Category Archives: Teachers

CONSCIENCE DVD part of new online teachers course

Densho Online CourseThe Densho online video archive is already a remarkable accomplishment: the filming, transcribing, archiving and posting of more than 1,600 hours of video interviews and over 12,000 historic photos, documents, and newspapers, all sharing the direct experience of incarceration in one of America’s concentration camps for Japanese Americans in World War II. The raw tapes of all 26 interviews we conducted for CONSCIENCE are archived there and available online, in what’s unavoidably dubbed the “Frank Abe Collection.”

Executive director Tom Ikeda and company have now taken their collection to the next level. After years of work they have synthesized the stories and images in their collection and organized them into a new online course, “Teaching WWII Japanese American Incarceration with Primary Sources.”

But there’s more. Among the benefits for completing the course and filling out an evaluation, teachers will receive a certification of completion to document professional development hours, and a copy of our new Two-Disc Collectors Edition DVD of CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION, documenting the largest organized resistance to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

“The online course helps teachers create classroom activities to encourage students to closely examine and question what people say,” says Ikeda. “The men in Abe’s film questioned the government’s action to draft them from behind barbed wire, which led to their civil disobedience. We want teachers and students to see how thinking deeply about an issue can lead to action.”

Thanks to Densho for its longtime support of our project and for sharing our DVD with new teachers and students. The complete course takes about six hours to complete and it’s completely free, so sign up now.

REVIEW: Frank Chin’s Great Chinese American Novel

Confessions coverThis 1970s-era novel by Frank Chin, published for the first time today by the University of Hawaii Press, predates his work with the Heart Mountain resisters who are the subject of this blog. But as a Friend of the Fair Play Committee, the surprise recovery and restoration of Frank’s unpublished first novel is a story as notable as his recovery of the buried history of the resisters.

For the occasion, I wrote a review of the book for International Examiner arts editor Alan Lau:

A first look at Frank Chin’s Great Chinese American Novel

The Confessions of a Number One Son by Frank Chin
edited with an introduction by Calvin McMillin

reviewed by Frank Abe
special to the International Examiner, April 1-April 14, 2015

newspaper coverThe emergence 40 years later of a tightly edited, slimmed-down version of a long-lost novel from the writer who first defined Asian American literature is an unexpected gift.

That’s because to read The Confessions of a Number One Son in 2015 is to peel back the decades and discover the creative foundation of the plays and later fiction of Frank Chin, in the moment before he became consumed with the polemics of separating the real from the fakery in the work of others.

In an early 1970s America where the postwar generation was just coming of age—where the world still celebrated the model minority, the Chinese Christian autobiographies of Betty Lee Sung and Pardee Lowe, and the movie stereotype of Charlie Chan—Frank Chin was putting a self-proclaimed Chinaman voice at the center of his stories. It was an act of self-invention he was perfecting in tandem with his better-known stage plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman and Year of the Dragon.  Read more …

Chin review

All forms of camp resistance are focus of Suyama Project

A new project out of UCLA has an ambitious goal: to preserve the history of the entire range of dissidence and resistance to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Suyama Project web banner

The full title is a mouthful: The Eji Suyama, 100th Battalion/442nd RCT Draftees, No-Nos, Draft Resisters and Renunciants Archival Collection Endowment. Eji himself was a  Nisei vet who survived the rescue of the Lost Battalion, a chief of surgery in Maine, and a frequent voice in the vernacular press who would caution against the super-patriotism of the postwar JACL and many veterans’ groups while championing the principled stands of the draft resisters and others. We received several letters from him in support of our film while in production.

The Suyama Project has an interesting take in recognizing that even small acts of defiance, like stealing lumber to make furniture or sneaking out of camp to go fishing, could be considered acts of everyday resistance to government authority. The project’s mandate, however, is to collect archival material on all dissent, including the various riots and civil unrest, the military resisters, the Moab and Leupp Citizen Isolation Centers, and the focus of a community forum March 7 in San Francisco: the unique story of the men in Block 42 at Tule Lake.

audienceA full house at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center turned out to hear the story of Block 42, where  in February of 1943 military police illegally rounded up three dozen men for refusing to answer either a Selective Service questionnaire or an Application for Leave Clearance, both of which included a troubling loyalty oath.

kashiwagiPlaywright Hiroshi Kashiwagi testified to what he witnessed: the ringing of the mess hall bells at 5pm sounding the alarm of the arrests, the military police hauling out the men from  Block 42, the mothers and sisters screaming for the men not to be taken.

brothers2Mamoru “Mori” and James Tanimoto of Gridley told how they were sent to an outside jail and then held without charge at a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp. There they were interrogated, rousted at night under bright lights, and made to hear the clicks of guards ominously loading their rifles as if ready to shoot, making the men believe they were going to be executed. Then from the darkness a voice shouted no one was going to escape under his watch, and the men were returned to their barrack.

From the audience, Ben Takeshita shared a similar story of mental torment, of how his brother Spencer had been taken to the CCC camp, put before a firing squad, offered a blindfold, and watched helplessly as the soldiers were given the commands “ready, aim … fire,” as blanks were fired.

After one month, the War Department and FBI told the Tule Lake camp director that he had no legal authority to arrest people for failing to sign an administrative form, and the men of Block 42 were returned to camp. Hiroshi joked that he always thanked the Block 42 boys for “taking the rap” for other no-no’s in camp, as he in Block 40 and others at Tule were never themselves arrested.

The Tanimoto’s have told their story before, at Tule Lake Pilgrimages past, but as Barbara Takei observed the story was not documented outside that circle. The Suyama Project is looking for more stories and materials of this kind for its archival collection, and we urge your support. Its website provides several links to this site and our film.

And thanks to project coordinator dvdsMartha Nakagawa for recognizing CONSCIENCE and RABBIT IN THE MOON in her remarks as “the two films that together led JACL to apologize” for its wartime suppression of camp resistance.

In Memoriam: Henry Miyatake, visionary for redress

photo: Densho EncyclopediaHenry Miyatake did not appear in our film, but we could not have told the story of the Heart Mountain resisters without first establishing a common foundation of understanding about the underlying facts of the incarceration. And we could never have those facts acknowledged without Henry’s vision of winning an apology and compensation for constitutional violations from the U.S. government.

It’s no exaggeration to call Henry the father of Japanese American redress. In the 70s he railed against Mike Masaoka’s “Japanese American Creed” when its words were used against him by a Boeing Company manager to levy a 25 percent pay cut. He researched and wrote the “American Promise,” apologizing for and rescinding FDR’s Executive Order 9066, which was signed by President Ford in 1976. Henry oversaw production of the very first Day of Remembrance in the nation. And he conceived the innovative “Seattle Plan” for redress and reparations, the essence of which was signed a decade later by President Reagan.

Henry passed away quietly in Federal Way, WA, on September 16. But the Seattle community would not let him go without some closure, as Bob Shimabukuro expressed so well in the International Examiner, “Remembering Henry Miyatake: A man with the plan.” So we held a community memorial service for Henry on Saturday, Dec. 6, at the Nisei Veterans Memorial Hall in Seattle. I said a few words, which were preceded by clips from Henry’s video interview for the Densho Project, which you can watch with a free registration.

“Day of Remembrance and Henry’s Impact on Redress”
Saturday, December 6, 2014

photo: Eileen Yamada-LamphereWe just saw the great value of The Densho Project. Thanks to Densho we will always have Henry’s image and words to remember him by. And seeing him again, I am reminded how that man could talk. Once you got him started, look out. Like Tom said, he had to interview Henry six different times to get his whole life story.

That was part of Henry’s charm. He could talk, and this was a time when we needed people who could talk. But he was also about action.

You have to remember that in the late 70s, the very subject of the camps was open to argument in the newspaper and radio. For every one of us who just mentioned incarceration, there was a war veteran quick to remind people that we attacked Pearl Harbor, or we were put in camp for our protection.

But Henry had a vision. He created a set of flip charts, as you saw in that photo. If we’d had PowerPoint back then, Henry would have made a PowerPoint presentation. But this was the 70s, all he had was paper, and he was a brilliant engineer, so he created flip charts. And he shopped his flip charts all over town. He’d talk to any group that would listen.

I was a young kid fresh from California, and Henry was unlike any Nisei I had ever met. He was unafraid. He thought nothing of going to a Congressman like Brock Adams to get his support, or of working his connections with Governor Dan Evans, or with State Supreme Court Justice Charles Z. Smith, who we are honored to have with us today.

I met Henry through Frank Chin. Frank was writing a piece for the Seattle Weekly about Henry’s flipchart plan. Frank thought the move for redress was bold, and he wanted to help publicize it.

Now Frank was big on ideas. He said let’s call it a Day of Remembrance. His first idea was for us to recreate the eviction and form a car caravan down to the Puyallup Fairgrounds, to go down on Thanksgiving Day, and once we got there, we’d get out and all chain ourselves to the fence. He thought that would be great television.

Henry screamed that Frank was nuts. No one’s gonna go out on Thanksgiving. It had to be a family event, he said, and people want to be with their families on Thanksgiving. So between the two of them we arrived at the program you see on the poster, framed as a formal invitation for the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  And not a protest, but a family potluck.

We nailed those posters to telephone poles, just like in 1942.  Just using the words “Remember the camps / Stand for redress with your family” was touchy with a lot of people. We took the poster to Imperial Lanes, and the manager refused to let us put it up. “I have a lot of white customers here. I don’t want any trouble.”

The signs invited people to assemble in a vacant lot next to the old Seattle Pilots baseball park, where Lowe’s is now. And on the morning of Nov. 25, we were stunned when we arrived at Sick’s Stadium and found a thousand people waiting in line with cars. People were ready for this to happen.

Ben Nakagawa arranged for the use of some National Guard trucks and buses. The driver didn’t know how to get to the Puyallup Fairground, so Henry had to sit in the first vehicle as a guide. And Diana, you may not remember this but you wanted to ride up front with him. But Henry saw another friend of mine from San Francisco,. Benjamin Tong, sitting in the cargo bed of a big 6-wheel-drive Army truck. And Henry says, “How come you’re riding in this truck?” And Ben says, “I want to know how it felt to be taken to camp in a truck, I want to go through the same experience that you guys did.”

So Henry says, “Well, Diana, you ride with Dr. Tong so you can experience what we went through.” And that’s what Diana did, riding in the back of Army truck in the cold November wind, at the head of a 2-and-a-half mile-long car caravan snaking down southbound I-5. And like he said in the video, inside the cars, parents opened up to their kids for the first time. Yasuko Takezawa calls it, “the event that burst open the tomb of Japanese American history.

And every newspaper and TV station was there to see the largest gathering of Japanese Americans in one place in Seattle since, well, since World War 2. We showed we could get the media on our side. And what people had feared most, never happened. There was no white backlash. No angry mob. No “rekindling of old resentments and racism.”

Day of Remembrance made it safe for people across the country to step out of the shadow. We sparked the popular movement for redress and reparations that led ten years later to President Reagan signing the Civil Liberties Act for an apology and individual compensation. Today Days of Remembrance are an invented tradition, observed wherever Japanese Americans live.

But taking credit, being in the limelight, was never for Henry.

For one of our newsletters Karen Seriguchi interviewed Henry and asked him, “Do you see yourself as a leader?” “No, I do not,” said Henry. “I ‘m one of the ditch-diggers. Hopefully, all the others will be digging the same way.”

Henry was not there when President Ford signed his American Promise. He was not in the photo when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act. But neither of those turning points that fundamentally changed our history would have been imaginable without the dogged persistence, the selfless commitment, and the unassuming courage of Henry Miyatake.

And that’s why we’re all here today, to remember Henry and to let his family know that as long as our voices are heard, we will never let Henry’s life and achievements be forgotten. Henry taught us to look our history in the eye, with the passion of a professor and the inescapable logic of an engineer.

Henry was a great ditch-digger. He was the conscience of our community. He was my hero, my mentor, and my friend, and I, like you, will deeply miss him.

Update: December 23, 2014
See more stories about Henry in this new obit that was requested by the Nichi Bei Weekly out of San Francisco,

James Omura and Frank Emi included in new exhibits

The legacies of journalist James Omura and the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee live on in two new museum exhibits opening this month in Washington, DC and Seattle.

Newseum exhibit graphicOn May 16, the Newseum, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, opened “One Nation With News for All,” an exhibition on the origins and influence of the ethnic media in the U.S.  One section discusses free speech during WWII, specifically highlighting this photo of James Omura as the editor of Denver’s Rocky Shimpo, with this description:

Fighting for Free Speech During World War II

Omura_NewWorldDaily watermarkedShortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forced into internment camps by the U.S. government. Despite this, the men in the camps were still called up for American military service. James Omura, editor of Denver’s Rocky Shimpo newspaper for Japanese Americans, risked jail by publishing stories about a draft resistance movement at a Wyoming internment camp. Charged with conspiracy to counsel draft evaders, Omura was acquitted on free speech grounds.

The Omura photo is also used on an interactive kiosk featuring 100 pioneering ethnic media outlets from Colonial America to today. Visitors can touch the map and find out more about those news organizations.

The mission of the Newseum in Washington, DC, is to champion the five freedoms of the First Amendment through education, information and entertainment. It blends news history with technology and hands-on exhibits. “News for All” will be on display there through Jan. 4, 2015.

in struggleThe mug shot of Frank Emi at Leavenworth is included in the program for a new exhibit in Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum  of the Asian Pacific Experience, “In Struggle: Asian American Acts of Resistance.”  We uncovered the prison mug shot in time for inclusion on the menu animation for Disc Two of our DVD.  The exhibit is on view through January 18, 2015.

in struggle

 

Video and audio of the year in review

Happy new year. It was a busy 2013 — so busy that we’re only now catching up to posting new video, audio and images from events of the past year: three panels at the JANM national conference and two fall screenings.

JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSUEUM national conference – July 5, 2013

Arlene Oki, Frank Abe, Yasuko Takezawa
Click on the montage to hear audio from our redress panel, featuring (L to R) Arlene Oki, Frank Abe and Yasuko Takezawa

The museum recently provided an audio recording of our panel on redress and creation of the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle. Click on the montage above to hear about the “Tangled Routes to Japanese American Redress.”

Frank Abe and Jeanne Houston

It was a great pleasure to catch up with an old friend, and my former housing officer at UC Santa Cruz, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. We enjoyed a lively discussion after a screening of her “Farewell to Manzanar,” in which I was forced to relive my on-screen character’s  beating at the hands of one of Hanako Wakatsuski’s uncles, or so she says. The museum website promises an audio file will be forthcoming.

Tak Hoshizaki
Click on the image to hear audio of the panel, “Standing on Principle,” with Heart Mountain resister Tak Hoshizaki (above), Professor Tets Kashima, and author Mary Woodward

In another audio file you can hear Heart Mountain resister Tak Hoshizaki present his fascinating insider’s look at the Fair Play Committee, “Kiyoshi Okamoto and the Four Franks,” which you can also read online here. Joining him in the “Standing on Principle” panel were Professor Tets Kashima and author Mary Woodward.

Thanks to Tracy Kumono for all the sharp photographs from the JANM conference.

FIFE HISTORY MUSUEM: “Rights, Rations, Remembrance” exhibit – October 17, 2013

Fife History Museum audienceOf the hundreds of screenings we’ve done over the years, this one was memorable for the number of Fife residents for whom this history is a living memory, and who brought that energy and interest to the film. This Facebook photo album shows the nearly 100 who joined us for a special evening. Museum director Molly Wilmoth has since moved on, but thanks to her for choosing our film to launch their museum program series.

NAGOMI TEA HOUSE: “Nikkei Heroes” film series – November 2, 2013

Nagomi Tea House posterAnother special program this year was one aimed at the Japanese-speaking community in Seattle. This was the first time in the U..S. that we screened CONSCIENCE with the Japanese subtitles created for the Fukuoka Film Festival in 2001. It was the first event in a ”Nikkei Heroes” film series at the Nagomi Tea House, a new performance venue inside the old Uwajimaya supermarket at 6th and Weller. Our thanks for the support of Uwajimaya owner Tomio Moriguchi and Hokubei Hochi Foundation director Elaine Ko.

Two videos are posted here. The first is a link to my introduction to the film.  The second video, embedded below, captures the Q and A after the screening. The second video begins abruptly after these opening words were already heard:

“As I was growing up, the party line in our community was that our response to the forced expulsion was represented by one of two catchphrases. The first was ‘Shikataganai,’ Japanese for “it can’t be helped.” Passive resignation in the face of injustice. The second was ‘Go For Broke,’ Hawaiian slang for “go all out, give 100 percent.” That just didn’t seem right…. “

The video picks up from there:

Thanks for a busy and productive 2013. Here’s looking forward to what the new year brings.

Screening in Seattle with Japanese subtitles

Here’s something new: a special program aimed at the Japanese-speaking community in Seattle, in which we’ll screen CONSCIENCE subtitled in Japanese. An original poster has been produced for the event.
Nagomi Tea House poster

This is the first event in a “Nikkei Heroes” film series at the Nagomi Tea House, the new performance venue inside the old Uwajimaya supermarket at 6th and Weller. We’ll be using a version of our film with Japanese subtitles that were created for the Fukuoka Film Festival in 2001.

The screening is coming up Saturday, November 2, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm, at 519 6th Avenue South. Admission is free with a donation suggested. You can register for tickets through this Eventbrite registration. The series is presented by the Hokubei Hochi Foundation, the North American Post, and Soy Source.

Screening with panel at Fife History Museum

Two screenings coming up in the Seattle region this month and next. The first is Thursday, October 17 at 7:00 pm, at the Fife History Museum, in connection with its fine new exhibit on the home front in WW2.  Full details below. Please join us and sign up on our Facebook Event page. The poster has a great caption:

Fife History Museum poster

A Film and Panel Discussion at Fife History Museum Bring Japanese American Internment to Light

Join the Fife History Museum for the second free event in a series related to the latest exhibit Rights, Rations, Remembrance: Fife in World War II taking place on October 17 at 7pm.  The event includes a showing of the controversial World War II documentary by director Frank Abe, Conscience and the Constitution, followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker and local historian.  Conscience and the Constitution reveals the long-untold story of the organized draft resistance at the American concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and the suppression of that resistance by Japanese American leaders.

A lively discussion featuring Abe, local historian Ronald Magden, Tacoma attorney Daniel C. Russ, and Puyallup Valley chapter head of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Elsie Taniguchi will follow the showing of the film.

Magden, a highly regarded educator and author with long-time roots in Pierce Country who alto taught at Tacoma Community College for many years after graduating in 1965 with a PhD in History from the University of Washington, is known by many for spending over thirty years of his life dedicated to the telling of history and development of longshore union activity on the Pacific Coast.

He is respected for his well researched volume Furusato: Tacoma-Pierce County Japanese, 1888-1977, published by the Tacoma Longshore Book and Research Committee in 1998, which provides what may be the most comprehensive look at Tacoma’s Japanese community.

Daniel Russ graduated with his J.D. from the Seattle University School of Law. Currently, he is a partner at Britton and Russ, PLLC, with offices in Tacoma and Puyallup, and a Lt. Colonel (JAG) in the Washington Air National Guard.

Besides serving on numerous boards of directors for charitable organizations, Russ is also active with the JACL and is spearheading a collaborative effort to preserve the history of Camp Harmony at the Washington State Fairgrounds.

A distinguished member of the JACL, Elsie Taniguchi currently serves as the head of the Puyallup Valley chapter.  She was interned with her family at Camp Harmony in 1942 before being sent to Camp Minidoka for the duration of the war.  After being contacted by the Fife History Museum, Taniguchi was instrumental in assisting in developing the museum’s collections and exhibition of Japanese and Japanese American artifacts related to Fife’s history.  The museum’s collections include numerous artifacts her family used while interned.

Former broadcast journalist and award-winning reporter for KIRO News Radio in Seattle, Frank Abe is producer/director of Conscience and the Constitution.

He is a founding member of the Seattle chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association and served as national vice-president for broadcast. He first served as Director of Communications for former King County Executive Gary Locke in 1994, then for the Metropolitan King County Council and now presently serves in the same post for current King County Executive Dow Constantine.

Abe is a third-generation Japanese American whose pre-broadcast days as a pioneering actor and community activist has drawn decades of respect and admiration from his peers. He helped produced the very first “Day of Remembrance” in the country, which dramatized the campaign for redress for survivors of America’s wartime concentration camps. He helped found the Asian American Theatre Company in San Francisco and was featured in the 1976 NBC/Universal TV movie Farewell to Manzanar as a concentration camp leader.

The Fife History Museum and Dacca Barn are located at 2820 – 54th Avenue East, Fife, WA.  Admission to the Fife History Museum is always free.

For additional information about the Fife History Museum or any of the programs listed here please contact Molly Wilmoth by calling the museum at (253) 896-4710, send an email to [email protected] or find us on Facebook at Fife History Museum.

See also this video preview created by Pierce County Television:

Next up: a November 2 screening in Seattle aimed at a Japanese-speaking audience.

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.