By Claire Cuccio - March 17, 2025
The multiple generations of Japanese Americans who have settled in the Pacific Northwest carry some of the region’s richest culture and darkest times. Seattleite and Mercer Island resident Kelly Goto highlights this heritage and history with creative flare in her second book, Seattle Samurai: A Cartoonist’s Perspective of the Japanese American Experience (Chin Music Press, 2024).
The book came together a few years after the death of her father Sam Goto on New Year’s Eve, 2017. During the Covid 19 pandemic, daughter Kelly made the industrious and heartwarming decision to honor her father’s legacy by collecting the stories of his lifetime through a carefully crafted exploration of hundreds of comic strips that he created in his later years.
If you are a reader of Seattle’s Japanese community newspaper Hokubei Hōchi, more commonly known as The North American Post, you might remember Sam Goto’s cartoon series appearing in the publication from 2012 until 2018, when the paper exhausted its cache of Goto’s strips. Endearingly titling his comic strip Seattle Tomodachi (Seattle friend), Goto invented the character Shigeru Tomo, adopting the given name of the first Japanese born in Seattle and playing off the sound “tomo” in tomodachi.
In Goto’s debut comic, Shigeru introduces himself, cheekily asserting that he is the narrator of “lots of facts and some fiction” where “most of the events actually occurred although not in chronological order.” As both illustrator and caption writer, Goto depicts frames of Japanese, Japanese American and American histories while balancing jest and jab. He manages to find humor and satire in his depictions of WWII incarceration camps and painful examples of racism. And he takes us on trips to the “Jap Camp” in Barneston, WA, the landmark Nippon Kan, Bainbridge Island, Alki Beach and other local places in a romp across the region.
The cartoonist’s strips also unified a community with shared heritage that had passed down generations. He peppered his captions with common Japanese words and phrases and explained them where he felt it was warranted. Many of the terms comprise a mini compendium of language of the home: the revered Buddhist expression before mealtime, itadakimasu (I humbly receive); tsukemono (pickles); umeboshi (salted plums); and of course, the ritualized furo (bath). He whimsically captures Japanese arts—taiko, judo, and karate, and animates Japanese holiday traditions such as Obon (a summer period that honors the ancestors), Hina Matsuri (Girl’s Day), and Bunka no Hi (Culture Day).
The use of samurai in the book’s title acknowledges Sam Goto’s dedication to samurai principles formalized as bushidō (the way of the warrior) that guided his life and infuse his comic strips. These principles also become the clever device that Kelly Goto uses as the organizing principle for her father’s myriad accounts of twentieth-century Japanese American life.
The varied references to other Seattle voices impart a neighborhood feel to the book. Wendy Tokuda, also a Seattle native and one of the first journalists to report on Japanese American Incarceration and the Minidoka Camp, spotlights Dee Goto, Sam’s wife, in the Foreword, revealing the underlying origins of Seattle Tomodachi. Among others, Kelly Goto’s publisher Bruce Rutledge of Chin Music Press, located in the depths of Pike Place Market, makes an appearance through his tribute to Sam’s intrinsic goodness and Kelly’s inclusion of Sam’s last interview transcript where Rutledge was the lucky interviewer.
When an author has an experienced designer’s eye, the book’s form offers another level of satisfaction. Goto’s volume bears a smart black-and-white cover and an original layout filled with nooks and crannies of historical information and playful placements of her father’s sketches. Before Goto launches into her father’s comic world, she devotes full pages at the start of the book to stylized photographs of his essentials: his standard-style male eyeglasses and his hand-sharpened pencil and dip pen for a cartoonist’s fine lines. Even the size and shape of the book is a gratifying, riffing on the large-scale comic treasuries of Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes that you can count on for a laugh.
The book presents meticulous visual storytelling through the digitization of ephemera before it disappears: timely newspaper headlines, Post-it Notes with Sam’s daily affirmations, his 1940 report card wherein his teacher records, “Sam is an artist,” and photographs that take us through the shifting formats of photography over the eight decades of Sam’s life: this is rare viewing for our virtual lives today. The author statement mentions that one of Kelly Goto’s aims was to engage the “tech-addicted generation.” Goto delivers in a way that her book may be viewed as a “graphic historiobiography,” a cousin, let’s say, to today’s graphic novel.
There isn’t a comprehensive enough genre for a publication that also manages to exude the very dedication of Kelly Goto to her father’s story. Every page reflects insight into Sam Goto living by samurai virtues of courage, mastery, honor, loyalty, integrity, respect, honesty, and compassion—served up with plenty of spirit and amusement.
