Episode Notes
In this episode, we sit down with Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, the executive director of Densho, an organization devoted to documenting the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II. She previously led the Nikkei Place Foundation and held key roles at the San Diego History Center and the California Center for the Arts. Naomi is passionate about addressing the challenges faced by community history organizations, especially concerning the legacy of Japanese American WWII incarceration, and has shared her insights in various publications, including an upcoming book on ethnic diversity and national identity in history education.
Join us as Naomi explores themes of heritage, resilience, and storytelling. She emphasizes the importance of making history relevant for younger generations, and she highlights the challenges of preserving oral histories, the role of technology in accessibility, and the power of art in conveying complex emotions and histories.
Episode Transcript
Darren Isom:
Welcome to Dreaming in Color, where we sit down with social change leaders of color to learn how their unique life experiences have prepared them to lead and drive the impact we all seek. I'm your host, Darren Isom, and this season I'm lucky to have a few of my Bridgespan colleagues dropping in to join me as guest hosts. Together we'll be celebrating the genius of leaders who live into the work every day. This is Dreaming in Color.
I'm excited to introduce Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Its mission is preserving history to educate, collaborate, and inspire action correctly. Naomi holds a BFA in metal design from the University of Washington and a master's degree in education from Harvard. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia, where for her thesis she focused on the intergenerational transfer of memory in Japanese communities in the United States and Canada. Previously, Naomi served as executive director of the Nikkei Place Foundation in British Columbia and held leadership roles at the San Diego History Center and the California Center for the Arts. She's also the board president of the Museum Education Roundtable in Washington DC. Naomi's work addresses the challenges faced by community history organizations, particularly concerning the legacy of Japanese American World War II incarceration. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to the forthcoming book Negotiating Ethnic Diversity and National Identity in History Education. Join me in giving a warm welcome to the remarkable Naomi Ostwald Kawamura.
Naomi, great to have you here today. So excited about this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for a bit. We start with my passing the mic to you and you offering us an invocation. So what do you have for us?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah, I actually was thinking about what I would say. So instead of reading a quote or anything like that, I was just going to mention that I was in Japan recently on this Japanese American leadership delegation, and then we were able to receive this sort of private tour of the Meiji Jingu Shrine, which is a Shinto shrine in the middle of Tokyo, by a Shinto priest. And I'm not religious at all, but he was sort of talking about how Shintoism is kind of about recognizing spirits around us and sort of the divine in nature, but also recognizing it with one another. And so I was thinking through the conversation that we would see the divine in one another and the wonder in one another as my invocation to start our conversation.
Darren Isom:
That's a beautiful invocation and hopefully we'll see divine within each other, divine within ourselves as well, and we are definitely surrounded by divine. So thank you for that wonderful start. I know that you or I understand you grew up in California as a child of Japanese immigrants. Would love to give you the space to tell a little bit about your upbringing, about your family history, and more importantly how stories and memories passed down from your parents have played a role in connecting you to your Japanese heritage.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
I am the middle child. I'm the daughter of two Japanese immigrants and they came from sort of the post-war immigration. There was a lot of kind of Japanese who came over to kind of help build some Japanese sort of industries in North America. And so my dad worked for a company called Kyocera where he got essentially his first job out of school and he's never really had to work anywhere else and has since retired. My mom was someone that grew up in Kyushu, which is the southern island of Japan, and she wanted to see the world, so they both were very kind of curious about seeing things outside of the country they were raised in and they haven't gone back, so they've lived abroad longer than they ever lived in Japan, and they were both people that are really interested in the arts and in seeing things and seeing new things.
And so we did lots of road trips. Have an older sister Yumi who's an artist, and then a younger brother Kentaro, who is a music producer, and very creative kind of family. Really sort of enjoyed kind of finding museums and seeing different cities and things. So really, people that kind of made me feel very much like a global citizen. And we spent a lot of time going to Japan when I was a kid, but not so much as I got a little bit older. And so their main thing was that they never really hid their Japanese-ness so that I had a relationship with my Japanese heritage. They also recognized they were raising their children as Americans and that they weren't sort of forcing either on us. They were sort of allowing us to just grow up being what we are.
So we're sort of both Japanese heritage and American. And so they weren't thinking we'd go back to Japan as a family or anything like that ever. They really never made me feel like I had to be more Japanese or I had to mask it or anything like that. So I feel like I had a good sense of self around my heritage with the kind of parents that I had. And then I have a close relationship with my siblings and having siblings that I really like made it feel always safe, that you never needed to make new friends in a new situation. We also moved around quite a bit when I was a kid, and I always had them and so they're still two of my very favorite people, so I feel very lucky. So really tight-knit kind of family that often like to do things together, travel together and just a nice group of people that I still enjoy spending time with.
Darren Isom:
I love this piece of your parents sharing their background in many ways, but not necessarily trying to lead the witness, not necessarily trying to push you into a different direction.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes.
Darren Isom:
And I've always found it interesting as well, particularly, I mean growing up in New Orleans, and I tell the story all the time, I was first generation integration. Right. And so I was living a very different reality. I know now that my parents and my grandparents were really, I wouldn't say struggling, but they were trying to figure out how much of my past to share so I have some anchors without necessarily offering me anchors that would not allow me to live into the world that I was going into, because I was living to a different world. And as you think about your background, I mean understand your father and grandfather are actual survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, but how did they share that? How did that story come up in a way that gives you some framing from a historical perspective but also gave you the space to recognize you're a different person living a different reality?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah, so similar to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during the second World War, my dad didn't really talk about it for a while and I didn't really know about it. I didn't really connect. I connected that my family roots were in Hiroshima, but not that the atomic bomb story was my story. When I was probably middle school age, we were in Japan, we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and it kind of more clicked for me that that was something that my dad and my grandfather survived. And then hearing more about how they survived and how much luck and chance and things that happened that would allow them to survive even though they were quite close to the epicenter. That it's more about kind of being raised by someone who survived something, by being raised by people that really could see kind of the darkness and beauty in things, like always kind of finding light even in darkness. And I appreciate that.
My parents can be very goofy, funny, silly people. My mom grew up kind of more blue collar, very tough, very working class, very kind of, she's one of the toughest people I know. So she didn't survive anything like an A-Bomb, but also similarly kind of resilient, like “you made it.” And so then you're sort of the child of people that made it, that sort of survive something and that because of that you could take that and think about how that might mean or map onto your own life or not. And so for me, my dad very much always was kind of like, everybody has the same hours in a day. And so you could take someone that you really respect and be like you had the same amount of hours in the day that you did, or also life just goes super fast. And so you can make do with what you want with that day that you have.
And so I think as an adult and professionally, I really wanted to contribute and kind of leave the world a bit better after I leave it. And then also when I meet people or interact with it, just thinking like, that might be the only time I interact with you, really. So why make it a terrible interaction? Why not make it something okay or good or decent or nice or even could be neutral, but not something that I'm going to add suffering to this other person just because it's kind of the way of like, you can make do with what you have in the moment and that it'll go quickly. So that sort of sense of resiliency, but also sort of good humor, having a sense of humor with it. My dad can be very silly and funny for someone that experienced so much trauma in his life, and I love that. I kind of appreciate that because I see that in other people as well, that sort of lightness and darkness.
Darren Isom:
And that lightness is actually quite beautiful because it's a way of processing and also a way of kind of shaking your fist at the past as well. So it's a way of showing resilience.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes. Exactly. And to live.
Darren Isom:
Exactly. Exactly. Now you're an expert at helping us feel connected to history. It's one of your many superpowers, which is no easy feat given the endless distractions of things competing for our attention in the modern world. And to add to that, I joke that Americans, we have this quest for the new, right? We love telling new stories about ourselves, and as a result, sometimes that forces us to divorce ourselves from the past. What is the secret to making history feel relevant to young people in the present?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
I think I sometimes look for stories that resonate for people in the present because I think being human hasn't changed that much. The humans are humans with human needs and humans sort of selfish actions or silly things or dumb, I'm hungry and I acted this way. Very, very sort of relatable. And so then when you find stories about people in the past that you could just, you yourself could imagine very much, that like, oh, if I was, I would be that guy. I could imagine that sort of similar sort of sentiment or that some instance of something terrible happens to a young child and their anger around it, and I could relate to it. And so there's these sort of ways that I'm looking for… and I think that's what we do at Densho, is we try to seek a lot of the diverse stories of the experience so that people who aren't of Japanese descent can find a connection to the incarceration story and understand why it was so wrong.
And that why as Americans, it was such a sort of travesty and a failure of the US government, is because they were just regular people who went to school, had a business, dated and got married and all those things. That's very, very just a human story. And so for me, I always just kind of go back and forth in thinking, we can't change that we are born into that historical context in the era in which we were born into, but the human story is quite, kind of universal. It kind of crosses time and things. And so it's just some of the circumstances and the time that you're born in is just different. And I always sort of think of myself as part of just a larger journey in the story of knowing who your ancestors are and kind of being, not just that you're just this little blip in time, but that you actually are part of a larger story of either your family or your community or what have you, that you are kind of contributing and participating to a particular chapter. And that's how you play into this present and pastime horizon.
Darren Isom:
And I love, I was going to jump to a different question, but I love that point that you added at the end, this idea that our stories are told over multiple generations. Right? And it's almost like you're trying to understand how you're feeding that story, feeding that narrative.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah.
Darren Isom:
That also requires you in some ways to kind of understand what happened before you and also predict in some ways what's coming after you. Right? And I would love to just spend a little time talking from a memory perspective, from a storytelling perspective. We hear the phrase very often, history is told by the victors, and I would love to hear, in your worldview, is that how you think about history and the role of history and the importance of history and the importance of storytelling? And who has the right to the narrative? Is it the victims, is it the victors, the combination of the two? Is it another way of thinking about it or processing it?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah, I think the more, as you dig into kind of memory research and things, you realize it's very faulty, even our own memories of things, very faulty, and we kind of recreate memories in our mind and it actually isn't exactly how it happened. And even the experience of this podcast, yours will be so different than mine, even though we are sharing in this time together, it will be very, very different. And so I think of when I work with young people, it's more about saying it's just different versions. And so we're kind of trying to collect as many versions of that past as possible so that we get a bit closer to what we might think is true. But that the ambition of it is to kind of have some type of shared objective of seeking an understanding of what happened then, but not invalidating how you might feel about the podcast.
That's fine. That's your experience versus mine. That's also mine. Both can be true. The way we've experienced it could have been very different, but both kind of have elements of truth, but that memory is very faulty. And so when we think about how then history in the past, the writing of it is taught to kids so that they learn that it's curated, it's narrated. You have to understand who wrote it for what purpose, what are their aims for kind of telling this story. You have to know all of that rather than just sort of taking in one story as the story. There is never one story of the past. There's a million different ones, but some type of shared or agreement or mutual understanding that gets close enough that we can both kind of agree that that feels about right. And that's why I also enjoyed sort of talking about why historians enjoy primary sources and things that rather provide other evidence and then oral histories provide color to events and that there's a lot of kind of information that historians use to get closer to the event.
And that's really what I'm kind of trying to get through with history education and say, but for a long time we just shared a lot of the victors and we kind of just sort of told this story of progress. And only told this sort of one particular narrow story of a particular kind of person who was born into a particular kind of a class or background or identities. And so this is why some communities feel the desire to tell their stories because they haven't been told across time. And so that's sort of the work that I sort of swim in, is more that history from below.
Darren Isom:
Yes. Yes. And that's so many, I mean that's a great space to swim for sure. And for me, I'm thinking, you'd mentioned the story of how the stories change or how you tell the facts differently, like recount the stories differently. And I may have shared with you before that I lived in New York during September 11, and I remember the events of the day very clearly to me. But over time I realized I was telling the story that was very clear to me that the timing didn't quite make sense. I had a story that was my story, that were my facts, but the timing in my story didn't quite make sense, if that makes sense at all. And it wasn't a question, like it was clearly I was there, I lived through it.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah.
Darren Isom:
It wasn't that I was making up past events, but things were happening in an order that couldn't have possibly happened given the timing of the day and the event. And it reminds me so much of this Ted Chiang quote about storytelling, and he talks about, before culture adopts the use of writing, when knowledge is transmitted through oral means, history revised itself very often. And that's not necessarily intentional, but is inevitable because bards and griots have adapted the material to the audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. And it's just a beautiful quote that I hold onto all the time, and it goes on to say, "The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. But anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently. For them their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself."
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes.
Darren Isom:
"So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable, their histories do what they need to do." I love that quote so much because I think about, even within my Black American experience, the point of history was to give you an understanding of yourself and to recount a past and for you to learn a lesson through that story. And sometimes the pieces of that story had to change, but the most important part was the lesson being learned. But that is just inspiration for you. I would love to get your thoughts on, how do you think about holding onto these oral histories that are passed down by our ancestors? How do we maintain the integrity of their memories and make sure they do not get written or rewritten or lost in translation over the course of decades? How do we hold onto that in a way that's powerful and meaningful even though there may be some distortions if you will, and I put those in quotes with love, right? How do you hold onto that, those nuances?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah. I think the work with Densho that we do is to record the oral histories of the survivors and as many as the founding executive director, Tom Ikeda, could, because many of them are passing on. And we feel like with technology, you can kind of watch a story from the survivor's voice, in their voice as they recount the stories and that we will try to steward that as technology kind of changes. But I really encourage people all the time to be like, can you just, I don't know, shoot a video with your mom while you're talking to her or kind of record the thing that you want to remember through them, like through their mouth, like the story of their survival of an event or a wonderful day or something like that that you want to remember from their voice. I feel like that's one way that makes us… I think in modern times we could be a bit lazier with having to not take it as in the same way that I think a lot of other oral traditions had to really be more careful.
Even in the Hiroshima museum, they have people who follow a Hibakusha survivor for a couple of years to learn their story so they can really tell it in a kind of honest way. And so I think of myself, when I think about being a second-generation person to the atomic bomb, to be a good steward of that memory and not to kind of map my own thinking around it, but just saying, well, my dad this or my dad remembers that his dad this, and that my responsibility would be try to kind of protect and honor that person. But so much of it also is care and love because to me that is part of my family story and I want my daughter to know it. And so I want to also feel a sense of responsibility towards the memory because I think it matters to us as a family.
It matters to me and future generations that we had this event that we survived, and we have done this with it. We've kind of been able to build this other life following it. So that's the story of my family, right, that I think is important. And so a lot of the people that I work with at Densho also really take their jobs with so much respect and regard to the survivors.
And so that's hard to teach or train. There's like kind of character qualities of people that really understand and kind of have this real deep respect for elders or that there's something that can be learned with intergenerational relationships and from elders that we don't correct them while they're talking. It is for them, the opportunity for them to speak from their heart and from their memory of something. And it's not for us to say, well, that's factually incorrect, that there's no possible way that 11:30 AM you could have... That's not what we're there for. So your quote kind of maps onto how we approach the work. It matters because the incarceration history is so important to Japanese-American kind of identity as a community. And so a lot of the historical activity has helped to build community ties with people.
Darren Isom:
Being a good steward of a memory. I'm really going to hold onto that. I think that's a really beautiful way to think about our obligation to those who came before. I think it's also an important way for us to, in many ways, appreciate that they were telling those stories in many ways to share what they saw, but also those stories were meant to offer us some degree of understanding of the world and also some degree of healing. It’s their way of giving us something to hold onto, a way to heal. And you have to in some ways respect that. You have to appreciate that. You have to accept that form of love.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes.
Darren Isom:
Right.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes.
Darren Isom:
And so I definitely remember growing up, and my grandfather would tell far-fetched stories that, he was a wonderful storyteller though, so I loved all the far-fetched stories. And he would say something that was just completely out there. It couldn't... And the way you corrected that is by not correcting it, by literally repeating it and making sure he understood that you got it down. Right? So it's like he did what? I'll write that down. I got it. I will not forget that detail, that clearly fictional detail in the story I will not forget because it is there for a reason, and I want to respect that and honor that.
You mentioned this idea of technology and being able to record those stories. Technology and elders notoriously don't mix. At this point, I'll throw myself into the elder category because technology can be your best friend or your worst enemy on any given day. And there are definitely times when I find myself completely challenged by technology. I would love to hear a little bit more about, how does Densho leverage technology preserve the memories passed down by our Japanese elders, but also how do you leverage technology in a way to make sure the story's authentic, not as a replacement for a person, but as a conduit for a story?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah. We have found, I think during the pandemic, Densho's staff kind of played around with trying to kind of do Zoom recordings, but then it's just so different to conduct an oral history with the person in the same room as you. I have done oral histories and done interviews for research outside of Densho, and I think that part of the oral history and kind of work feels like you're building this relationship with somebody, that you're being an active listener, but that you also are making it so that someone can share with you sometimes their most difficult moment or their most difficult memory and that you can show them that you're going to not treat that memory with disrespect, that you're going to hold that space for them. And I feel like that's a little bit more difficult to do over the screen. Sometimes it works, it depends on the person, but I definitely see that we still are conducting kind of oral histories with elders, but flying to see them, like still trying to conduct it.
And so in terms of technology, how we think of it is that it enables us to then have people from anywhere access that history of their great-grandparent or grandparent if you can't make it to a museum on the West Coast or something, that you can be in Des Moines, Iowa, and stream it from home. And that was kind of the thinking that I think Tom Ikeda and the founder, Scott Oki as well, was thinking that this would enable access, that the history won't be kind of locked up in archives, that you wouldn't be able to kind of feel like you had some sort of ownership around and you can make available to you whenever you want.
And now we have all of these kind of images and oral histories that you can download anywhere. And so as people are passing on, their families might take a clip from the oral history for the memorial service or celebration of life or a photograph we have from our digital repository. And so that technology enables something that I think still is something that we would've done decades ago with photographs at the celebration of life or a snippet of a story. But now you can kind of show the video clip of the person, and we feel that that's a part of the technology piece that we can enable, is the access to history.
Darren Isom:
You mentioned earlier this idea, and the quote that I wrote down to use again, as society of being a steward of a memory and a steward of a person. How do you strike the balance between honoring and respecting the past and honoring that memory while also serving as the steward of the future, right, and how you recount that story? And I ask this specifically even as I found myself, I was using a quote the other day, and I took out the word “negro” and replaced it with “Black” because it just would've been a distraction otherwise. Right? It wouldn't have been as the same meaning at the point in the time. But it just made me think about how in some ways, going back to how you have to edit the past if you will, to make sure it's relevant in the future. So I would love to get your thoughts.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Your example would've been like a footnote. So you would use the quote and then just sort of say in present time, these terms are sort of no longer… or that can be construed as negative or that we don't use this terminology in present day. And so we often with a lot of our work then, because the initial Densho work was the oral histories, they then realized we have to contextualize some of these things. We had to place it into, like what are they talking about or what is that about? And that maybe a slight kind of correction sort of, could happen more in a scholarly kind of manner. Just saying that, well, we haven't found evidence that the fish your grandpa caught was actually 10-foot-long. We haven't seen that yet. The narrator recounts the story of fishing, and yes, there was fishing at that particular lake, that is true, but we haven't seen evidence that 10-foot-long salmon lived there or something like that.
Darren Isom:
Grandpa said there was a 10-foot-long salmon Naomi. We're not going to correct him on that one.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
So I'm like, that's fine. We're just going to mention we have not found evidence of the 10-foot-long fish. And so that's how we, Densho's kind of evolved to also have this encyclopedia. So the Densho Encyclopedia. It goes along with our digital repository so that then they kind of can point to one another. So you could be reading about Tulelake or something, you could point to a couple oral histories. You might hear something and a narrator mention something. And maybe Brian Niiya, who's our primary kind of historian that works with us. He will definitely have his two cents, but in a kind respectful manner. But just that we haven't maybe been able to find evidence of X.
Darren Isom:
And going back to this comment you made about the conversations happening in person always being just a lot more sincere. I think that I find this as well. I noticed now we've all trained ourselves at being really good at Zoom because the world required us to be good at Zoom. We've set the limit to the moment that we were in. But there's a whole art to listening in person and talking in person. And I joke that this podcast or share this podcast was in many ways meant to mimic my grandmother's kitchen table…
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Oh.
Darren Isom:
Kitchen table conversations, and the world would be solved at that kitchen table. You can imagine. It was everything from financial issues, to political issues, to relationship issues, to coaching kids on going to colleges that you knew nothing about. And there was always a gentle way that my grandmother would touch someone's shoulder, touch someone's leg, when they were presenting something very sensitive or very dark. Right? Or a way that a laugh would punctuate something that was very dark as a way of like reminding folks that we were still alive and loving and happy. Right? How do you translate that? How do you make sure that is caught in the conversation and how do you create that level of calm and comfort in the conversation so that that comes through?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
So far we have, I think through the oral historians we work with, it's thinking about how we're going to kind of train up a new sort of generation of community historians that might be able to do the work in the way that… Tom Ikeda was one of the central oral historians for Densho's, like the chunk of that early work. And he's incredibly, just such a compassionate kind person. And he kind of hired people that he brought on that kind of continued in a similar sort of character where they really do the same thing.
Tom actually received the Order of the Rising Sun, I think from the Japanese government. And we were at this decoration ceremony in Seattle recently. And the staff kind of just listening to elders talking, even if you can't quite hear what they're saying or anything. Just the patience through which they are… it's more about, not about the content necessarily, but just that I'm here, I'm looking at you, I care, and the fact that you're speaking, I am paying attention only to that, and that kind of training, like I'm really trying to kind of think of how we can articulate that when we're sort of training new community oral historians, is it's not just about getting to that interview, but also kind of reading people, having a bit of emotional intelligence that also the content that we work with, it's a heavy topics.
And so it warrants a level of respect and thoughtfulness that the content sort of asks for. And so that I think is really important, to have people that recognize that it's not just sort of this interview, but it's also this relationship that you're building with somebody. And that you want to do it with care.
Darren Isom:
You mentioned that your siblings are artists, if you will. I understand you have a background in art as well.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yes.
Darren Isom:
You're earning your master's in arts education from Harvard in addition to working with students in art. What are some of the most compelling ways you've seen art be used to tell a story and pass down history? Before you jump in, I want to frame it as well, I've shared this story before, that 50 years ago within the black community, all of our leaders came from the church. They were all reverend something or another. All the people that were encouraging us to see a more beautiful world, live in some more beautiful world, helping to create a more beautiful world. And you look up 50 years later, and now all of our social justice leaders come from the arts world. Those are the people who are encouraged to give us a new world view, who understand the divinity within and the beauty that surrounds us. And so with my understanding of the important role that artists play in moving us to a new world and giving us inspiration and hope and all those things, how do you see art playing into the work that you do?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
My undergraduate degree, I got a bachelor of fine arts in metal design, so it's like metal smithing. Very unusual trajectory. But what I loved about, why I was gravitated to that program is that you really have to pay attention. So there's fire, there is heavy metals, it's soldering and welding and things like that are happening. It's loud in a metal shop. There's hammering, there's kind of all this sort of sensory activity that happens. And so when you're working, you really are focused in this sort of very more meditative kind of fashion where you're sort of just doing that. And it's sort of like a form of meditation where it's a good exercise for your brain to go back and forth to being always… I think when you work in leadership, right, that you're always, what's a three-year plan, the five-year, what's a 10-year plan kind of thing?
And that's sort of what everybody wants from you, but then you need to also be able to live and be in the moment, breathe, smell the air, and be human. You are in this moment just this one time, and it's fleeting. And so for me it's that ability that I also see in artists that have survived conflict or trauma and things where they then create these beautiful works that are so moving, and I feel like that ability for them to... My grandfather was an artist, and I was looking at some of the works he did, and I know that he had seen horrible, terrible things because he was an adult when he survived the bombing and was still able to draw all these beautiful images of nature, of the rivers in Hiroshima or the outside and things.
And when I see them now, he's passed away, he passed away when I was in grade school. But I think of him as somebody that can switch back to this, that same thing, that light and dark thing that I think that arts is able to kind of connect to both light and dark at the same moment. It's one of the few things that we have as humans that I think are able to do those two things at the same time. It kind of can kind of make you feel moved. So it could be beautiful literature, it could be beautiful music. It could be those two light and dark kind of parts of ourselves. And to me, the arts is the way that humans are able to express that, that we aren't able to do in other ways.
Darren Isom:
And I wonder how much there's a natural quest as a human being to find beauty and how artists can help us find that beauty even in the ugliest of times.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
I hope so. I would hope so. Or I hope more than the majority of us, I hope, aspire towards that.
Darren Isom:
We're living through a period, Naomi. I don't even know how to express the moment we're living through. And I very often know when I start meetings, I acknowledge that we lived through a presidency that was, some years ago, that was disruptive is the most charitable way I can talk about those years, right? Followed by a COVID crisis, followed by a whole civil rights movement. And then we're living in a state of chaos. It can feel very chaotic.
The longer I live, the more I realize how optimistic I actually am. I never thought myself as an optimist, but I truly believe that cynicism is a form of obedience. And I'm not one to be obedient, so I go with this optimism. But as we think about the story of the moment that we're in now and the story that we're capturing in the moment and the story that we want to tell as we think about the now as a projection of the future, are there any insights, any thoughts, any things you want to tell us, console us, give us something to work with, to think about the moment that we're in now and how it's building towards something else?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
It's more actually that I very much agree with you, that it takes work to be happy. It takes work to find beauty, and it takes work to find things that are funny or delightful or bring joy, but that you have to work towards those things. And for me, I try to, in my professional life, work towards building a beautiful world. But in my personal life, I also really actively work hard so that I wake up not being sort of taken down too hard by the fact that I do agree, it's a tough time we exist in, and you really could fall into despair, but I also don't want to kind of pretend that everything's going to be fine. And it's pretty and it's so easy. It's not, it's going to take work. And so then we need to kind of be able to shore up whatever it is within you that builds your spirit up.
So for me, my spirit is built up by beautiful art and beautiful music, time with my family, and things like that that kind of allow me to do hard work and then have the balance. Always like, you have to be also kind of taking care of yourself as an entity that wants to do good work out in the world. That means you also need to have time in your day that you have a moment of joy, otherwise you won't be able to do this work. And so it's again, kind of the going back and forth between, for many of us who do work of tough kind of content or challenging kind of situations or with communities really in need, it is tough to not fall into despair. The need black hole is huge. Right?
So it's easy to just be like, throw my hands up and say, well, what's the point? We can't do this. And so I do try to kind of invest in institutions that I have faith in, that I want to kind of not give up on schools. I don't want to give up on libraries. I don't want to give up on parks. I want to use them. And so why don't we kind of put that energy towards the things that we want to build, the world that we want to live in, like that we need to participate in it rather than kind of retreat.
Darren Isom:
Yes. And that's our role here, right? I remind myself all the time that on days when I'm feeling dark or feeling low, that I'm descended from enslaved people who managed to find joy, managed to find love, managed to find all these beautiful things in clearly more horrible and darker contexts, so I can pull through, I can make this happen. Right. I have it in me. The season of Dreaming in Color, were highlighting mentors who have paved the way for us as leaders, and truly impacted our lives for the better. Would love to give you the space to call out a mentor you've had who has been really impactful in your life and career.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
I'm walking in my PhD graduation ceremony this spring, and my PhD supervisor, Peter Satius, he passed away before I finished my program. He was a wonderful mentor, a wonderful history educator, a good human being. But then I also was thinking about in the moment now, so since I've lost him, about mentors and mentees, and I've had great people in my life that have been both, but more recently I have my friends Emily Potter Injai and Braden Painter are these great educators who I met while we were on the board of the Museum Education Roundtable. We do this thing called peer mentoring. So we have a calendar Zoom meeting where we wrestle with stuff that's going on with us professionally.
And so we kind of work it out together as peer mentors, where we also kind of, you can be the mentee in that moment and bring your sort of challenge. Or you could be the mentor and offer sort of counsel and advice when one of the others has it. So I just want to give kind of a shout-out to those two, of that space that we've created for each other that's so supportive, that we can be both a mentor and a mentee in the times that we've calendared for each other as dedicated time just to do that for each other.
Darren Isom:
Yep. That sounds like a great space. You're very lucky to have it. Another question, what does freedom look like to you?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
I'm married to a political scientist, so this could mean many things, that immediately mind goes to political things, right? So freedom from something or freedom to something. Those are two things that we could think of. But when I just think about the people that I have met in my life and people just in the world right now who are suffering, that freedom would be that you could be born into being and that you can't control the context which you're born into or the identities you're born into, et cetera, but that there is no added suffering, unnecessary suffering, all of the isms and all the things that don't need to exist that adds and causes suffering to you, that those are not there, and that we can continue to just live, participate, work, love, all of those things, but not have this unneeded suffering in your life, to me would be freedom.
Darren Isom:
It's beautiful. All right. And then the final question is more of a playful one. Do you have a walkout on stage or a theme song that you would like for us to use?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
If I was playing baseball, it would be like, I'm a time capsule of 90s hip hop, so I love anything from that era.
Darren Isom:
Say it louder, Naomi. That was a good era. That was a good era. That was a good era.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
It was the best era, but then that dates me. But I have a form of ADHD, and so sometimes music actually inside of me is chaos. I am constantly going just a 100 miles an hour, but I come off kind of as a calm person in my life. But inside, it's crazy. So when I listen to music, I actually like listening to things that calm my nervous system. And so the song I could listen to on repeat always is a Japanese DJ, producer named Nujabes, sort of contemporary of like Dilla, that sort of lo-fi, hip hop kind of era. He passed away. And so he has a song called “A Day by Atmosphere Supreme” that is this beautiful song that I could listen to on repeat. And so those are the either, so you could play Gang Starr or you could play Nujabes.
Darren Isom:
You got to give us a hip hop… you have to give us an example from the first grouping. What you got?
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Oh, yeah, I've been listening to the late 90s Gang Starr right now. It's like “Work,” like that's great.
Darren Isom:
I love it.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah, but that era, like Tribe and Dilla and the…
Darren Isom:
Oh yeah, that's good stuff. That's good stuff. That was quality stuff.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
The best era.
Darren Isom:
No, that was definitely the best era. The kids don't even know. The kids don't even know.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
They have no idea.
Darren Isom:
No idea.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
My daughter though, my 10-year-old now, she can recognize Method Man or she could… I'm like, parental win.
Darren Isom:
Mom, you have success. You have won the game fully. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been a beautiful conversation. I hope when you think back to this conversation, you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Naomi Ostwald Kawamura:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Darren Isom:
My first job out of grad school in Paris some many years ago was in the private sector, working in finance with a group that landed me just blocks away from the World Trade Center. And on the morning of September 11, I sat paralyzed with shock and disbelief as the first World Trade Center tower fell, covering me and my Wall Street colleagues with debris as we gazed on. Coffees in tow from what just moments before it felt like a safe three blocks away. Despite the true horrors I witnessed that day and there were many, it's the memory of that clear blue September 11 sky that haunts me the most. A true reminder that we live in a world where calm and chaos often live and play on the same canvas.
I remember the chaos of that day and the weeks that followed. It was such a heavy time to live in New York. Some days when I'm feeling low, I think about how relentlessly dark those days felt and how we also lovingly looked after each other as our parents had taught us to do, and how we all pull through and found happiness again. Somewhere in the story of September 11 is a song of hope and healing, one worth repeating. After witnessing firsthand the horrors of that day, I had the most Gen X epiphany possible. If dying at work were inevitable as it appeared at the time, I should probably enjoy what I did for a living. A few months later, I left Wall Street and moved over to the social sector, where I'd first trained and where I've been ever since.
I'm so thankful for the career I've been able to build in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds, and the brilliant, thoughtful, and tenacious folks I've been able to call friends and colleagues in building it. Mr. Rogers once shared that as a boy, when he would see scary things in the news, his mother would comfort him by telling him to look for the helpers. You'll always find people who are helping. My conversation with Naomi reminded me of that beautiful community of talented folks who have committed their professional careers to being the helpers and how lucky I am to be in their company.
There's a beautiful passage from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower that I first read sitting quarantined in my home here in California some months early into the Great Pause. I was so moved by the passage that I remember closing the book and not returning to it for a few days. "The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind, and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees. A beautiful reminder that even in our most painful stories, there is something beautiful worth seeing and celebrating. For our stories offer us a path through the pain to the water that awaits beyond the trees."
This season, we're putting some music with the magic and have collected the theme songs from all of our guests and collaborators to create a Spotify playlist for our listeners to enjoy. Find it on Spotify under “Dreaming in Color: The Playlist.” Thanks for listening to Dreaming in Color. A special shout out to all the folks who make this magic happen. From StudioPod Media, our wonderful producer, Denise Savas, audio engineer Teresa Buchanan and graphic designer Diana Jimenez. And from Reel Works, our video production team, Jenny Loo and Stephen Czaja. A huge shout-out to our ever brilliant Bridgespan production team, Cora Daniels, Christian Celeste Tate, Christina Pistorius, Ryan Wenzel, and this season's guest hosts, Jasmine Reliford, Nithin Iyengar, and Angela Maldonado. And of course, our fabulous creative director, Ami Diane. What a squad you all. Be sure to rate, subscribe, and review wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next time.
