Tama Tokuda

“My mom was a devoted mother and wife who helped my dad … run Tokuda Drugs and raised five kids – one of them disabled…. What was wonderful was watching her blossom into her own person in her 60s after my father died and all us kids grew up. She was a gifted writer, and she began to write again. She became involved in the community, speaking out about the internment, becoming a docent at the Wing Luke and an usher at the Northwest Asian American Theatre.” – Wendy Tokuda, daughter, “Tama Tokuda passes away at 93,” Northwest Asian Weekly, September 12, 2013

“As youngster, I really got to know some of the older performers, and they were like rock stars. You know [former state legislator] Kip Tokuda? His mother was one of the players. She was so good…. She did something called a kyo-ningyo that’s about a doll. And she played the part so wonderfully. It’s about a doll that comes to life. And then she lives and loves and everything. Then she has to revert back to a doll. She played that so wonderfully that no one else could play it because in order to play a doll, you have to make your face like it’s not a person’s face…. She was so good at that, and so beautiful too. No one else has been able to repeat that.” – May Sasaki

Tama Tokuda’s mother took her to her first performance at the Nippon Kan in Seattle’s Japantown (waypoint #17) when she was five years old. Dance lessons came soon after. She studied off and on for 15 years. Tokuda recalls, “I remember asking my mother why she had sacrificed so much to give me the lessons, and she replied, ‘It was the light of my life.’ Then I realized how much she must have missed the culture she had left behind and what a gift she had bestowed upon me.”

Tokuda was a University of Washington student when she was forcibly removed from Seattle in 1942 and incarcerated at the Minidoka concentration camp. In her later years, she used the craft of storytelling and theater to share deeply and powerfully about her incarceration experience.