This week the third graders watched a short film called Exclusion: The Presidio’s Role in World War II Japanese American Incarceration that tells the story of both Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s signing of the executive order from the Presidio that evacuated and interned people of Japanese descent from California, Oregon, Washington, and the territory that is now Alaska and the Japanese-American soldier-linguists who were trained in the Japanese language and helped the U.S. win the war from an abandoned army hangar on Crissy Field. Students had a lot of impassioned ideas to share about what they would have done had they been alive during that time.
In the kitchen, we learned how to make temaki, a sushi hand roll that doesn’t require a sushi mat. Everyone had a choice of a variety of fun fillings: furikake (a Japanese rice seasoning), pickled ginger, carrot, Japanese cucumber (grown by the Japanese-American-owned Hikari Farms), oshinko (pickled daikon radish), braised tofu from Oakland-based Hodo Foods, green onion, sunflower sprouts, and, of course, sushi rice. We talked about how important it is to see others as human beings in addition to learning about and celebrating cultures that are new or different.
