A special week began last Sunday with our annual Mochi Tsuki celebration.

The next day we vividly remembered The Dream, our dream, as articulated by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the only U.S. citizen not a President honored with a national holiday. I heard him speak once near Boston when I was young. He spoke truths basic to every human heart. At that time, we seemed so far away from overt racism in the far upper left hand corner of the nation’s map.

How far away were we? Two of my classmates married right out of high school and honeymooned in the South. When they returned they reported that they “have laundromats in pairs there – one to bleach your white clothes and another next door to wash your colored.” Naive? Other interpretations were inconceivable to those raised in southeast Seattle.

Dr. King’s messages came home one sobering evening when a group of 21-year-old friends – Bob, Ray, Ed, Kunio and I – ventured to a downtown Seattle bar where a fellow classmate was bartender.

Men of the world we weren’t, and soon found our “neo-post-adolescent” selves intoxicated. Four of us were hakujin (“white”) and one was nisei.

“We’d better have some coffee and something to eat before we show our faces at home,” all agreed, especially our designated driver.

We emptied our pockets on a table at Tai Tung Restaurant and quickly realized we barely had enough for one dish and tea.

“What’ll we have fellows? Roll call!”

“Squid,” said four of us.

“No squid!” Kunio urged. “I’ve had all the squid I ever want to eat in the camps.”

Those words resonate deeply even today. We stayed out late that night as our friend put a face on a history we’d touched too briefly or not at all in “social studies.”

When Dr. King was assassinated later that decade, we shed tears for us all and recalled unjust experiences of our Japanese American friends.

Tuesday we inaugurated President Obama who is well-educated with early roots to Punahou School in Hawaii. Our TVs streamed images all day of our beautiful people and huge extended family.

On Wednesday, Fumiko Hayashida celebrated her 98th birthday! We see the image of her and her infant daughter, Natalie, every time we go to the post office courtyard in Winslow. A Seattle P-I photographer changed their and our lives forever on March 30, 1942. They were photographed wearing numbered ID tags as they were uprooted from their Bainbridge home and escorted by U.S. Army soldiers bearing rifles with fixed bayonets onto the ferry Kelohken. When P-I photos hit the press, Army officials ordered, “No more bayonets will be used by escorts.”

Natalie and I attended high school together in Seattle. It was my privilege to join Fumiko, Natalie (playing her mother) and Kunio as extras in the film “Snow Falling on Cedars” with other Islanders in 1998. In September 2006 Fumiko made an inspirational testimony to a Congressional sub-committee in Washington, D.C., on behalf of our National Historic Landmark – Nidoto Nai Yoni (“Never Let It Happen Again”) Memorial. Mary Woodward, Lily Kodama, Frank Kitamoto and I shared Fumiko’s first return trip to Minidoka since WW II on the 2007 “Minidoka Pilgrimage.” Natalie was here for her mother’s birthday and another very special event.

On Saturday, island neighbors celebrate the memory of Rev. Dr. King at the 10th anniversary “Sing Out!”

Dr. Frank Kitamoto, president of the Japanese American Community will miss the choir event to attend the annual Japanese American Citizen League Installation Dinner in Seattle, where a “Special Recognition” award will be presented to his aunt, Fumiko, who has inspired us all and kept Dr. King’s Dream alive like few others.

We join him in singing “Happy Birthday” to our island heroine!

Gerald Elfendahl is a local historian.