have made my career as a writer or producer without her because when I had no money and I had no prospects, she was the one that definitely supported me as I worked at the museum. So I think both both of those people are people that, uh, that I that are probably my favorite women in my life, other than my dog who would probably be top dog. I love her a lot. No, I don't think leaving Japan makes you stronger. I left Japan because I didn't want to be close to my parents. I think what made her stronger, though, or what I respect out of it was the I mean, she went to France first. Oh, nice. And then she went to the United States. But but I think it's just, you know, that I'm pretty sure she didn't know anything about either of those places. And I don't know what kind of education she had before she left. Probably not great, but that she, you know, she was a hustler and she was a survivor. And she was able to she was, you know, she did things that I'm not sure I would do. I'm not sure I would move to another country and, and, you know, like I respect you as well, Michelle, because you did that as well. I mean, I, you know, if I went to a country where I didn't speak the language, I would be in a lot of trouble. I would have a hard time. I would have a hard time surviving, I suppose. Supposedly had six years of English classes in middle school and high school. And that doesn't mean I could speak English, but. But you could understand pretty well, couldn't you, with a six year? I mean, could you understand a little bit? Well, I didn't answer the phone for that. I didn't answer the phone for the first half year because I was so afraid to answer the phone, and I finally answered the phone. And it was the L.A. times like trying to get you subscribed. I'm like, yes, yes, yes. And then I felt that he was asking for me to sign up. I said no, and then I hung up. That's pretty funny. That's a great story. Irene Hirano Inouye showed us that a museum isn't just a place for all things. It's a place for new conversations and permanent legacies. Thanks for joining us for this special tribute. Next month, we're heading back to Little Tokyo for something a bit more colorful. We're celebrating the history and the beauty of the cherry blossoms in Little Tokyo. You won't want to miss that one. Until then, stay warm and keep exploring. Bye.