With a population of 150,000, Bellevue is known for its modern skyscrapers, bustling hotels and shopping hubs. But it was once a farming community where some 300 Japanese Americans were abruptly forced by the U.S. government to abandon their homes and dispersed into incarceration camps during World War II.

A few years before the 80th anniversary of the executive order that led to those incarceration camps, Woodridge Elementary School teacher Michal Friesen began working with school colleagues, historians, families and community members to build lessons about the events. Her challenge: Teach about an uncomfortable period in American history in a way that’s kid-friendly, culturally responsive and historically accurate.

The Bellevue teacher, who was educated as a historian, believes it’s important to teach this local history in a way that doesn’t sugarcoat the lessons. And the district’s recommended guidelines to teach about Bellevue history gave her the opportunity to revive and re-imagine the district’s “Bellevue Then and Now” curriculum. 

Teaching this history, she said, can at times be “a tricky balance” between addressing information that may have adversely affected some of her students’ own families and “some difficult topics that they haven’t heard before.” 

But, she said, third graders are curious about their community’s history, even the parts some people find disturbing. Friesen and her fellow teachers notify families before they begin the unit, by sharing an overview of lessons. In teaching, they stick to the facts, use picture books and age-appropriate clips of interviews with people in the community. They avoid using graphic materials that include violence and dead bodies. 

During an April lesson on what Bellevue was like before 1941, students sat on the classroom carpet and passed around black-and-white images of Japanese American schoolchildren, baseball players and buildings of that era. They discussed whether the images depicted contributions (the opening of a Japanese language school), hardships (clearing acres of tree stumps to cultivate farmland) or examples of government and community action (the vandalism and closure of the Japanese language school). 

Friesen then asked individual students to take the image they were holding and match it to a description on a poster board in front of them. While reading about the 1922 Supreme Court decision that prevented first-generation Japanese immigrants from seeking a path to naturalization, one student raised a hand and asked, “Is that law still here today?” 

“When we teach these difficult topics, kids respond with a lot of engagement because they know that it’s real and they know that it’s important,” Friesen said.

The class then split up into five small groups, each assigned to work together to write a sentence about a contribution, hardship, government or community action on large strips of poster paper. They were arranged on an easel to create a class paragraph that included lines like, “Did you know Japanese immigrants contributed to Bellevue by doing dangerous and hard jobs?” After reading it aloud as a class, Friesen assigned the kids to share it with their families at home. 

For third grader Rei Yamazono, watching the rest of her classmates learn what it means to be “issei,” the Japanese term for immigrants born in Japan and living in the U.S., and “nisei,” second-generation American-born children of the issei, is a source of pride. 

“I am from Japan. I am issei. I feel so special,” she said. “Everyone can learn Japanese a little bit and I can help teachers know about Japan.” 

Tiffany Reimergartin, a Woodridge Elementary kindergarten teacher who is helping Friesen use inclusive and collaborative teaching strategies with the curriculum, said other teachers in the Bellevue district are revisiting curricula in a similar way, rethinking how to teach topics like enslavement and civil rights. 

The curriculum highlighting the experiences of Japanese Americans was officially adopted by the district last year with the aim “to provide a more complete historical narrative of the people and families of Bellevue.” Friesen worked with other teachers to roll it out this year, though she says the expansion is slow.

The lessons identify turning points in Eastside history, including how the Mercer Slough, a tranquil 320-acre wetland, was once a shallow bay of Lake Washington. This was home to Indigenous people who established longhouse villages near the shores until they fought with European settlers and were forced from the area. As the curriculum tracks history into the 1900s, Friesen added details of the contributions Japanese immigrants made to the Bellevue region, which were noticeably lacking in the original lessons. 

This exclusion in narratives is not unique, she notes. The history section of the city of Bellevue’s own website and other past histories of the city acknowledge that Japanese immigrants lived and farmed there early on, but gloss over their displacement and discrimination, as well as their other contributions, she said.

Friesen backs up the curriculum with a growing bibliography of primary sources, including documents and video interviews meticulously archived by Densho, the Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to “preserving Japanese American stories of the past for the generations of tomorrow,” King County’s 4Culture program and Bellevue’s Eastside Heritage Center. 

“You cannot tell the history of Bellevue without talking about the Japanese immigrants and the community that helped form it,” she said.

David Vielbig, now a fifth grader at Woodridge Elementary School, remembers learning about Bellevue’s famed Strawberry Festival in Friesen’s class and how Japanese “truck farmers” were known for growing high-quality produce, like the berries, and distributing it to Pike Place Market and other places across the nation. After incarceration, he learned that some people in Bellevue did not welcome their old neighbors back and that their homes and farmland had been taken over or destroyed. 

“I was kind of shocked” to learn this, he said.

He wasn’t the only one. 

Family engagement is also part of the curriculum, and the lessons have piqued some parents’ curiosity. Friesen said a few have also pushed back over the years. 

In March 2020, as instruction went remote due to the pandemic, Friesen enlisted her colleagues and her own family to help create a virtual field trip series. They recorded lessons at Mercer Slough, the ferry landing in Medina and the former packinghouse for the Japanese American growers association, among other locations. They encouraged families to visit to get an in-person sense of what they were learning about. 

“The more that I can connect [the curriculum] to things they recognize in their community then, for all of us, I think that’s really engaging,” said Friesen. 

Elizabeth Vielbig, David’s mom, worked from home during the pandemic and said viewing the videos became a part of their morning routine. They wondered aloud about where each segment would take them. As a child growing up in Bellevue, she remembers learning some Washington state history, but nothing about her own neighborhood.

Without watching the videos with her son, “I never would have known,” said Vielbig. “It was a nice, collaborative family experience.”

Allen Kim, the father of third grader Rei Yamazono, is intrigued by this approach to teaching history. He is South Korean and raised in Canada. He met Rei’s mother, who is Japanese, while living in Japan. Kim said that as the only Asian in his Canadian school, he tried to assimilate to fit in. He said “it is very refreshing” to see his young daughter take pride in her multicultural heritage and that she “can relate to our own ancestors’ history.” 

When it comes to how she’s being taught about this in school, Kim said he’d like to see even more perspectives incorporated so that children can get a greater worldview of different histories and cultures. He’d also like to ensure that kids get multiple sources of information, beyond textbooks. He worries that getting a limited scope of information can cause kids to form hard opinions early on.

“They need balance. They need guidance,” he said.

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.