Special to The Seattle Times
By all appearances, Sam Shigeru Goto lived the life of a typical Seattleite. A second-generation Japanese American, he and his wife, Dee, raised two girls in their Mercer Island home, and he commuted every weekday to the Medical Dental Building downtown to work as a dental technician — a job he diligently performed for 55 years. Sam Goto died on Dec. 31, 2017, at the age of 84, and by all accounts, he lived a happy life.
But Goto had a secret side that wasn’t visible from the daily commute: He was an avid, lifelong cartoonist. Indeed, he almost always was doodling in his free time, sketching or writing down axioms and life tips. On an index card kept in an overflowing box labeled “IDEAS,” he inscribed the Helen Keller quote: “Life is a daring adventure or nothing.” Tagged to a corkboard on a scrap of paper, he scrawled a quote that was presumably of his own invention: “That’s the way kids are. Just live with it!!”
In the basement of his home, Goto would sit at a drawing board sketching cute dogs, cats, members of his family and original cartoon characters in the style of the newspaper funny pages. Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” was a clear influence, with Snoopy cartoons carefully cut out and posted above his desk for inspiration.
Finally, at his wife Dee’s insistence, Sam created a comic strip of his own. Starting in 2012, “Seattle Tomodachi” (friend of Seattle) was published weekly in The North American Post, a Japanese American community newspaper published out of the Chinatown International District since 1902. He drew the strip right up to the end, even while hooked up to an oxygen tank.
This month, Seattle publisher Chin Music Press will publish “Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience,” a collection of Goto’s “Seattle Tomodachi” cartoons with extensive commentary provided by his daughter, Kelly Goto, who assembled the book.
“I’ve always wanted to put together a tribute to my dad and his artwork, and the philosophy that he had,” Kelly Goto explains. Originally, the book “was just going to be for my family,” and she thought it was going to take a year or two to put it all together.
All the material Kelly Goto needed to make the book was preserved and filed in her childhood home, where she lives today. “My dad documented everything,” she says. “He saved every receipt, every service for his ’65 Mustang. It’s just a crazy amount of detail. … He was very organized.” When she started to assemble the material, a bigger picture became clear.
“What ended up was four years of the most painstaking work,” she laughs. The more Kelly Goto read her father’s cartoons about a fictional boy named Shigeru Tomo, the more she realized that “Seattle Tomodachi” was a composite story documenting the Japanese American experience in Seattle in the late 19th and early 20th century.
“There’s a deeper meaning behind the daily lives of what these Japanese immigrants went through,” she says. “There’s a deeper message that my dad was actually trying to convey.”
The book begins with Shigeru’s birth and his early days as the first nisei (second-generation) Japanese American born in Seattle. The punchline of the fourth strip in the book features Shigeru’s first word: As his expectant parents look on hoping for him to say “Papa” or “Mama,” Shigeru blurts out “SHI-AH-TO-RU!,” the Japanese word for Seattle.
Soon enough, the strip settles into its own gentle rhythms. As he eases into school age, Shigeru Tomo goes on adventures with his adorable beagle Inu. He adopts an alter ego, Samurai Shigeru, carries a toy sword, and becomes fascinated with the samurai code.
Sam Goto used the strip to hop around in time to document important moments in Seattle history, like the first steamship to reach the city from the Klondike gold rush in 1897, and small but significant moments that shaped the lives of the men and women who immigrated to Seattle.
Those slice-of-life stories are largely based on real moments in the lives of the Goto family or their friends. In one instance, two young girls are talking in Japanese on a Seattle Metro bus when an older white woman snaps, “If you live here you should speak English!” One of the girls asks the other, “How do we say ‘baka’ (idiot) in English?” In another strip set in the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, two young girls cut a small hole in the wall of their incarceration camp dorms to pass notes back and forth. A mother discovers the hole and castigates her daughter: “You did this? You should never damage other peoples’ property! Shame!”
Throughout “Seattle Samurai,” Kelly Goto illuminates the strips with commentary and photographs that delve into the real-life inspirations of many of the strips. From providing family history to describing traditional Japanese New Year’s meals to explaining the history of well-known Chinatown International District businesses like Uwajimaya and the Panama Hotel, her notes open up the world of “Seattle Tomodachi” for readers who aren’t intimately familiar with Seattle, or the Japanese American immigrant experience.
With all those layers of meaning and art in conversation with each other, “Seattle Samurai” serves as a beautifully designed collaboration between generations of a family, an important historical document and a compelling work of biography.
On a personal level, it’s something even more special. “My dad grew up in [Shin] Buddhism, and he found out about Christmas when he was maybe 7,” Kelly Goto says. “He was always a person that made things, and so he carved gifts for his whole family and wrapped them up and put them underneath the stove because they didn’t have a tree.” When Christmas morning dawned, the family discovered that “there were Christmas presents, so everyone got to open up a gift — except for him.”
It’s a bittersweet story, but one with a happy ending. “Seattle Samurai” is a daughter’s gift to her father — a love letter to a man who was full of restless creativity and exuberance for his community until the very end.
“Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience”
Kelly Goto, illustrations by Sam Goto, Chin Music Press, 264 pp., $39.95
Kelly Goto will be at Island Books on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 6:30 p.m., 3014 78th Ave. S.E., Mercer Island; 206-232-6920; islandbooks.com; and at Elliott Bay Book Company on Thursday, Oct. 24, at 7 p.m., 1521 10th Ave., Seattle; 206-624-6600; elliottbaybook.com. Visit seattlesamurai.com for more author events.
Paul Constant: thisispaulconstant@gmail.com; Paul Constant is a Seattle-based writer and the co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. His Neighborhood Reads series appears monthly in The Seattle Times.