Last month I was invited by a female acquaintance to accompany her to the University of Washington's Tacoma campus on Tuesday, October 23, for an evening screening of two films at Carwein Hall on the forced relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
This topic had a special interest for me because both my American-born mother and father together with their entire families were part of this unique and unprecedented chapter of history. With a stroke of a pen President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order #9066 on February 19, 1942 and turned the world as they knew it upside down. Only a month before Mom turned 17 years old. Dad was all of 14 years. Their lives would never be the same.
What the President's signature actually allowed was to give local military commanders the power to designate areas of the United States military areas as exclusion zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded". When this was applied to Americans of Japanese ancestry living in an approximately fifty-sixty mile deep area stretching from Washington State to California, some 112,000 persons living up and down the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes and communities by military authorities.
Shown October 23rd were the films: "Take Me Home" a dramatization which depicted the evacuation of families from the viewpoint of a small boy, and a documentary entitled "Resettlement to Redress" directed at older audiences which which followed the interment story from the dispursement of all camp residents at the end of the war to the eventual hard fought but successful national community drive during the 80's for a governmental apology and monetary redress, and finally into the 90's when the actual claims were paid.
Above: My maternal grandparents, Chiyo & Ichiji Yoshikawa. Picture taken in October 1944 while they were still residents of the U.S, government internment camp known as Heart Mountain Relocation Center near Cody, Wyoming. From family photo collection of C. Yoshikawa.
Several segments of videotaped footage from the Seattle, WA hearings held by the US Congressional Commission on the Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians at Seattle Central Community College in 1981 were featured in the second film. The screening in turn is part of a larger series of films on Asia Pacific Cultures sponsored by Tacoma's own Asia Pacific Cultural Center (APCC) and it's partnership with he Urban Studies Program at University of Washington Tacoma, with additonal support from the Cultural Diversity Resource Center.
As it turned out, I got far more than a night of history. As a young woman in my twenties, I had the pleasure of serving as a representative for the Lake Washington chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League on the state redress committee prior to the Congressional hearings in Seattle. However, until recently I had not been able to enjoy such extensive videotaped coverage from the era. So the flashbacks provided by "Resettlement to Redress" were truly a complete and delightful surprise!
Memories of the proceedings, my own short commission testimony as part of the Sansei (third generation) panel, and memories of attendance at meetings where I sat next to some of the major players in the movement as pictures on the movie screen flashed by. This was quickly followed by the same kind of thrill I had then merely being in the same room these sharp, dynamic and talented local leaders such as: Chuck Kato, Sam Shoji, Ken Nakano, Cherry Kinoshita, and Frank Abe to only name a few.
Another familiar face in the movie was one of my personal heroes, Gordon Hirabayashi, a civil rights activist whose legal challenge to 1942 government curfew and evacuation orders took him all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Coincidentally, Hirabayashi is a local boy having been born & raised in Thomas, Washington a South King County town near the present city of Auburn which no longer exists.
Hirabayashi's argument now forms one leg in an important trio of legal cases whose impact has had a historic impact far beyond the brief historical blip the internment might have normally registered on the timeline of national history because the Constitutional challenges and precedents set by Executive Order #9066 and what came after have come to be accepted and applied to far more people in recent years than West Coast residents of Japanese-American ancestry during World War II.
According to an article in The Tacoma Weekly, entitled: Internment, adoption and civil rights struggles focus of Asian Film Festival by Matt Nagle which ran October 4, 2007, the two films were part of a series of five nights of free programming and quoted APCC executive director Phil Chang as saying he was fascinated by films about this period because "If you're not Japanese, it's not really talked about that much. A lot of people who went through it don't really like to discuss it. Hopefully this will be some conversation started."
Above: Many internees took jobs in camp to earn money for incidentals or take their minds off their situation by keeping busy. My mom, Susie Yoshikawa, (seated, second from left) then a recent high school graduate, got a job in the camps dealing with Evacuee Property. From family photo collection of C. Yoshikawa.
It's hard to believe this today, but my own parents were among the people who didn't discuss this topic and when I had announced my intentions to participate in some way during the Congressional hearings back in 1981, they didn't hide their concern for my personal safety and the safety of other Japanese-American community members who were also interested. Despite the reality World War iI and their own imprisonment in the camps was a full forty years in the past, they continued at times to nervously look over their shoulders. It wasn't an imaginary concern that other people who lived around them still carried their own war wounds.
What an education it was to myself, a baby boomer born in the mid-fifties, just around the same time my immigrant Japanese grandparents were finally allowed by the U.S. government to apply for citizenship for the first time, to read some of the hateful letters to the editor by people who still felt the need in the late 70's and early 80's to hold my parents and their families as equally guilty as nationalist Japanese troops because they still looked just like the enemy.
It didn't take much for me to realize then, that looking so much as I do like my good old mom and dad, that I fall just as easily into this same category for fearful people just like those who wrote those letters. Like my folks, all I have to do is look in my mirror. So I particularly remember reading with a more personal feeling one or two folks in the minority thankfully, expressing the opinion Japanese-Americans should be grateful the US didn't choose to kill all camp residents ostensibly alluding to the Holocaust taking place in Europe.
It was hard then for my younger self to understand anyone would actually feel comfortable writing things like that. How would they feel if the tables had been reversed and they had walked in my parents shoes during World War II, and it was I angrily writing to the newspapers about them?
Above: My maternal uncle, Benjamin T. Yoshikawa (front row, second from left) with a small group of army buddies outside their barracks near Mito, Japan. Picture is dated December 9, 1945. From family photo collection of C. Yoshikawa.
Fortunately, despite learning a few people we lived among were still fighting the war, I felt really good then and I continue to take pride i being a tiny part of redress and movement that in a larger sense would eventually help my own parents and my ethnic community feel safe, comfortable enough to break out of the self-editing confines of certain parts of their post-war lives and finally claim the healing and freedom won by the hard-fighting sacrifices of the men and women who made up the United States World War II military fighting forces including our own dedicated ranks of Japanese-American troops (such as the mostly Nikkei 442nd Infantry Battalion and the equally brave Military Intelligence Service colleagues) of which two of my uncles were also a part.
"Resettlement to Redress" also reminded me of that the rewards I have enjoyed were not witnessed by three of my four immigrant grandparents, who died years before the US government issued an apology for and granted redress to former residents of its internment camps. When they were released from the camps and given some $25.00 in cash and a train ticket to their next stop everything they had worked so hard for prior to the war was gone. So, at the age most people retired, my grandparents were forced by necessity to start over from the bottom as if they'd just arrived from overseas only yesterday.
Above: My immigrant Japanese grandfather, Ichiji Yoshikawa, poses in cap and gown at the time of his graduation from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921. From family photo collection of C. Yoshikawa.
Because Grandpa was never able to get back the lifestyle his pre-war efforts had bought, my mom's elderly dad - the first US college graduate in our entire clan (University of California at Berkelely, Class of 1921) was forced to rent lodging from a series of Chicago landlords whose buildings were simply substandard. In the early sixties when I was about six or seven, this quiet and gentle man who my mom recalled baked cookies and read "Psychology Today", was killed while descending a two-story staircase at the rear of his apartment to take out the evening garbage.
For some reason that night, I'm told that the a wooden staircase there which had been for years quietly decomposing suddenly gave out without warning, sending Grandpa, what he carried and what parts of the staircase that collapsed plunging into the bottom of a basement stairwell. His widow, Chiyo, who only much years later was able to retire from her last career as a member of the garment workers union, managed to become the only grandparent still alive in 1993 when monies for redress payments were finally released. Regrettably, she followed her husband into death just two years after at the age 90.
Aside from my families personal internment postscripts, going back for me to recall the positive and uplifting community experience of the redress effort years has been a considerable personal lift which I now directly associate with the APCC and my unexpected invite to these movies. My hostess is rapidly making the transition between acquaintance and a good friend and I feel much the same way about the museum.
We all started out having mutual interest in arts and culture. Now there's proof we have similar tastes in film. Perhaps the day will come when I can return these favors. In the meanwhile, it looks as if all three of us will be trying our best to build on what we have now one precious linkage at a time.
For more information on activities at the Asia Pacific Cultural Center including films go to: http://www.asiapacificculturalcenter.org/
For a short but concise round-up on participation by Japanese-American soldiers during World War II go to: http://www.army.mil/cmh/topics/apam/Patriots%20Under%20Fire.htm
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