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ANCHORING CALIFORNIA
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"Richard wanted them to be raised Jewish," says Tokuda. "I respect his wish. I didn't grow up with organized religion demands, so I was open to what he wanted."
| "My selection of a marriage partner has to do with a bunch of things. A lot of it has to do with just the generation I was born into." |
Tokuda does want at least some aspects of her Japanese culture to be passed down through her daughters. For example, in naming them, she and Hall wrangled out an elaborate formula that would allow each daughter to carry essentials tokens of both sides of the family. 11-year-old Mikka, for example, has a Japanese first name and a Jewish middle name. "We put unbelievable amounts of thought into naming the girls," says Tokuda. "Jewish people have a tradition that you name a child after the last person that died or with a name that begins with the same letter. With Mikka she's a girl and her grandmother's name is Rose." Therefore, Mikka's middle name is Rose. Her 8-year-old sister Maggie has a first name that incorporates the letter M from the name of another relative on her father's side and a Japanese midle name.
"Bonodori was a real big deal for me when I was growing up," says Tokuda. "So in the Bay Area I found a church that had it and we would go to these rehearsals and the girls and I would put our kimono on in the summer and on the bonodori we would go down and dance. In the summer they would go to this program called Darumanugaku that was set up by a group of sansei like me who wanted their children to make sure they get culture. They would go to this program for five weeks." Tokuda admits that despite her year in Japan her Japanese isn't good enough to teach the language to her daughters.
Soon after her second daughter was born Tokuda's father passed away. The death came at a time when he had begun to acknowledge and respect his wife's individuality and talents as a creative writer. After a long hiatus from writing brought on by the demands of her marriage to a very strictly traditional Japanese American husband, Tama Tokuda, then in her sixties, had begun writing again, even winning an award from a Northwestern writer's group. "My dad was so excited. He was trying to get her to write more, write more. After he died, she was devastated and it took a long time to pick things up, but when she did, it was as if for the first time in her life she had her own life."
A year ago Tama, who had never acted in her life, played the lead role in a Northwest Asian Theater production of Philip Kan Gotanda's The Wash about a Japanese American woman who feels trapped in an oppressive marriage. "She was wonderful," says Tokuda of her 72-year-old mother's performance. "She was in another play last year. They asked that she be in another play this year in a lead role."
"I'm talking about a woman who went from a very traditional relationship to a very different one with herself," says Tokuda. "She wrote a whole article about what it's like to have that happen." Despite the physical distance that separates them, Tokuda remains very close to her mother and is admiring of her evolution from housewife to award-winning artist. Tokuda refuses, however, to allow any connection between her mother's experience with her father and her own choice of husbands.
"My selection of a marriage partner has to do with a bunch of things," she says. "A lot of it has to do with just the generation I was born into."
The first thing Tokuda cites about Hall is his character. She ties that intimately with his commitment to what she describes as sixties values like community service, the peace movement and the free speech movement.
"I think both of us are definitely products of the 60s." The 60s come up a lot in my conversation with Tokuda. It soon becomes apparent that she ascribes most of our society's positive values to 60s activism. It is equally clear that she ascribes to Richard all the same positive values.
"The thing I find the most wonderful about him — not the only thing, his character's the main thing — is his real commitment to making this a better world. I sound so corny, I hate to even hear myself say it, but in his case, I think it's really true. He really means it. He's a very interesting man and he just gets more interesting all the time. He travels a lot and he reads a lot. He's a student of the world."
Soon after Tokuda was promoted in late 1980 to become the lead anchor for KPIX's 6 and 11 p.m. news broadcasts, Hall left to become executive producer of a highly-rated 10 o'clock news program at KTVU, an independent statin. "I never felt like Wendy and I were competing because our shows weren't aired on the same time slots," says Hall. He left KTVU in 1987 to become an independent producer of local broadcasts of satellite broadcasts of major events.
At around the time the Bay Area was captivated by the plight of a humpbacked whale that had strayed into the Bay and gotten itself trapped in the Sacramento River. The media named him Humphrey. For weeks reports of Humphrey's progress was a regular part of Tokuda's news broadcasts. She hit on the idea of turning Humphrey's story into a children's book. At Hall's suggestion they contacted a local Japanese children's book publisher. Tokuda did most of the work in writing the book.
"She's very details-oriented," says Hall. "I'm big-picture." Humphrey the Humpback Whale was published in 1987 and became a children's best-seller. This encouraged the couple to write a second book called Shiro in Love about a male dog who becomes famous throughout Japan when he swims to a neighboring island for the sake of a female dog. Published in 1989, the book shows a distinctive flair for language and a happy knack for shaping a subject into a children's story. According to Hall, credit for Shiro can be more evenly apportioned. PAGE 6
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