Being Japanese American during World War II: East Coast Stories

American Flag Over Barbed Wire Fence, by Koho Yamamoto.

Having grown up in California, I know some things about the West Coast Japanese American World War II experience of evacuation and imprisonment. But I know little about what happened here on the East Coast. So it was a treat to catch the eye-opening exhibit "If they came for me today...East Coast Stories," part of Community Works NYC's "Japanese American Internment Project," which (too bad for you), closes today at the Interchurch Center Treasure Room Gallery on Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights.

A series of portraits, biographies, reminiscences and artwork tells the story of seven Japanese Americans who were affected in different ways. Some were born and grew up in New York and only learned later the various ways that their parents were persecuted during the war.

Others, like Masako "Koho" Yamamoto were imprisoned on the West Coast, and then made their way east after being released. Yamamoto was locked up in Topaz, Utah, and then moved to the high-security Tule Lake prison camp, where those who refused to renounce loyalty to Japan or agree to serve in the U.S. armed forces were shunted off to. There, ignoring the deplorable conditions, she wrote poetry and studied ink brush painting under Chiura Obata, a widely admired artist and UC Berkeley emeritus professor.

Describing the above painting, Yamamoto says, "They treated us like prisoners even though we were American citizens." Recalling a time when a group of Obata sensei's students came to visit him at Tule Lake, she writes, "They were crying, saying he looked like he was in prison standing behind the barbed wire fence. He first said, 'Don't cry.' Then he added, 'From where I'm standing, you look like the ones who are in jail.' He had great wit." He coped, in other words, with the means that were left to him.

Native Sons of Fresno, California Look Back

I'm writing a Densho Encyclopedia entry now on the poet Lawson Fusao Inada. He's a third-generation Japanese American who was locked up in three different U.S. government prisons during World War II.

It's not surprising that even though he was only four years old when he was first placed behind barbed wire,  the "camp" experience became a major theme in Inada's poetry, a wound he revisited repeatedly. It's as if he wanted to figure out what happened and recast it on his own terms, not those of the government--who said it was for his own protection--or of many of his fellow prisoners, who wanted so badly to prove their loyalty they enlisted to fight, and in many cases die, for the U.S.

There are two other great themes in Inada's poetry that he returns to frequently for grounding and inspiration: Fresno, California, where he was born and grew up, and jazz. Fresno is where his maternal grandparents opened the city's first fresh fish market in 1912, which became an institution that stood for 70 years. The writer William Saroyan, another native son of Fresno, recalled his grandmother sending him to The Fresno Fish Market in Chinatown.

When the order came declaring all Japanese and Japanese Americans "enemy aliens" and telling them to pack a bag and be ready to clear out, Inada's grandfather handed the store over to trusted friends. Stories abound of prisoners who came back home at war's end to find their businesses and property had been stolen, sometimes by "friends." That didn't happen to Inada's family. When his grandfather got back, writes Inada, "he hit the ground running."

In a short essay titled "Seven Words of Poetry," Inada recalls that post-war period when he was studying poetry at Fresno State and helping out at the store in the afternoons:

My uncles are on break, making deliveries, whatever; my grandmother, Yoshiko Saito, is taking an order, in Japanese, over the phone. My grandfather, Busuke Saito, is out back, in the sunlight, by an orange tree he planted, placing pieces of salmon to soak in a miso cask.
    Who is he? What is he like? Well, let's just say that he's ready. He's always been ready, and he's readier than you are. He's old, fast, muscled, smart. You don't mess with him--unless you want to be chased down the street with a knife.

Inada's mother was born in the fish store, and Inada grew up nearby, in Chinatown on the westside of town. In truth, it was a mixed-race neighborhood of Chicano, Black, Chinese, Japanese and Italians. In his poem "Finding the Center," Inada writes about playing in the rich agricultural soil of Fresno with a friend.

Mama Gomez was calling us in for supper--

but tonight, if we were good, or lucky,

she would feed us sweet tortillas

and the crunchiest iced tea

as we sat on the porch, watching

moths meet the moon, fluttering stars,

and whatever else was doing on C Street.

These evocative images and tales were rolling around fresh in my mind when I read a wonderful article titled "From a Tortilla, The Feeling of a Warm Embrace" in The New York Times earlier this week. Writer Manny Fernandez also looks back in time to a grandparent in Fresno, a Mexican American grandmother who, like Inada's mother and grandmother, "straddled the three cultures of her state, her country and her heritage." Fernandez, a reporter for the Times, writes of how his grandmother, Cuca, cooked meals of tacos and burritos for the Mexican farmworkers who lodged at his great-grandmother's boarding house.

"The masa pressed by her hands made the flour tortillas flattened by her hands for the tacos filled by her hands. Decades later, I probably walked by those anonymous farmworkers and their descendants at Fashion Fair Mall or Fresno State University. We had Cuca's tacos in common," he writes. 

What's a little amazing to think about is that Inada probably walked by those farmworkers and their descendants and maybe even Fernandez or his parents, all of whom had tasted Fresno's sweet tortillas, tacos and burritos--and maybe even fresh fish from The Fresno Fish Market. 

Bringing New Life to Japanese American Hero Gordon Hirabayashi's Story

Three men, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, defied President Franklin Roosevelt's order to 110,000 West Coast Japanese to submit to evacuation and imprisonment during World War II. Among their stories, Gordon Hirabayashi's has always struck me as the most dramatic.

Convinced that Executive Order 9066 was unconstitutional, he possessed the moral courage to defy it. He ignored a curfew placed on targeted Japanese, refused to post bail that would have sent him to a prison camp, and challenged the government on the constitutionality of the Order. Upon conviction, lacking the funds to get himself from Seattle, where he had been at senior at the University of Washington, he hitchhiked to Tuscon, where he was to serve out his sentence, sleeping in ditches along the way.

Forty-three years later, Hirabayashi's conviction (upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943) was overturned by a San Francisco federal appeals court. Earlier this year, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

So I was excited to hear that actor and playwright Jeanne Sakata's play about Hirabayashi, Hold These Truths, was coming to New York's Epic Theater. Last night Sakata spoke at a meeting of JAJA (an informal group of Japanese Americans and Japanese living in New York) at the Manhattan loft of Tamio Spiegel and Julie Azuma.

It was fascinating to hear the story of how Sakata's initial curiosity about Hirabayashi turned into a driving passion, inspiring her to try her hand at play writing for the first time. She forged a relationship with Hirabayashi, and immersed herself in his correspondence and papers at the University of Washington library. She lucked out, meeting Hirabashi when he was in his early 80s, his memory sharp and his naturally sunny personality on full display. Hirabayashi died in January after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for a number of years, at 93.

Hirabayashi's personality was so positive in fact, that pinpointing those moment of self-doubt and anguish that Sakata  knew she needed to give her one-man play dramatic tension proved to be one of the challenges of the project. Even though Hirabayashi gave her licence to "just make up" what she lacked, she preferred not to; luckily she came across enough early primary source material to illuminate those desperate moments. One  such discovery came when she learned that when Hirabayashi's parents were brought from their prison camp to Seattle to testify against him, the government refused to put them up in decent lodgings, instead making them stay in his prison cell with him. Hirabayashi swore he would never forgive the U.S. government for doing that to his parents. He was also, Sakata told the audience, deeply anguished over the pain he caused his mother by his actions, which she feared would separate him from the family forever. 

Asked how she felt about a non-Japanese, playing the role of Hirabayashi (Filipino American Joel de la Fuente stars), Sakata noted that the theaters at which Hold These Truths has been staged all conduct open auditions, and that all the leading Japanese American male actors who might have fit the part were busy working, which for any actor is  "a good thing."

From all reports this latest incarnation of the play is moving, beautifully acted and powerful theater; I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Hold These Truths

By Jeanne Sakata

Starring Joel de la Fuente

Epic Theater

344 E. 14th St.

New York, NY 1009

Through November 18

National History Day Competition Entry Spotlights WWII U.S. Government Prison Camps

A while back, I was interviewed by two fifth graders and one sixth grader from Acaciawood School in Anaheim, California. They were preparing their entry for something called the National History Day competition, and their topic was the illegal forced roundup and imprisonment of West Coast people of Japanese descent during World War II.

I answered a series of questions from the team of girl researchers, Emma Chen, Rachel Kuai and Emily Rangel, and referred them to a Nisei friend and former Military Intelligence Service buddy of my father's in Michigan, Nob Shimokochi. 

Little did I expect that their final product would be this polished, impressive website.* Over half a million kids a year participate in the competition, according to NHD's site, so it was a big deal for Emma, Rachel and Emily to advance first through the county level competition for their category, and then win the state competition to gain the right to compete for the national award in Washington, D.C.

The finals were held earlier this week and I was pleased to hear from the girls that they got 7th place in the junior group division. Congratulations, Emma, Rachel and Emily!

They worked on the project over the course of the school year, first visiting the Nixon Library to learn about primary resources. They visited the Manzanar National Historic Site, and they interviewed former Secretary of Commerce and Transportation Norman Mineta and numerous other people. It's an impressive body of work that they can be proud of forever.

To give you a sense of how good the entries were, go to the NHD home page and click on the "student web sites" box in the left-hand column. Another entry I particularly liked was the winner of the senior individual web site category on the Meiji Restoration.

* [One thing I should note is that for their web site, the Acaciawood girls use term "internment camp," which is widely used and understood, though it is one that many others dislike, and point out is a euphemism. For more on that, see Densho's note on terminology.]

Confession of Error: Justice Department Finally Admits it was Wrong in Hirabayashi v. United States

 In May 2011, Neal Katyal, then Acting Solicitor General of the U.S., issued a “confession of error” on behalf of his office for defending the mass government roundup and imprisonment of U.S. citizens and immigrants of Japanese descent during World War II.

Last night Katyal, who is now a law professor at Georgetown University and a partner in the firm Hogan Lovells, LLP, spoke about this confession of error in a talk at Fordham Law School. He described how in 1943 Solicitor General Charles Fahey had to defend the government’s actions when the appeal of conscientious objector Gordon Hirabayashi, who had been convicted of violating curfew during the earlier forced roundup, reached the Supreme Court. Although Fahey was aware of intelligence reports that found that the vast majority of Japanese Americans did not pose a security threat, he papered over that evidence, leading to the Court unanimously uphold  Hirabayashi’s conviction in June 1943. You can read a blog post Katyal wrote on the confession of error here.

In a way, Katyal’s talk was a tribute to Justice Department lawyers Charles Ennis and John Burling, who fought hard to “challenge the system from within” and urged Fahey not to fight Hirabayashi’s appeal and those of Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui, even as Fahey made “arguments that were products of their time.” After Assistant Attorney General and Columbia law professor Herbert Weschler drafted a footnote to the government’s brief fudging Justice’s position in order to prevent any accusations of suppression of evidence, Ennis and Burling reluctantly signed their names to it.

   

Katyal told the audience his “greatest regret” was that Hirabayashi did not receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom during this life time, as Korematsu was able to do. Since posthumous awards are sometimes given, Katyal added, “I would very much like to see that.”

The talk, directed at a hall full of law students and law professors, was a footnote to the story of the World War II incarceration, yet poignant and relevant as well. Katyal’s advice to current Justice Department officials prosecuting the war on terror: “Because the courts lack institutional competencies in war matters [Justice Department lawyers] have to make the most accurate briefs and have to explain their reasoning…their duty of candor means they have to be absolutely sure to tell every part of the story.” Let’s hope that the current staff in Washington heeds Katyal’s message.

A new musical set in Heart Mountain, an indy film featuring Manzanar

Last week, I attended a workshop production of a musical called Allegiance, which tells the tale of the unconstitutional imprisonment of 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese descent during World War II. The show is being developed by the Old Globe in San Diego, with music and lyrics by composer/producer Jay Kuo and book by Kuo and Lorenzo Thione.

 Having looked at popular depictions of this sad chapter of American history in the decades since World War II, I was interested to see how the musical, directed by Stafford Arima, would tell this story through the medium of musical theater.

The play follows the Omura family as they are abruptly uprooted from their lives as shopkeepers and students in Salinas, Ca. and sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo. Father Tatsuo (Paul Nakauchi) is a defiant Issei (like all Japanese immigrants at the time, barred from becoming a U.S. citizen) who refuses to sign the infamous “loyalty oath” swearing allegiance to and willingness to fight for the U.S. and forswearing allegiance to the Emperor and Japan. As American-born citizens, his sons James (Jose Llana) and Sam (Telly Leung) express the sentiments of the majority of Nisei at the time—the wish to prove their loyalty to America at any cost. James volunteers to fight in the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat team, and Sam throws himself into the camp newspaper, The Heart Mountain Sentinel to write pro-America articles.

The production stars George Takei as old Sam (the story is structured as one long flashback, with a young and an old Sam). Lea Salonga is young Sam’s Japanese teacher and the fiancée of James.  In Heart Mountain, father and sons are on opposite sides of the tense political divide that separated loyalist Nisei, led by the accommodationist Japanese American Citizen’s League, and the vocal and defiant “No-No Boys,” who refused to sign the loyalty oath and protested their unjust imprisonment.

Opinion about this play will likely be divided among the Japanese American community that watches it, too. First, there is the squeamish uncertainty: is this going to be a Springtime for Hitler-like attempt at concentration camp musical theater? Turning deeply resonant Issei sayings (shikata-ga-nai/”it can’t be helped,” gaman/“persevere, do your best”) into the lyrics for a Broadway-style song-and-dance musical at first struck me as bizarre, and slightly cringe inducing. The songs, though, turned out to be moving tributes to the stoicism and unquenchable spirit of the prisoners.

Then there is the matter of historical accuracy. One friend, well-versed in Heart Mountain history, objected to the way the “No-No Boys” are treated as a mere plot device to gin up some drama, and their views not fully explained and honored. On the opposite end of the spectrum, viewers at earlier workshops apparently complained that toadying JACL head Mike Masaoka, as played by Paolo Montalban, was too much of a buffoon.

Yet there is a long history of musicals using the raw material of history as fodder for popular entertainment; think Evita, Porgy and Bess (which started as an opera), Les Miserables, and 1776, for example. The first two, especially, were criticized for factual inaccuracies, yet their mass appeal brought small pieces of history—however fudged, cheesed up, glamorized and overwrought the final product—to a mass viewership that most documentary filmmakers and historians can only dream of.

The musical’s outlook on the legality and morality of the mass roundup is in line with today’s views of the evacuation and concentration camps as a gross breach of civil rights and a stain on America’s reputation: JACL leader Mike Masaoka is portrayed as a spineless puppet, the “lapdog of the WRA” (War Relocation Authority, the government body created to oversee the mass incarceration), who suggests that suicide squads of Japanese American soldiers be sent into battle to prove how loyal the Japanese are to America. The camp director installs young Sam as a government mouthpiece at the Sentinel, using him as “bait” to get to the dissident inmates. (In fact, as my friend points out, there was no hiding of the No-No boys; they expressed their views and suffered the consequences of being sent to the even harsher Tule Lake concentration camp.)

This approach is a far cry from Ansel Adams’s 1943 collection of writings and photographs of Manzanar, Born Free and Equal. In it, Adams took pains to both praise the industry and neatness of the prisoners but called the concentration camps “only a rocky wartime detour on the road of American citizenship…a symbol of the whole pattern of relocation—a vast expression of a government working to find suitable haven for its war-dislocated minorities.”

I overheard two people sitting behind me talking about the evacuation and incarceration as a “sad chapter” in American history and “one we don’t hear about.” I hope that Allegiance will get more people talking about it, and send them to the history books to find out the full story of what happened. 

***                                                      

                

The indy film Littlerock, directed by CalArts graduate Mike Ott, has been pulling in favorable reviews on the festival circuit. I went to see a local screening because it stars two young Japanese actors, Atsuko Okatsuka and Rintaro Sawamoto as a brother and sister (also named Atsuko and Rintaro in the film) stranded in a dusty dead-end California town. Even more interesting to me, it features a trip to Manzanar.

Ott slaps two very Japanese characters down in the middle of Littlerock, a podunk Antelope Valley town where the young people pass the time drinking, partying, fantasizing about getting out, and trying to scrape by. They are befriended by a hapless dreamer, Cory, who pulls them into his circle. While Rintaro soon tires of the scene, Atsuko, getting in touch with her inner slacker and relishing the sheer otherness of this aimless existence, opts to stay behind and explore a budding romance.

Manzanar as their destination, along with San Francisco, is alluded to, but we don’t really know why these otherwise typical Japanese siblings want to visit the site of the former World War II Japanese concentration camp. Although Rintaro’s Japanese is serviceable, Atsuko, from the beginning to the end of the film, doesn’t utter a word of English. Her face is a blank slate; one of the few clues to her inner life comes from her voiced-over letters to her father. We learn that he and her brother are estranged, and that she lies to her father and tells him she is in San Francisco when she’s actually learning to make burritos at Cory’s father’s Mexicatessen.

                

Themes of racism, cultural difference and language barriers gain new resonance and the tone of the film abruptly shifts when Rintaro and Atsuko arrive at Manzanar, now a National Parks Service site, and tour the interpretive center. There are clips of FDR’s speech after Pearl Harbor, images of racist signs, and the “soul-consoling tower” ireito, or obelisk that marks the prison camp cemetery. It’s an abrupt and jarring shift to documentary mode, and we at last find out that there is a personal connection between the siblings and the camp. Atsuko muses to her father in a letter what her life might have been like had the war and the concentration camps not happened, and had she been born in America. But the final scene, a frustrating farewell phone call between Atsuko and Corey, who still can’t understand a word each other says, hints that the racial and communication divides that caused such trauma continue today.