Meeting June Tatsuno for the first time is very refreshing to see. The small, fragile Japanese woman is so humbled by the idea of being put as a feature in the paper. “Why me?” asked Tatsuno meekly.
Professor Hagop Najarian said, “Her creativity is contagious to see, a women of her stature and age to keep going for her ambitions is inspiring.”
The 84-year-old has taken Professor Hagop Nigerian’s life painting class since 2007.
“I want to keep going with life,’ Tatsuno starts off telling me.
Her whole life she felt like a failure that nothing she accomplished was creditable. But by going back to Cerritos to take painting classes it gives Tatsuno self-gratitude that she can keep going.
Tatsuno first started off in drawing class then went to life painting and continues to keep coming back to perfect her craft.
“I really want to paint a picture and feel like I accomplished it. Sometimes I feel it and sometimes I don’t, it is almost mechanical. I want to paint a painting and attain a style that you can tell is June,” she explained.
Mostly painting with pastels and watercolors, Tatsuno prefers to paint people.
“I look at her sit there so peacefully working on a painting I don’t know how to critique something that doesn’t have a flaw to it,” asid Prof. Najarian.
Tatsuno is her biggest critic, but she gives herself less acknowledgement than she should.
She was 15 when Pearl Harbor broke out and her father was arrested and taken to jail just for being Japanese. With her mother in the hospital with tuberculoses , Tatsuno and her siblings were sent to relocation camps.
They could only take what they could carry with them. Later on when Tatsuno’s father was released, he was sent to be with his children at a relocation camp in Santa Anita. Later, they move to Jerome, Ark. and then to Arizona.
Tatsuno and her siblings had had just about enough. Her brother was drafted into the army and her sister went to Pasadena. Before she felt she would go crazy, Tatsuno went to the counselor and asked to sign her papers to leave the camp.
In order for that to be done, Tatsuno had to go stay with her sister in Pasadena. After staying there for a little while, she set off for Chicago.
There she learned what it was like to really be hungry. With only twenty cents in her pocket June debated on whether to buy a paper to look for work, or to buy a loaf of bread to eat.
Eventually, Tatsuno got a job as a waitress at a restaurant.
“I thought to myself, ‘if I work here at least I can eat,'” she remembered.
Tatsuno came back to California where she read a book that said “If you have seen Hollywood and New York you have seen the world.” Since she had already seen Hollywood, she wanted to see the whole world, so she jumped on a Greyhound bus to New York.
There she stood all by herself in New York’s Time Square, watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve. Then 20, Tatsuno was making very little money and eventually came back to California to take care of her sick mother and to get some things done since very little was being done in New York.
“I felt like a failure and needed to do something,” she said.
That’s when Tatsuno decided to attend the University of California Santa Barbara where she obtained a bachelor’ss degree in science and business economics.
Tatsuno is a sharp, savvy woman.
When I asked June if she has ever been married, she replied “yes, twice. They both passed away though.” She continued with a smile, “I thought to myself I must be killing off my husbands, so I just won’t marry anymore.”
After surviving cancer twice, along with life in the relocation camp, Tatsuno’s uplifting spirit serves as a role model to those around her. Her journey through life is inspiring, and she insists she will not stop challenging herself.
“I will keep going ’til the end,” Tatsuno declared.
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