Stop the Fence at Tule Lake

Join the growing movement and sign the petition to Stop the Fence at Tule Lake. More than 500 people have now sent emails via the Change.org online petition sponsored by the Tule Lake Committee, urging the FAA to deny an 8-foot high fence around the local airport that is evidently used mostly for local crop-dusting planes.

Outline of proposed fence at Tulelake Airport
The outlines of the Tule Lake National Monument and of the Tulelake Municipal Airport are superimposed on a wartime photo of the Tule Lake Segregation Center. You can see how a fence around the airport would destroy the physical and emotional integrity of the site. Artwork by Evan Johnson.

Tule Lake is ground zero for the government and JACL program to segregate dissidents and so-called “troublemakers” inside America’s WW2 concentration camps. Conscience and the Constitution touches upon this. Tule Lake is the last great untold story in Japanese America. Several films about the Segregation Center are in the works. I urge the FAA to deny the fence and keep the landscape and horizon of the Tule Lake site unbroken, and protect the physical and historic integrity of the site for visitors and filmmakers.

Petition backer Evan Johnson questions claims that the fence is even needed for aviation. He writes, “I don’t get the motivation for the fence – which serves no realistic safety function. This airport is essentially the crop-duster operation, essentially serving one man.” Johnson also provides the following research:

  • Percentage of aircraft wildlife strikes that are deer strikes: 2
  • Number of deer strikes in California between 1982–2000: 13
  • Number of reported strikes of any wildlife anywhere in Modoc County: 0
  • Month during which most deer strikes occur: November
  • Time of day at which deer strikes are most likely: Dusk
  • Number of owners with registered aircraft at Tulelake airport: 3
  • Number of aircraft which they currently registered: 10
  • Number of those registered to Nick Macy: 8
  • Amount of money in farm subsidies paid by the USDA to Modoc County in 2010: $464,000
  • Amount one registered owner of a single plane at Tulelake airport received between 1995–2010: $298,792
  • Estimated average cost to build 16,000 feet of 8′ chain link fence: $303,840
  • To build that fence topped with barbed wire: $343,840
  • Number of times per day the FAA recommends walking an airport fence circumference for inspection: 1
  • Number of employees at the Tulelake airport who will be doing this: 0

So please sign the petition at Change.org. Here again is the link. Also, go the Facebook page for “Stop the Fence at Tule Lake” and LIKE it. Thanks.

Revisiting “Farewell to Manzanar” and the revolt against the JACL

The screening and discussion of Farewell to Manzanar this Friday night at the Japanese American National Museum annual conference in Seattle provides an opportunity to share these newly-rediscovered photographs taken by photographer Nancy Wong.

rioters in truck
Mako, Lawson Inada, Frank Chin, and extras recruited from the Bay Area Asian community prepare to recreate the Manzanar Riot for the 1976 NBC/Universal film, FAREWELL TO MANZANAR. Photo by Nancy Wong.

Nancy shot these on location on the grounds of the former Santa Rita state prison in the summer of 1975 while we were assembled to recreate the Manzanar Riot of December 6, 1942. Mako played “Sam Fukimoto,” the character based on Harry Ueno, the fiery leader of the Kitchen Workers Union whose arrest for the beating of Los Angeles JACL leader Fred Tayama, played in the film by myself as “Frank Nishi,” sparked the Manzanar Riot.

The AIIIEEEEE boys with one actor
Three of the editors of the groundbreaking literary anthology AIIIEEEEE! with the brother of the fourth, posing on location for FAREWELL TO MANZANAR: (from left) Lawson Inada, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, and Michael Paul Chan, who went on to perform in the cast of The Closer. Photo by Nancy Wong.

In my youthful enthusiasm I did not know that first-time film actors should not try rewriting their own lines, but that’s what I did the night before we shot the big mess hall confrontation with Mako/Sam Fukimoto/Harry Ueno — much to the dismay of scene partner Seth Sakai, whom I’d failed to notify and who cursed me after our scene and hurled his gloves in my direction, to the applause of the hundreds of extras in the scene. I have to thank director John Korty for allowing me to make the change. Among the extras were writers Toshio Mori and Shawn Wong.

But I felt compelled to make the scene more specific reading this seminal essay by Art Hansen and David Hacker that reconstructs the actual events in “The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective” [4MB], which had recently appeared in the fall 1974 issue of Amerasia Journal.

The piece reveals that one of the fundamental causes of the Manzanar Riot was not, as simplified in the film by Korty, simply a grumbling over sugar stolen from the mess hall. It was more, as mentioned in Conscience and told more fully in Jeanne Houston’s book,  a revolt against the power conferred by the government and the camp administration to the Japanese American Citizens League. As documented in Art and David’s essay, Fred Tayama and internee security chief Kiyoshi Higashi had returned the day before from an emergency meeting of the JACL in Salt Lake City attended by two delegates from each of the ten camps. In that meeting National JACL, enacting its own policies without any ratification or popular vote of the people, resolved to urge the U.S. government to reinstate Selective Service for the Nisei as a means of asserting their U.S. citizenship and proving their loyalty. As Hansen and Hacker wrote: “For the internees — Issei, Kibei, and Nisei — the time had come when something had to be done to prevent the corrosive effects of the JACLers … The events of December 6 were but a logical culmination of developments originating with the administration’s decision to bypass the community’s natural Issei leadership to deal with its own artificially erected JACL hierarchy and to embark on a program of Americanization at the expense of Japanese ethnicity.”

Watch that scene in the film in this light. The revolt against the JACL prefigured the resistance at Heart Mountain and other camps that occurred a year later, when the JACL plea for a Nisei draft was finally granted.

In a somewhat related aside, Frank Chin now claims that Bay Area radical activist and early Black Panther Richard Aoki — recently named as an FBI informant, a charge that’s also been disputed — was there with us on location. I never knew Aoki, but in an email Frank writes, “Remember the first day at Santa Rita? There was a fattish fella in a mustache and tee shirt passing out lemonade. That was Richard Aoki.” He later speculates, “Why was Richard Aoki at the Santa Rita FAREWELL TO MANZANAR shoot? … Aoki might have been getting acquainted with Yellow actors in the parts of camp activists and victims.” Or, maybe he was just there to ladle out refreshments. We may never know.

Resisters and redress at the Japanese American National Museum annual conference

Japanese American National Museum conference logoJapanese America comes to Seattle this weekend for the JA National Museum annual conference at the Seattle Sheraton, commemorating the 25th anniversary of winning redress for the camps.

Heart Mountain resister Tak Hoshizaki speaks Saturday at 2:00 pm on a panel called “Standing on Principle.” I’ll be there Friday sharing the Conscience DVD at a Marketplace exhibit table. I’m also speaking on a panel called the  “Tangled Routes to Japanese American Redress” — a title you’ll hear me dispute — and looking forward to reuniting with Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a Friday evening screening of Farewell to Manzanar, which the Museum recently freed from the clutches of Universal Studios for a long-overdue release on DVD. More on that in our next post.

newspaper article: "An Appeal for Action"
“An Appeal for Action” was the original manifesto of the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee. Written by Issei intellectual Shosuke Sasaki, it was mailed along with an audiocassette of Shosuke reading it to every chapter of the JACL in the mid-1970s, before we got it published as an op-ed in the Sunday Seattle Times as an advancer to the very first Day of Remembrance.

For the redress panel Friday we will welcome conferees to the region that, in our humble opinion, saved the redress campaign before it ever got off the ground. I will share the story of how the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee, with the advice and experience of writer Frank Chin, delivered the key strategy for reframing the issue after an AP story quoted California Senator S.I. Hayakawa calling the JACL’s resolution for redress “ridiculous,” and saying “The relocation was perfectly understandable … even the JACL supported it at the time.”The Wall Street Journal backed him up with an editorial titled, “Guilt Mongering.”

You could feel the air leading out of the redress balloon, until Seattle created and staged the first “Day of Remembrance” on Nov. 25, 1978, as a means of leveraging the media to tell our story and encouraging the local community to “remember the camps/stand for redress with your family.” At Friday’s panel we’ll talk about the turnout of 2,000 people — the largest single gathering of Japanese Americans since, well, World War II — that made national news and rallied our community behind our shared experience of incarceration and injustice.

photo of crowd
Despite the misleading caption, the first-ever Day of Remembrance was a joyous reunion and a taking-back of our shared history, with the not-too-subtle subtext of showing people like S.I. Hayakawa that Japanese Americans rejected any notion that “relocation was perfectly understandable.” Seattle Times photo by Pete LIddell.