Comic Collection Celebrates Japanese American Experience in Seattle | Entertainment

By all accounts, Sam Shigeru Goto lived the life of a typical Seattleite. A second-generation Japanese American, he and his wife, Dee, raised two girls in their Mercer Island home and commuted to the Medical Dental Building downtown every weekday to work as a dental technician, a job he did diligently for 55 years. Sam Goto died on December 31, 2017 at the age of 84 and by all accounts lived a happy life.

But Goto had a secret side that wasn’t visible on his daily commute: He was an avid, lifelong cartoonist. In fact, he was almost always doodling, sketching, or writing down axioms and life tips. On an index card kept in an overstuffed box labeled “IDEAS,” he wrote the Helen Keller quote, “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” He scribbled a quote on a piece of paper on a bulletin board, which probably came from himself: “That’s just how children are.” Just live with it!!”

In the basement of his house, Goto sat at a drawing board and drew cute dogs, cats, members of his family and original cartoon characters in the style of the funny newspaper pages. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was a clear influence, with Snoopy cartoons carefully cut out and placed above his desk for inspiration.

Eventually, at the urging of his wife Dee, Sam created his own comic. Beginning in 2012, “Seattle Tomodachi” (Friend of Seattle) appeared weekly in the North American Post, a Japanese-American community newspaper published in the Chinatown International District since 1902. He pulled the strip all the way to the end, even while hooked, all the way to an oxygen tank.

This month, Seattle publisher Chin Music Press will publish “Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience,” a collection of Goto’s “Seattle Tomodachi” cartoons with extensive commentary from his daughter Kelly Goto, who compiled the book.

“I always wanted to put together a tribute to my father and his artwork and the philosophy he represented,” explains Kelly Goto. The book was originally intended “just for my family,” and she expected it would take a year or two to put everything together.

All of the material Kelly Goto needed to create the book was stored and archived in her childhood home, where she lives today. “My father documented everything,” she says. “He kept every receipt and every service for his ’65 Mustang. It’s just an insane amount of detail. … He was very organized.” As she began compiling the material, a bigger picture became clear.

“It ended up being four years of arduous work,” she laughs. The more Kelly Goto read her father’s cartoons about a fictional boy named Shigeru Tomo, the more she realized that “Seattle Tomodachi” was a composite story depicting the Japanese-American experience in Seattle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries documented.

“The daily lives of these Japanese immigrants have a deeper meaning,” she says. “There’s a deeper message that my father actually wanted to convey.”

The book begins with Shigeru’s birth and his early days as the first Nisei (second generation) Japanese American born in Seattle. The punchline of the book’s fourth strip contains Shigeru’s first word: while his expectant parents wait for him to say “Daddy” or “Mommy,” Shigeru blurts out “SHI-AH-TO-RU!”, the Japanese word for Seattle .

The film soon develops into its own gentle rhythms. As he slowly reaches school age, Shigeru Tomo goes on adventures with his adorable beagle, Inu. He adopts an alter ego, Samurai Shigeru, wields a toy sword and is fascinated by the samurai code.

Sam Goto used the Strip to hop through time and document important moments in Seattle’s history, such as the first steamboat arriving in the city in 1897 after the Klondike Gold Rush, and small but significant moments that shaped the lives of immigrants Men and women imprinted on Seattle.

These slices of life are mostly based on real moments in the lives of the Goto family or their friends. In one case, two young girls were chatting in Japanese on a Metro bus in Seattle when an older white woman snapped, “If you live here, you should speak English!” One of the girls asks the other, “How do we say?”baka‘(Idiot) in English?” In another strip set in Japanese-American incarceration during World War II, two young girls cut a small hole in the wall of their internment camp dormitories to pass notes back and forth. A mother discovers the hole and castigates her daughter: “You did this? You should never damage someone else’s property! Shame!”

In “Seattle Samurai,” Kelly Goto illuminates the strips with commentary and photos that explore the real-life inspirations of many of the strips. From family history to describing traditional Japanese New Year’s dishes to explaining the history of well-known businesses in the Chinatown International District like Uwajimaya and the Panama Hotel, her notes open up the world of “Seattle Tomodachi” to readers who aren’t exactly familiar with Seattle or the experience Japanese-American immigrant.

With all of these layers of meaning and art in dialogue, Seattle Samurai serves as a beautifully crafted collaboration between generations of a family, an important historical document, and a compelling biographical work.

On a personal level it is even more special. “My father grew up in Shinto Buddhism and learned about Christmas when he was maybe seven years old,” says Kelly Goto. “He was always a person who made things, so he carved presents for his whole family, wrapped them and put them under the stove because they didn’t have a tree.” When Christmas morning arrived, the family discovered that ” There were Christmas presents, so everyone got to open a present – ​​except him.”

It’s a bittersweet story, but one with a happy ending. “Seattle Samurai” is a daughter’s gift to her father – a love letter to a man who was full of restless creativity and exuberance for his community until the end.