1. Meet Teru

My great-grandmother Teru Koyama (née: Ohashi 小橋), born March 8, 1898, in Kashiwazaki (柏崎市), just south of Niigata City, arrived in San Francisco, California, sometime in 1916. We do not know much about her in these early years, but by at least 1925 (likely earlier), she had relocated to Seattle to study English writing and Christian theology at Seattle Pacific College, where she met and fell in love with Kei, marrying him in 1927, shortly before the birth of her first child, William.

The circumstances surrounding her emigration from Japan are not completely understood, but her Christianity likely played a role. In her letters to Kei, she often writes of feeling persecuted as a Christian in Japan. In 1916, this was quite possible given the relatively rural setting of Northern Honshu, but it is worth noting that her emigration predates the most extreme Imperial censorship and regulation of Christianity that came with World War II.

There exists a cruel irony in the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans that I believe is exemplified by my great-grandmother Teru. Not one case of espionage was ever found among those forced into the camps, and among a large number of Japanese Americans, there existed a Christian zeal that informed an absolute loyalty to the United States, despite the unjust incarceration.

Teru was not perfect, yet she proves herself to be almost everything one could ask for in a mother, able to weep openly with her daughters for the pain of injustice while simultaneously encouraging her children to look to Christ for answers to what seemed like unanswerable questions. Teru represents a bedrock of passionate faith, and this kept both herself and her children afloat through some of the most difficult periods of their lives.