THOSE WHO HAVE NOT YET set foot inside the new 60,000 square-foot Wing Luke Asian Museum might be wondering, "What is Japanese American inside it?" To find out, I wandered in there 40 minutes before closing on the Sunday afternoon of its May 31 opening weekend. Spying the teethy smile of Sharon Sobie-Seymour among the volunteers dying to be asked something, I asked her to point me to some quick first-visit JA high points. Sharon directed me to the back room featuring the wonderful old stage backdrop from the Nippon-kan Theater, and to an upstairs room where a small camp exhibit resides.

Gosho Drugs.

For those who have been living in caves this past month (and who hasn't, given the weather), the cherished circa-1909 scrim, thought by many to have been destroyed, has lovingly been restored! Admiring it with my childlike Japanese reading ability, which on paper places me in the second grade of primary school, but is actually the equivalent of Tokyo kindergarteners, I sounded out "risuku" from a central panel. But what could risuku possibly mean?

Fortunately, I happened to be standing next to World War II military-intelligence veteran Tak Matsui, who gently pointed out that the horizontally splayed period hiragana [the womens' script of "The Tale of Genji"] are read "backwards"-right to left, as "kusuri" [medicine]. He then read me the leading smaller text as "Gosho," which made the meaning clear. This is an advertisement for the old drugstore that my Yamaguchi grandfather mentions in his WWII correspondence.

Another eye-catching panel features a frog, with the bold characters for "ju sen"-literally ten cents-prominent. This is an ad for the Higo Ten-Cents store, today operating with the same wooden furniture I remember from childhood as Kobo at Higo.

Higo Ten-Cents Store.

The scrim additionally features an ad for Sagamiya, the old Japanese confectionery run by Issei Kinzo Asaba, father of bunka [embroidery] instructor Yoshi Mamiya. When I was a kid, Sagamiya used to display the largest matsutake mushrooms found in a community-wide competition in their front window. I remember coming in second place one year. Kindly Asaba-san, figuring I wouldn't be interested in receiving the usual runner-up prize of a gallon of Kikkoman shoyu (purchased from my family's store), gave me a box of See's Chocolates instead. So while the shops advertised in the scrim might seem to be ancient history, several of those old family shops persisted into Sansei time, and a few continue to the present. Other shops are featured in the scrim but I will leave them, and the camp display, for the reader to ponder firsthand.

As a Sansei, I find it cool to see our history-our story-in a real museum likely to be featured in many a school field trip from now. At the same time, the limited space available for displaying things JA in a museum of this size reiterates how we must continue developing other community venues, notably the Japanese Community and Cultural Center, and the Nisei Veterans' Hall, as complementary places for teaching local JA history.

But isn't the vet's hall done, you ask? Well, yes, they have a nice building now. But as was pointed out by Dale Watanabe at the recent showing of the film, "Only the Brave," to really make the building achieve its potential, they really could use a parking lot…

Sagamiya.

More broadly, standing beside the scrim, it, Mr. Matsui, and I represented three generations, across which history has shown that information well known to the first gets lost owing to the difficulty of passing down information twice. The classic example of this is the early fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding tradition. As shipwrights abruptly stopped building sea-going vessels, the skills that had fed their families for generations fell through the fingers of grandsons.

The three-generation quandary in part explains why the sailing of the world's oceans would be accomplished by countries other than China. It explains why today I am writing this in the language of one such upstart, instead of in the Chinese that girds the scrim, the Wing Luke Museum, and the International District encircling the museum. The quandary similarly explains why present-day Seattle Chinese and Japanese especially-the two oldest Asian immigrant groups-need a museum like the Wing Luke. It will help us carry on with improved understanding of our origins as Asian Americans.

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