David Yamaguchi is the executive director of the Japan America Society of the State of Washington. He was previously editor at the North American Post (NAP) from 2020 to 2023, steering the 122 year old Japanese American Newspaper through the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Yamaguchi has had a dynamic career, from being a pioneering dendrochronologist who helped solve a centuries old geological mystery that spanned from the Pacific Northwest to his ancestral land of Japan (and helped standardize earthquake codes in Washington), to being the International Examiner’s very own South Seattle distributor. His love for writing is the common thread weaving throughout his career, as well as a commitment to his community, family, and curiosity.
International Examiner: How has your transition been from Editor of The North American Post (NAP), to the Executive Director of the Japan America Society of the State of Washington?
David Yamaguchi: I am learning! Everyone says that learning is a lifelong process. This is my first time being in a role of directing something. Over the last nine months now, I’ve developed a new appreciation for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. You never know how they run behind the scenes until you’re in the position of running one yourself: being the person who makes sure that all the bills are paid, employees get paid. Learning to run a nonprofit is a challenge in itself. This job, (Elaine Ko has told me) is more leading from the front. It’s part of my job to go out and meet people, introduce speakers from the podium, as well as do the administration that it takes to keep the organization afloat.
IE: What have you been excited about in your new role, and what do you miss about working in the CID?
DY: Part of this new job is being bilingual. I was a Japanese Studies minor in college, and for my first career, I was in forestry. I spent a lot of time driving around in the forest. So in my car is where I polished up my rusty college Japanese and got it to the point where I could work with it, later, in Japan, for two years.
This job is the closest I can think of to being a diplomat, but not being in the foreign service. I’m interacting with Japanese visitors a lot, with the consulate, and with the Japanese businesses that are established here. I’m interacting with Japanese immigrants and with Japan, rather than with other Asian Americans. Changing jobs is gaining something and losing something. Certainly I miss working at the NAP. In this position I don’t interact with Asian Americans as much anymore; it’s much more on the US – Japan interface.
I miss having my finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the ID. Especially because we put a fairly complete calendar in most issues at the NAP. We were constantly just on top of it.
IE: What does the Chinatown International District mean to you? What are your favorite memories of the neighborhood?
DY: I’m Sansei, which means third generation. My grandparents came from Japan. My dad, grandpa, and uncle had a shop where Purple Dot Cafe is. Our family shop was there from my grandpa’s time up through the 80s (it’s hard to say exactly when the shop closed, because at some point my dad closed the shop, but he was still doing business out of our home).
My siblings and I grew up in the International District, because we were there every Saturday for Japanese school. Dad would drive down to the ID, open up the shop, and then run us up the hill to the Japanese school, which is today’s JCCCW [Japanese Cultural & Community Center of Washington]. We were always kind of in and out of the shop, especially my brother and I. We were kind of like street urchins. All the shopkeepers knew who we were, and so we would commonly be reading comic books at the two barber shops.
IE: You were featured in National Geographic and the New Yorker with your research of ghost forests, which created a more comprehensive geological history of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, leading to solving the mystery of the last big earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. You also co-authored the book, The orphan tsunami of 1700, which explores this mystery. Can you explain your little-known history as a Dendrochronologist (tree ring scientist)?
DY: The start of all of this was a program at Cleveland high school that I was involved in. It was called the Youth Conservation Corps. As high school students, we got to work and spend the summer working at Mt. Rainier. That experience changed my life.
I started forestry graduate school at the UW shortly after Mount St. Helens went off. There, I met a lot of geologists. I had started to figure out that the trees living around the volcano had recorded all of these past eruptions in their tree rings. I could determine when those trees died by matching their ring with variation patterns against those of living trees. When a tree is alive, it records the climate and by how wide each ring grows. And if you can find old trees to match that pattern, then you can tell when those trees were alive and when they were killed.
After getting out of UW, they hired me to help them work out Mount St. Helens eruption history. At that time, a geologist came to UW to give a seminar on the new evidence for the Pacific Northwest being susceptible to great earthquakes: magnitude eight or nine. He put up a slide showing buried trees, and I said, ‘Oh, I can help you, too.’
That work across the forestry and geology boundary is something we continued across the next 20 years. And so over time we helped prove that huge earthquakes do happen here. That set the building standards; we were able to revise the Washington State building codes that happened in 2004. Everything is much sturdier now. All around the ID where they’re retrofitting old buildings you see those big metal cross beams? That reflects a present day understanding of what the earthquake hazards are that we’re facing here. I was just really glad that I could participate in one big project that made a difference.
IE: You helped operate a community paper as editor and a freelancer for The North American Post for many years. Why do you think papers like The North American Post and the International Examiner are vital to our communities?
DY: When I was on the staff of the NAP we ran a number of stories where we interviewed older people in the community and told their stories. And these stories are not of any interest to probably the mainstream reader of the Seattle Times, for example, but to students of the Seattle International District and to students of the Seattle Japanese American community, they’re fascinating. There’s tons of interesting stories, and I felt like I was at the tail end of capturing a lot of those.
I’m very grateful for the International Examiner and I wish it a long life. It may be the path forward where individual immigrant groups stop having their own newspaper and start contributing to a common Asian American newspaper. I look forward to continuing to read every issue.
This year’s Community Voice Awards benefit dinner will be at Ding Feng Restaurant on Sept. 27, 2024 at 6 p.m. Tickets can be purchased online: givebutter.com/fkO6ZI
