I have fallen in love with the Tsuboi Family Home Movies
A newly released digital collection from the Oregon Historical Society has my heart
When I was writing Kitchen Ghost, I reached out to the Oregon Historical Society. I had read some of the letters that soldiers from Oregon who were stationed in the Philippines from 1898 to 1900 sent home, which they have in their collection. I knew they had a corresponding collection of soldiers’ photos. I was curious to see how the photos portrayed the Filipinos, knowing the soldiers’ perceptions of their humanity changed so much over those two years. (Please see Kitchen Ghost or Sean McEnroe’s exceptional Painting the Philippines with an American Brush for more details.) Because of COVID, I couldn’t enter the facility, but one of the librarians spent hours scanning representatives images that she compiled in pdfs to help me understand the vast scope of the collections. She did all this for free! I was floored. What an incredible public resource we have to explore our complex collective history.
What I learned is that most of the Oregon soldiers simply stopped taking photos of Filipinos once they became enemies. But the photos from when American and Filipino soldiers were fighting together against the Spanish portray the same curiosity as the letters from that period, and helped me see people who looked like my great grandparents. It was a tiny window into a past that I have yet to explore, but which is there for me in vivid depth if and when I’m ready.
This exchange with the Oregon Historical Society librarian coincided with something Luke Mogelson concisely described in his exceptional story for the New Yorker, In the Streets with Antifa:
On the weekend of Columbus Day, which Portland recognizes as Indigenous Peoples Day, protesters toppled a statue of Abraham Lincoln, shot through the windows of a restaurant owned by a Black veteran, and broke into the Oregon Historical Society, where they inexplicably stole a celebrated quilt commemorating African-American heritage, stitched by fifteen Black women in the nineteen-seventies. (Police found the quilt lying in the rain a few blocks away, slightly damaged.)
When I heard about the theft and immediate discarding of the quilt, I felt outraged. But this incident reminded me that I want to be more vocal in declaring the value of public institutions I love that can be hard to comprehend from the surface. I can imagine the mindset of these protestors who rightfully see Oregon history as filled with violence and dehumanization and then mistake the Historical Society as a hall of fame for white colonizers. The reality is that collecting historical artifacts does not sanctify them—it simply makes them available. (Enshrining them is a separate thing entirely.) We are richer as a society for preserving even our darkest moments. We can only interrogate them if they are available to grapple with. These images and artifacts don’t always reveal their value in the moment, but with the passage of time, new meanings become available.
But more than that, we are especially called upon right now to prioritize the histories of people who have been marginalized, including the everyday moments and objects of their lives.
As if to jump into this conversation in my head, a few weeks ago the Japanese American Museum of Oregon shared a newsletter with a link to a newly released digital feature from the Oregon Historical Society: The Tsuboi Family Home Movies. Stop reading and please click that link! What you will find is immediate access to fifteen reels of 16mm home movies taken from the late 1920s through 1960 by Tsuboi family members, donated by Annie Migaki and digitized by Matthew Cowan.1 The notes share that Masaichi and Teruo “operated ‘Tsuboi Brothers’ store, selling western-style clothing, suitcases, and jewelry for people coming from Japan” on west Burnside Street in what used to be Japantown.
The footage is gorgeous—deeply rich black and white images (although a few later movies are in color) intimately filmed. The first short movie I watched, “Annie and Robbie’s Ballet,” begins with a toddler beneath towering firs learning how to walk. The sweetness of this little person testing out the bounce of her knees made my heart melt. What did they mean by “ballet”?2 The beauty of watching someone learn to walk? Other than those steps, there is no dancing, but the film maker, I assume her father, cannot get enough of documenting her progress, and we watch as her shaky legs begin to confidently if jerkily march. The eyes shining from behind the camera capture the people in his life with incredible tenderness. This is a collage of sweet moments—a little boy, Cliff, being coaxed by his mother, Nobi, into kissing his little sister, unsuccessfully (1:23), the same little girl, Robbie, trying to walk in her mom’s shoes (2:50), eating dinner around the table together (4:13), panoramas of the Columbia River Gorge, their home treasure as well as mine (4:34), Nobi looking right into the camera, her mouth in a happy gape (5:31). There is something voyeuristic about seeing something so private, but also unbelievably heartwarming. Watch it! No excuses—it’s only 5 minutes and 38 seconds.
I wish we still had a culture of taking languorous home movies of our loved ones. I wish we could imagine the small moments, like a grandmother scooping ice cream into a cup for her grandson, as the whole thing, the real deal. I hate that 60 to 90 years after these movies were filmed we are still being called upon to declare the humanity of Asian Americans. But in the face of erasure and violent stereotyping, this home footage of a Japanese American family is powerful. I encourage you to spend time checking it out. There is so much here—about cowboy mythology, Japanese American connections to Japan, how people travelled and leisured, intergenerational affection, multigenerational households—it’s as deep as you want to go.
Filmmaker John Waters once said, “There’s no such thing as a bad home movie. These mini-underground opuses are revealing, scary, joyous, always flawed, filled with accidental art and shout out from attics and closets all over the world to be seen again.” If you want to learn more about the efforts to preserve the experiences of Asian Americans through home movies, visit Memories to Light, a project by the Center for Asian American Media. And for more on home movie preservation generally, check out the Center for Home Movies (h/t Oregon Historical Society).
Have you stumbled upon someone else’s private family ephemera that moved you? What did you learn? I’d love to hear!
While I am thinking of the power of film and my story about Amy Peterson is fresh, I wanted to share a video my friend Giselle Kennedy and I made almost a decade ago about Amy. I hope you enjoy witnessing her unbelievable matsutake eye in action! I am enjoying the experience of making new work that is contiguous with old work. It turns out my heart is still in the same place, right there in my chest, even as I grow and change.
I learned after I first posted this that these reels were donated to the Oregon Historical Society by Annie Migaki, one of my collaborators on a contemporary Japanese American community cookbook. Her maiden name is Tsuboi. She identified the children in the movies for me as her brother Cliff and sister Robbie (Roberta).
Annie later told me that this reel was probably mislabeled on the tin can, but I can’t help but love the name anyway, which made me think about what we consider dance and performance!