The International Examiner is proud to honor Stanley Shikuma with a Community Voice Award (CVA) for a Lifetime Achievement Award. Please join us in-person, on October 23, 2025, to celebrate him and other community leaders.
I recently sat down to chat with lifelong activist Stanley Shikuma at Fresh Flours in North Beacon Hill. He checked his phone as we grabbed a table outside. There’s an app called ADS-B Exchange that lists crowd-sourced information on flights, he explained. Shikuma uses this information in the volunteer work the Japanese American-led organization Tsuru for Solidarity does with La Resistencia NW, where they track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flights—with a group of viewers that watch and count the people boarding, or arriving from, ICE flights at Boeing Field.
There were other apps around a while ago that had more detailed information, but they have since been removed from app stores. The one they use now is the best app remaining, and even then, the exact flight details have to be parsed together.
“The good thing is that they log everything that’s in the air, and the bad thing is that they log everything that’s in the air, so you have to filter through that stuff,” Shikuma said.
From a special viewing room at Boeing Field, volunteers count how many people, chained by their hands and feet, are transported. According to Shikuma, in 2024 there was one deportation flight per week. Since Trump came into office, these flights have roughly tripled. In July 2025, there were 12 flights.
It’s been estimated that 72% of people detained by ICE have no criminal history, but once detained, people can be transported and imprisoned for an indefinite period of time, with no guarantee of any legal recourse. For descendants of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during WW2, like Shikuma, the similarities are shockingly close.
Shikuma is a sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. His grandparents, parents, and older brother were incarcerated during WW2 under Executive Order 9066. The EO set a precedent for rounding up and incarcerating groups of American citizens “without charge.”
“You’re Japanese, therefore you’re suspicious; you’re a potential threat to national security,” Shikuma said, of the Japanese incarceration. “My brother was four years old at the time. He got taken away. My grandma … was very, very nearsided. She didn’t speak much English at all. She was [considered] a national security threat, so she had to get taken away.”
Of the similarities between then and now, Shikuma said, “I just see hundreds of people every month [on local ICE flights], and then this is replicated dozens of times among dozens of other cities. We’re talking about thousands of people. This is the largest transport program of people in chains since the end of the slave trade.”
Shikuma said the lasting damage of these ICE deportations is twofold, with “people in unmarked cars in civilian clothes with masks covering their face, no badges, no ID. They don’t answer any questions. They grab someone, put cuffs on them and shove them in the back of a van.”
“In any other country you would assume that this is a drug cartel or organized crime. Abductions. Human traffickers,” he said. “Now in the U.S., if anyone sees that, they say, ‘Oh, that must be ICE. That must be the government.’”
The secondary danger, according to Shikuma, is, “the normalization of abnormal things. Illegal things. Unconstitutional things.”
As we talked, planes passed overhead every few minutes, and I wondered if any of those were ICE flights.
Shikuma has been involved with Tsuru for Solidarity from its inception in 2019. The organization started when Japanese American and Japanese Latin American WW2 concentration camp survivors and their descendents made a pilgrimage to the former site of Crystal City internment camp in South Texas. That was where children were imprisoned and separated from their families during the war. Participants couldn’t ignore the fact that on the same highway, 40 miles east, hundreds of Central American children and mothers from seeking asylum were being incarcerated or separated from one another.
Obama and Biden pledged to deport “dangerous people” Shikuma said, but under Trump, it escalated to incarcerating people with “no known criminal history, who’ve been here for decades. They’re separating families. That’s kind of what triggered Tsuru for Solidarity.”
The family separations spurred Tsuru for Solidarity’s first protest at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. Since then, the organization has operated as a grassroots campaign of Japanese Americans and allied groups that work to end detention centers, prisons, and illegal deportations motivated by racist policies.
“People generally kind of get it about the Japanese American incarceration during WW2, that it was wrong, that we were denied civil and constitutional rights and human rights,” Shikuma said. “So when we can make the connections between what is happening today to what happened to us in ‘41 and ‘42, it helps people rethink things.”
Shikuma’s activism began when he was a student at Stanford University and later at UC Berkeley, where he got involved with the Asian Student Union and went on his first Tule Lake pilgrimage in 1979. When he moved to Seattle in 1981, he got his nursing degree and quickly became involved in the Japanese American Citizens League, as well as taiko group Seattle Kokon Taiko. He worked as a nurse for decades before recently retiring.
Shikuma currently serves on the Leadership Council of Tsuru for Solidarity and works with several other community organizations like the Seattle Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, Tule Lake Pilgrimage, From Hiroshima to Hope, NVC Foundation, and the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance.
“Activism took a front seat for him when he retired,” said Lika Seigel, Artistic Director of Seattle Kokon Taiko. “I admire him … he’s one of those human beings that you are grateful to meet in your life. He’s one in a million, really.”
Taiko (Japanese for “drum”) is a cultural and performance art that dates back thousands of years. The deep, resonant sounds from wooden, barrel-like drums were used to indicate village boundaries or call in people from the fields during a crisis. Shikuma has been playing taiko since 1981, composing and performing original works, writing extensively about taiko’s history, and serving as Artistic Director for Seattle Kokon Taiko in the ‘90s. Shikuma is now also a board member of Seattle Kokon Taiko. Seigel has collaborated with Shikuma for about 25 years.
“Stan is synonymous with taiko, not only in the Pacific Northwest, but I think globally,” Siegel said. “Everybody knows Stan. Everybody loves Stan. He is quiet and patient and a wealth of knowledge. If you want to know anything about taiko, just ask Stan.”
Pairing taiko with activism came naturally to Shikuma. For example, during the pandemic lockdown, Tsuru for Solidarity led a series of car rallies at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. Shikuma brought his taiko drum in the trunk of his car, and when volunteers made a circle around the detention center, Shikuma started drumming from the back of his car.
“The sound of taiko drums permeates prison walls and can be heard by people inside,” Seigel said. “They know they’re not alone. They know that people are right there fighting for them.”
Shikuma’s patience and steadfastness left an impression on artist and activist Erin Shigaki when the Wing Luke Museum was vandalized in 2023. Shikuma was there with Tsuru for Solidarity and other community leaders for an after-hours event when a man took a sledgehammer to the windows facing Canton Alley. At the sound of crashing glass, Shikuma and others ran outside to see what was going on.
“I have this image of [Stan] … he was just standing there with his feet on the ground, firmly planted in front of the guy, trying to have a conversation with him too … he was there, and we could have confidence that he was one of the leaders on the ground. He is so principled and kind,” Shigaki said. “He’s kind of a marvel.”
Throughout his life, Shikuma’s activism has steadily expanded to meet injustice wherever it happens.
“He never forgets the way that we’re all linked,” Shigaki said. “Even though we still have our own healing to do [within the Japanese American community] … there’s bigger things afoot when families and children are being separated and jailed in the same places that we were jailed in the same places where Native Americans were jailed using the same techniques.”
When it comes to connecting the dots between unjust detentions and imprisonment today, or during WW2, Shikuma’s solidarity transcends time.
During Japanese American incarceration during WW2, “pretty much everybody supported openly, or just kind of stood by,” said Shikuma. “It could have made a difference if there was a big outcry, and certainly would have made us feel less targeted if there were some people who said, ‘We stand by you. We know this isn’t right. Maybe we can’t stop it, but we want you to know we’re on your side.’”
If he could speak directly to people in the Northwest Detention Center, Shikuma said, “I would want them to know that there are people on the outside who know that they’re there, who care, who are working to try to end the detention and the deportations. That we don’t believe our government is right with what they’re doing, and we’re trying to stop it.”
“Humanity is more important than laws,” he continued. “Laws do not equal justice.”
