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From:
Family&Friends Of Miko
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Monday, April 4, 2016
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By Lawrence F. “Larry” Van Horn, April 2, 2016
Miko Yamamoto was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in the early 1960s when we met. We were both graduate students in anthropology as was Gail D. Schroeder with whom Miko shared an apartment in West Philadelphia. The three of us did things together as pals. Sometimes I would eat supper with them in their apartment. Other times it would be an outing as a brief break from graduate study. One Sunday afternoon during the fall, I drove Miko and Gail to Valley Forge Park, some miles northwest of Philadelphia as a unit of the national park system, where George Washington famously winter-camped his army while the British were occupying Philadelphia during the American Revolution. We enjoyed the autumn foliage and the history.
It seems that Miko in her time and I in mine lost track of Gail Schroeder. I recently telephoned the Alumni Office of the University of Pennsylvania about Gail. There is no record of her ever receiving a Penn degree. Gail was from Webster Groves, Missouri, southwest of Saint Louis.
Both Miko and I did earn Ph.D.s in anthropology building on our M.A. degrees from Penn -- Miko at Cornell University and I at the City University of New York. How Miko ended up at Cornell, I do not know. I had the opportunity to teach at Hunter College of the City University of New York and transferred to the the CUNY Ph.D. Program in Anthropology.
It was through the National Park Service of the U. S. Department of the Interior that I came into contact with Miko again. In 1978, I became the first anthropologist hired by the National Park Service. I worked in park planning and had trips to various parks and environs for Native American consultations on possible sacred and subsistence areas now parklands, which should not be disturbed by any NPS development, such as for visitor use.
Miko became the full-time curator of the Adan E. Treganza Anthropology Museum at San Francisco State University. I looked her up there on trips for Native American consultations involving some NPS park units in California. We spent one pleasant Saturday on Alcatraz Island, which of course is no longer a federal prison but rather a unit of the national park system. The island was
developed as a lighthouse, a masonry fort and a military prison circa 1868. It was a federal prison from 1933 until 1963. On that Alcatraz Saturday, Miko and I were guests of the park staff. They gave us a complete tour of the island with interpretation, including the brick masony fort upon which the fedral prison was later built. Later that day, Miko invited me to her home in Daly City, California, south of San Francisco, for supper. She provided “thin beef,” which is prepared in a frying pan. She said that “Americans like it.”
For many years in recent times, Miko and I exchanged Christmas cards. During one year I telephoned her for greetings at Christmas and the New Year when she was visiting relatives in upstate New York. Another year we had dinner together when the American Anthropological Associate held its annual fall conference in San Francisco.
Miko told me that she was born in Hawaii. Her father worked for the Bank of Japan. She went back to Japan when her father and mother did so just prior to World War II. During the war, Miko “dodged American bombs” as she put it. This practice stood her in good stead when a fire broke out in the West Philadelphia house where she lived with Gail Schroeder. It was Miko who kept calm and helped all the residents get out safely,
In 1967, I married Judith S. Reyes, a native of Panama but of Puerto Rican heritage and thus an American citizen. We are doing well as oldsters. Judy knew of my friendship with Miko and encouraged it.
Miko’s death is indeed sad. But her life is to be happily celebrated. She was thoughtful of others and a very good friend. I close with another memory. One year Miko asked me if I had any ideas to share with her about donating books that she wanted to cull from her personal library of anthropology books, I suggested an American Indian college in South Dakota and provided her with some names and librarians of Lakota colleges there. She followed through with shipments, I believe, to Oglala Lakota College at Kyle, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of the Lakota people.
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From:
Justin Rosenschein
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Saturday, April 2, 2016
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When I was a lot younger I used to always be really psyched about the t-shirts that I would get from here that would glow in the dark and have dinosaurs on them. When I was older I just loved to see her and always appreciated her attitude around the holidays. I used to enjoy her Japanese cuisine that her and my Grandmother would make around new years and Christmas. A couple years I think she joked about birthday punches which I always thought was pretty sweet considering. She was such a nice woman. I'm really going to miss her.
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From:
Family&Friends Of Miko
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Sunday, March 13, 2016
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FROM: JOHN WOLFF
I was shocked and devastated to learn that Miko has passed away. She has been a friend ever since she enrolled for a PhD in Anthropology at Cornell in the mid seventies. She studied Indonesian in my courses and joined the 1978 Indonesia Abroad Program in Malang, where we, Miko, Greg Acciaoli, and I, spent the study week together in Kulawi, Sulawesi Tengah. We had many adventures together, on that trip and later.
When Miko was doing her field work in South Nias in 1980, I was planning to visit her. The only way to get there was to take the ferry from Padang to Gunung Sitoli in North Nias pre than 100 km away. Miko was to go fetch me with her motorcycle. I was delayed and missed the ferry. Meanwhile Miko was riding the great distance to Gunong Sitoli on her, expecting to pick me up, for there was no way to communicate to South Nias to warn her that I was not coming. Her trip was in vain, for I did not arrive. but neither did anyone else on that ferry arrive, for it capsized en route from Padang, with all aboard lost. Poor Miko, she was sure that I had died and blamed herself. She wrote a deeply regretful letter to Ida, my wife, which confused Ida, for she knew I was on my way home from Indonesia. I forget how the misunderstanding got straightened out, but after Miko got her degree, we visited many times-- in Los Baños, Philippines and frequently in Daly City.We once had an emotional get-together with Greg Acciaoli, perhaps ten years ago. I last saw her when I returned from Asia via Daly city and was her guest in her home there. As usual she treated me to various delicacies that she was so skilled in preparing. She was a dear, dear friend, and I am devastated to know that she has passed away.
John Wolff
John Wolff, Professor Emeritus
Linguistics and Asian Studies
Cornell University
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From:
Dédé Oetomo
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Sunday, March 13, 2016
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I first met Miko Yamamoto in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, in the summer of 1977. I was a student at the Teacher's College there (IKIP Malang), where Prof. John U. Wolff of Cornell University was directing the Indonesia Abroad Program there. Pak John hired me as a tutor, and there I was one morning in Miko's Class C. I was nervous, and Miko's presence somehow calmed me down, so I asked her the first question for the reading she and her classmates had worked on. Later she told me that that made her nervous.
Pak John, we tutors and the students were a tight-knit group of around 30 people, and we often went on excursions in the weekends. One weekend some of us went to Pasir Putih, a beach resort about 150km northeast of Malang, which my family also used to visit for a day on the beach.
When, late in the following summer, I was starting my graduate studies in linguistics at Cornell, Miko was very helpful. She picked me up at the tiny Ithaca-Tompkins County airport after a twenty-nine hour journey with stops in Narita, Anchorage and JFK, dropped me at Pak John's house, where I was to stay the first few days, and immediately took me on a walk around campus, introducing me to my first friends and fellow students. I remember meeting John Pemberton and Nancy Florida, and a few others.
Miko helped me find an apartment at 102 Harvard Place, which I shared with Jeffery Sng, another starting graduate student in the Government Department. I believe he is now a banker in Bangkok. She gave us a few cooking utensils, and generally made me feel very welcome and loved, which made my start of living in a foreign land smooth.
We spent a lot of time together in our free time. I remember she taught me how to make gyoza (Japanese dumplings). In the summer of 1975 I had received a Japan Airlines scholarship to study at the Summer Session in Asian Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo, so having a Japanese American friend was very nice and exciting for me. I learned so much more about Japanese culture, language and religion from Miko.
Generally speaking, then, she was the big sister I never had. She even invited me, along with my friend, Ismet Fanany, who also studied at IKIP Malang, to visit her at her sister Noriko's home in Pound Ridge, New York, where I also met Noriko's husband, Fred (later in the early 1990s we almost connected again because he was doing research on some vaccine on Lombok, Indonesia, and I was starting to be active in HIV prevention work). I also met Noriko and Fred's children, Lisa and Boku, and Miko's father, Mr Yamamoto.
I was a little excited to learn that Mr Yamamoto was colleagues with a Mr Ono at the Honolulu branch of Bank of Tokyo before World War II. Most of us of course know Mr Ono's daughter, Yoko, who was married to John Lennon. Noriko told Ismet and me stories about Yoko's antics.
Mr Yamamoto was very warm and friendly to Ismet and me. He showed us his beautiful calligraphy, and let us choose a couple each. I chose the characters for "longevity" and "nothingness." Miko told me a few times how he named his three daughters based on his interest in religion and philosophy when they were born. I remember Miko's formal name, Yoshiko, had the character for "benevolence," which certainly suited her very well. I often think she reminded me of the Goddess of Mercy (Kannon in Japanese, Guanyin in Chinese), one of my favorite deities.
Miko also shared with me her study under Harold Conklin, her interest in rice culture, basket weaving, material culture and especially his passion for the people of Nias, off the western coast of Sumatra, where she did her dissertation research in the early 1980s. We supported each other as fellow graduate students, navigating and surviving the treacherous path that graduate studies can be. When I was about to go to Pasuruan, my home town in East Java, for my dissertation research, she recommended that I read the classical ethnography, Chan Kom, by Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa-Rojas, and Oscar Lewis' Five Families.
When I was returning to Cornell in the summer of 1983, Miko asked me to bring her Javanese spice plants. That must have been before stricter plant control, or maybe I had to smuggle them into Europe, then the US, but the plants managed to find their way into little pots in her apartment.
Over the years we corresponded and kept in touch. She came to visit East Java in 1991. We went to ludruk (folk theater) performances around Surabaya and later did a little tour around Kediri, where my father spent his childhood, to collect basketry. She even came to my cousins Martina and Ade Boentaran's wedding, which was a small affair by Indonesian standard.
A few weeks ago, when Harold Conklin passed away, I was thinking of emailing Miko, but other things got in the way. Two days ago, when I received an email from her niece, Lisa Prince Fishler, with the subject line bearing Miko's name, I braced myself for the sad news, and indeed Miko had passed on. I am quite happy that in April 2013 I managed to spend two days with her in the Bay Area, going to Chinatown and the Castro District in San Francisco, and watching the Cherry Blossom Festival parade in Japantown. It is sad that that was the last time I saw her. I will sorely miss her, but I cherish the memories of our friendship. Farewell, Miko-san!
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From:
gregory acciaioli
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Sunday, March 13, 2016
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I first met Mbak Miko, as fellow Indonesianists called her, when I did a year of intensive Indonesian at Cornell University in the FALCON program under Professor John Wolff (Pak John) in 1976-77. Mbak Miko was then studying for her PhD at Cornell University. She was a largely quiet but also effervescent presence, with her infectious laugh punctuating conversations at gatherings of our FALCON group with other postgraduates studying Indonesia at Cornell.
Most of us in the FALCON program went on to the program in advanced Indonesian held at Teachers Training College in Malang, East Java, in the summer of 1977, which Pak John was also coordinating. Mbak Miko was part of the group as well. Mbak Miko was a frequent visitor at the house where I was staying, and my adoptive mother there, Ibu Mardianti Rustamadji (i.e Ibu Anti, we called her), became very fond of her too. Mbak Miko’s quiet geniality found favour with Ibu Anti, and to this day when I visit her in Jakarta she asks how Mbak Miko is doing.
During the mid-term break of our program, when most of the American students went to Bali or Jogja, Mbak Miko, Pak John and I decided to head up to the highlands of western Central Sulawesi instead. We each had our own reasons. Mbak Miko was interested in the area’s material culture, particularly its persisting tradition of bark cloth production; Pak John was interested in looking for traces of Spanish or Portuguese language influence in local highland languages, as had been suggested in a series of articles from the Jakarta newspaper Kompas that he had also passed on to us; I was looking for a field site for my PhD research, and knew that other than a brief report on the Lake Lindu area written by Gloria Davis based on a short visit during her own field work among Balinese transmigrants down in the coast region, nothing had been written on the anthropology of this area since the 1920s.
We flew from Surabaya via Makassar (Ujung Pandang, as it was still known there) on the old Fokker F27 ‘Friendship’ turboprop planes still being used by Bouraq Airways. Landing eventually in Palu, we didn’t even overnight there, but found a small passenger van that was going to a place called Kulawi in the highlands and hopped on. I remember exchanging looks with Mbak Miko that clearly communicated our shared query: ‘What are we getting ourselves into?’ It was a long ride, punctuated by having to cross through several small rivers (now all with bridges), but eventually toward evening we did arrive in Kulawi. We had no idea where we were going to stay, but a local entrepreneur, who presented himself as of noble descent from the village of Kantewu further south (though I later ascertained his father was a Bugis migrant to the area) said he would be happy to take us in. A sigh of relief from us all!
Pak Zainuddin Abdulrauf (or Papa Nur, as he preferred to be called in accordance with the local usage of being addressed by the title ‘Father of [First Child’s name]) was a truly magnificent host, but a very competitive one. He was determined to demonstrate that he could outdrink us, and succeeded in doing so with numerous glasses of Johnny Walker mixed with local palm toddy. I have only once witnessed Mbak Miko drunk, and that was the night. Her infectious laugh was more in evidence that evening than I ever heard again. We were all soused, and getting up the next morning was not easy; certainly, that was the worst hangover headache I have ever experienced in my life. Mbak Miko was more discreet about how she felt than my wailing, and I think Pak John was less worse for wear than the two of us.
That stay was full of walks throughout the local region. None of us was particularly elegant in negotiating the rattan suspension bridge we had to clamber across on one of those walks. Papa Nur brought us to one house where a number of women were pounding bark cloth and ended up not only gifting a fine example of local barkcloth to Mbak Miko but also a full set of the pounding implements, from rough to fine in the design of their pounding surfaces. I think those materials made their way into the Treganza Anthropology Museum collection at San Francisco State when Mbak Miko served as its director. Papa Nur was very keen for Mbak Miko to return and do her doctoral field work on material culture in Kulawi, as he was obviously as taken by her genial generosity and committed curiosity about local life, as Ibu Anti had been in Malang. However, Mbak Miko was already committed to proceeding to Nias for her field research, though I think she was momentarily tempted!
Pak John ascertained after some linguistic elicitation from local speakers of Moma, the local language of Kulawi, that there was no significant Spanish or even Portuguese influence on the language beyond the usual loan words found throughout languages in the region (e.g. sepatu for ‘shoes’), and thus the whole story of highland creole languages in these highlands due to the influence of shipwrecked Iberian sailors who had made their way up into the mountains was a journalistic fantasy. That night we couldn’t help but break into uncontrollable laughter every time we looked at each other, as we could not keep ourselves from recalling that one of the major reasons for our coming to this region was totally bogus. But we were having such a good time together with Papa Nur that it didn’t really seem to matter.
With only a couple of days to go, Papa Nur suggested that the three of us walk up to Lake Lindu, as it would be a shame to have come this far and not see Lindu, a lake he declared to be ‘more beautiful than Lake Geneva’. This sounded too good to pass up, so we all agreed. Papa Nur arranged for the village headman of a community of local transmigrants at Lindu to accompany us up to Lindu, a highland plain formed from the caldera of a now extinct volcano. It took us 7 hours to walk there (most locals did it in less than 4!), though I think this was the morning after our boisterous drinking competition, so our protracted plodding was perhaps forgivable. Lindu did indeed turn out to be stunningly beautiful, though of a very different sort than Lake Geneva. We stayed cramped together in a guest room of the laboratory, Le Petit Soleil, that had been established for the US Naval Medical Research Unit (NAMRU) team that had come in the 60s to conduct research on schistosomiasis at Lindu. Our host, the director of the NAMRU unit at the time, Drs. Baroji, took us all around the lake. I remember Mbak Miko catching her breath in admiration several times as our motorised canoe proceeded around the lake. The sight of Mt. Nokilalaki towering above the lake, the graceful herons striding and flying at the lake’s edge, the majestic trees coming down to the shore at several points were all worth gasping at. Suffice it to say, that after I checked out several other sites for my field work some 3 years later, I ended up returning to Lindu to do my doctoral research, indeed eventually marrying into the Lindu community, and now return most every year I can, partially to continue research, but mainly to be with family and friends there. Each time I go back I remember vividly that it was with Mbak Miko and Pak John that I first encountered and shared this ever magical place.
Having moved across the ocean to teach at the University of Western Australia, I have only been able to visit with Mbak Miko a few times in my occasional trips back to the USA to visit relatives and friends. It was always a joy to share a lunch with Miko at her aesthetically striking, yet very comfortable townhouse in Daly City. She was always keen to hear stories of what was happening in Central Sulawesi, and I remember the joy on her face when I first introduced my wife Niniek to her. The reunion of our Central Sulawesi trio when Pak John and his wife Ida were also there at her townhouse was the highlight of these meetings.
Reading on the memorial site that the character for her name Yoshiko was that of the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion Kwan Yin, I could not help thinking how appropriate that name was for her. Mbak Miko’s compassion was both genial and intense, a compassion that made us all feel comfortable and comforted in her presence. The world will seem a less compassionate place now without her direct presence, but Mbak Miko’s gift for friendship will live on as we remember her part in our joyous experiences.
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From:
Brian Rosenschein
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Wednesday, March 9, 2016
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When I was younger, Miko asked me what my favorite color was. Ever since then, all of the gifts Miko gave me were orange. She was such a considerate lady, really going to miss her.
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Family&Friends Of Miko
3/6/2016 at 10:28 AM
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Candle Lit By
Family&Friends Of Miko
Sunday, March 6, 2016 at 10:28 AM
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I keep thinking of how one of your last requests to me was to make sure the candies that were sent to you from Japan were put in a bowl for people who came to visit you at the Zen Guest House. I miss you so much, Miko.... Love, Ishi chan
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Family&Friends Of Miko
3/2/2016 at 2:59 AM
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Candle Lit By
Family&Friends Of Miko
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 at 2:59 AM
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From: Marilyn
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Never Gone
3/2/2016 at 12:25 AM
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