THE MEMORIAL TO DR. CLIFFORD IWAO UYEDA
by Frank Chin
August 23, 2004
Doug --No RICHARD-- Wada always knew. Even back in the sixties when
everybody was a gang of inexperienced nobodies. He already knew.
Been there,
done that. Old news. His father Yori Wada was a regent of the University
of .California. Richard, like his father, vibrates with confidence
and knowledge.
I walked into the gym where the memorial was all ready, chairs
individually set up—and very small—from the days that Japanese were smaller.
High ceilings with beams-laminated two by twelve’s ran the
width of the building every twelve feet across the whole large wooden
gymnasium.
I sat on the bleacher benches pulled out from the back wall. A large
aisleway separated the bleachers from the foldout metal chairs painted
brown at the factory.
Richard was talking with someone passing out programs to “IN
MEMORIUM CLIFFORD IWAO UYEDA”
“No sitting in the bleachers, Frank. You’re in the fourth row
down there with those people.”
He called me by name. That meant he knew me. But I didn’t know
him. The eyes were the same, still sharp and knowing, but the glasses
were different. The hair cut the same, and the same as many or most of
the Japanese. I didn’t recognize him. His face had changed. His
mouth wasn't drawn up into a look of just having tasted something icky.
Or it might have been a reaction to my personality that had a way of
preceding me. It seemed he had a mustache and beard when I saw him years
ago. I didn't really know him, but I saw him around George Woo and the
first generation of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State. Perhaps
it was his mustache that made his mouth look like he was saying "Yuck!" He
had gained weight. He was hard for me to put together. I hadn’t
seen him in 23-25 years.
How did he know that I was coming? I hadn’t decided on coming
to Frisco till the day before I left. He couldn’t have known.
But he already had an assigned seat for me. Maeda, the Sacramento
State
prof who had given BORN IN THE USA a good and knowledgeable review
was here and on his feet with his hands in his pockets, was talking
with
Noboro Taguma who had had a stroke, and I had the impression he was
an old old man with emptiness in his eyes who spent all dry drooling
and
getting his sleeves all wet. But, Noboru was Noboru. Still cocky.
Still smiling. His handshake was quick and firm. The House of Taguma
is intact.
The stroke did have an affect on the brain. It shut off the smoking
urge.
I thanked
Prof. Maeda for his review of my book, and he said it wasn't that
good. He had defended the JACL at the end of the review.
But then
everybody did. He had actually read the book and talked about the
JACL being employed as official FBI "Confidential Informants" with
showy code names to flash in secret. He tells me that all his Japanese
American students after being told of the JACL betrayal and the camp
resistance, sided with the JACL against Japanese America and against
civil rights, for the opportunity to fight for the white man.
I thought it was interesting that all of them were willing to betray
their parents into camps to be held hostage to assure their obedience. "None
of them would even consider defending their civil rights and maybe get
their people out of camp before they go off to war?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"You should invite group of resisters to your class. And have them tell
the resisters why today's Japanese-Americans are cowardly and
treacherous and white supremacist," I said.
Hiroshi Kashiwagi comes over to say hello. He still hasn’t
aged from when I first met him thirty years ago. His play
LAUGHTER AND FALSE
TEETH was and still is the only play set in camp that makes
fun of a dirty little habit of some camp doctors and dentists had to charge
their
patients for their services, to make up for the maximum
of nineteen dollars a month they made in camp. It's easier to know nothing
and
write of pitiful
Japanese Americans being unjustly put into camps by the
whites too busy with the war to know anything about their own citizens. Boo
hoo camp!
Mits Koshyama arrived. He resisted the draft at Heart Mountain
when he was eighteen. His older brother paid for his membership
in the
Fair Play
Committee, and was a member himself, he believed resistance
to the draft was the right thing to do, but didn't have
the guts
to stand
against
the draft and the camps. Mits, like him believed resistance
was the right thing to do, but unlike his brother, he resisted.
He
defied
the JACL/
FBI campaign against civil rights and with 263 resisters
from eight out the ten concentration camps, as the people
taken
to them, and
put in,
to live, called them. "Relocation Centers," the people who
built them, but did not live anywhere, nearby called them. The Presidential
pardon reaffirmed the rights of people to talk about their civil rights
in a racially specific concentration camp. To punish them for breaking
a law--even in war time--is, using their word, "un-American." Japanese
America owes their civil rights to those that asserted
them, because they were born citizens of the USA, and stood
on
the rights as Americans.
Of course whites are confused. The resisters who stood
their ground on civil rights were not supported by their
own civil
rights organization,
the Japanese American Citizens League.
Japanese should have had the JACL role as masked G-Men,
explained by now. It's been sixty years. Did the Jews wait
for sixty
years to write
of the Jewish Police, Jews the work of Nazis, pressing
Jews to the rules in the Ghettoes? Did it take them sixty
years
to write
about
traitors
to their people, who took positions on the Judenradt, or
Jewish Council, an organization run by the Gestapo, to
fool the ghetto
people. An
organization eerily like the JACL. It's been my experience
since my meeting with
Lawson Inada at a launch party for Ishmael Reed's 1972
anthology that Japanese
America who had spent a part of their lives in camp, talked
of camps a lot. And they talked about the "inu" the "dogs," the
JACL everyone suspected of being the source of FBI and
talked about it, with a little chuckle.
In his review Maeda noticed that my book quoted an FBI
report that named Mike Masaoka and the JACL staff, "confidential Informants" with
their own code names. The staff had their own code names. I think they
liked, they really enjoyed knowing what the army and the FBI shared only
with them, and not with the Nisei. The Nisei didn't know their American-ness
was official, and Shhh! Secret! Mike Masaoka used to say "…there's
more I could tell you. But there are those things I can't tell you about,
even now!" He was still telling you he was a G-Man,
and knew more about things than you. You know nothing.
At a break in the first meeting of Tateishi's JACL Redress
Committee Meeting, in 1978, Dr. Uyeda said, "Mike
told me when I talked with him, that the JACL only agreed
to co
operate under protest.
He said it
was printed in the Minutes to the Emergency Council Meeting
of March 1942."
A frantic and short search of the JACL offices later, a pile
of souvenir mimeograph copies of the Emergency Council Meetings
of
March 1942,
(printed in 1947) were in Uyeda's hands. I asked if I might
have a copy. Cliff
Uyeda gave me a copy, then opened the one in his hand and read.
From that moment on, if he hadn't already, he was losing respect
for the
legend of Masaoka. Masaoka thought of the Emergency Council
Minutes would be
taken as the Japanese American equal to the much shorter Gettysburg
Address. A document of patriotism, and betrayal of the Japanese
American rights
and culture, to the whites for their own good. Without their
knowledge of course.
What they hoped to engineer was a process. Lose your history.
Lose your identity. Japanese Americans became Asian Americans,
and Asian
Americans
became ignorant of Japanese or Korean or Chinese children’s stories
but are perfectly conversant in LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, JACK AND THE
BEANSTALK, THE PIED PIPER OF HAMLIN and on and on. And from the Asian
America came "assimilation" or extinction. A
recent article in the New York Times had confirmed that
Japanese
Americans had married
out faster than they could reproduce and were extinct as
an identifiable American culture, extinct as an American
people.
The JACL policies
of 1942 had succeeded.
At one of the later interviews on tape, Uyeda said, that
Masaoka, "did
not act the advocate of the people, against the government. He acted
like an agent of the government." This he said before we had seen
the FBI papers, Aiko Herzig had peeled the pasties off the blacked out
words and names. I was afraid to name the names she had found. Art Hansen
had gotten his hands on the documents, and confirmed their authenticity.
The names of Masaoka and the JACL staff were uncovered, the proof the
JACL was a government agent and did not represent the Nisei, was in the
FBI's own words and the signed "confidential" reports
of the JACL.
It still felt like it took a lot of courage for Mits Koshiyama
to publicly present himself as a resister. Later, I realized
the people
I saw at
the memorial, were mostly supporters of the resisters.
His wife was a mama lion, watching out for her man. Her
eyes are always on Mits. He's become the symbol of the
Heart Mountain
Fair
Play Committee
in the San Jose-San Francisco area. He's had a heart attack
and a stroke. He was young and youthful when I met him
in 1980. Funny
and
feisty. "Every
family has a black sheep, and in my family it turned out
to be me," he
once said.
Aiko Tsuneishi arrives in the row behind me, and asks about
my son Sam. It's been years since she's seen him. He's
grown two
feet. He
still remembers
her oatmeal cookies, I tell her. Her husband Paul has become
lost, as usual. His father was a better poet than a farmer,
Paul always
said. We had helped each other gather interviews for his
collection of interviews
and transcripts, and my book. I spy him at the entrance
to the gym and
wave to attract his attention. Jim Hirabayashi comes over
to shake hands. He looks thinner and more frazzled by his
wife’s
cancer and at seventy taking over the upbringing of his
13 year old adopted
daughter
from China, than when I saw him two months ago in Eugene.
He was in African anthropology when he was made the first
Dean
of Ethnic
Studies
at SF
State. His qualifications for being Dean of Ethnic (Japanese
American) Studies seemed to be that he was the brother
of Gordon Hirabayashi,
who violated a military curfew order that applied only
to citizens of Japanese
ancestry and became the first resister. Jim Hirabayashi
seems talking the facts of a life that only by happenstance,
is
his, and describes
a sense of self protected from any identification with
anyone or anything before 1950. He didn't know his brother
that
well, the age
difference,
his memory goes from sporadic to episodic. It kicks into
serially remembering one thing after another remembering
everything
in sequence around 1950.
He is responsible from 1950 on. The war is out. He grew
up in the country, on a farm, outside the prohibited zone.
The place seems to be filling. But very quickly all the people
that are coming are here.
The memorial officially began with a woman saying Dr. Clifford
Uyeda would have hated this memorial. She reads a statement
by the deceased,
saying he specifically does not want an event like this,
held after he’s
gone. Well, sorry Cliff, this is for us.
Kenji Taguma walked to the podium, stopped a few paces
from Betty, Cliff’s
widow, and bowed. The gesture was deliberate and eloquent.
Then he walked up to the podium and gave us the life of
Clifford Iwao Uyeda
in headlines.
A little girl, Two maybe three. Still in diapers. She ran
the width of the room wall to wall, alongside of the folding
chairs
and clapped
her
hand over a pair of electric plugs in the wall, turned
around and ran to the back of the room and turned and ran
forward
again. Clop!
Clop!
Clop! I start to rise, to go to her and keep her from putting
her finger into a plug. Chrys, now calling herself Christina
stops
me.. “It’s
all right,” she says. Back and forth, the little stomps of the
little girl’s running feet clomped on the hardwood
gym floor, and echoed off the polished wooden walls, out
of rhythm
with Kenji
Taguma's
summary of Uyeda's life.
It was subtle. The evening was a confusion of "integrity" and
icky words, offered like candy to our ears. But one theme—The
JACL oppressed the resisters during and after the war jumped
out as soon as
Kenji Taguma said it.. It was nice that he was an editor
of the San Francisco NICHI BEI TIMES, but everyone knew
that under
his Clark
Kent journalistic
identity, he was speaking as the son of a resister from
camp Amache.
The next speaker, John Tateishi of the JACL, gave a perfunctory
bow to the widow, and ignored the resisters and his mentor
Mike Masaoka
in his
remarks. He claimed he and Cliff had accomplished redress
all by themselves. He told an amusing story of the signing
of something
at the Carter
White House. He and Cliff, were in the row behind Inouye,
and Mineta
and Matsui.
Inouye was reaching behind him for a hand to thrust forward
when Pres Carter called for some Japanese American to come
forward
and speak.
Would it be Clifford’s or Tateishi’s? “I learned what a strong
grip Clifford had.” Somehow he had pushed Clifford's
hand to be gripped by Inouye's one hand and thrust Cliff
forward to speak.
Mits Koshiyama walked up to front, so far, then bowed to the
widow. First words out of his mouth were that he had suffered
a stroke.
And there
were things he wanted to say. He unfolded a piece of paper.
Cliff had told him how close he had come to resisting when
he was at
medical school.
Mits seemed to include Uyeda's sympathy with the resisters
in his adding "dissidents" to
the resisters. "resisters and dissidents". …
“I’m Wayne Collins. I’m usually called Wayne Collins Jr.” His
father was the ACLU lawyer who fought for the resisters and saw the US
citizenship restored to those who had been forced to renounce America
and be "repatriated" to Japan. Both acts against the JACL's
public and secret policies. Strangely,Collins seemed to want to reconcile
the JACL “apology” to the resisters that the resisters did
not ask for, or want, or accept, with the JACL stand against civil rights
or face white violence that the police wouldn’t be able—or
wouldn't want to—control. The isolation of the "apology" from
any business of the JACL convention proves the JACL is not willing to
renounce Mike Masaoka and the JACL betrayal of civil rights. Why he thinks
this is proof of a reconciliation between the resistors and the JACL
is a mystery to me. The terrible alternative, according to Collins is, "the
anger of Frank Chin." Anything is better than that! Wayne Collins
sees all rifts healed and the resisters are merely the reason for the
JACL apology that was a ministerial miracle of something or other. Norman
Mineta’s demand that his brother-in-law, Mike Masaoka be declared
a "civil rights advocate" on the Japanese American monument
in Washington was what the JACL celebrated with the sham apology. The
use of Mineta’s force as a congressman, the Secretary of Commerce,
under Clinton and the Secretary of Transportation under Bush, to get
the name of an enemy of civil rights, declared a "Civil Rights Advocate" against
the wishes of knowledgeable Japanese Americans is an example
of Japanese American obedience to the Bush administration's
stand against civil
rights.
For Collins the apology somehow made it possible for the
young to join the JACL- Which they haven’t.
Then after a list of Uyeda's last causes—He was against Japan’s stand
on whaling—for some reason he’s joined a group of Chinese
seeking restitution from Japan for THE RAPE OF NANKING. Why are
Americans sticking
their noses into the affairs of China and Japan? The war crimes
trials that sentenced
Tojo and several Japanese also sentenced Japan to pay reparations
for the Rape of Nanking and the Bombing of Shanghai. How many times
will
Japan be
tried
and convicted by America for the same crime? Dr. Clifford Uyeda
had many causes but
only one cause that was personal, Japanese American, and should
have raised one set of men and women to, at the very least, heroes
of
civil rights against
a
JACL led by a liar, Mike Masaoka and the US government. Clifford
Uyeda himself came on the TV talking about the Indians and the
Japanese being
alike and
musing on the choice between resisting the government, that might
result in death,
or obeying the government that would result in dishonor. He seemed
to favor death,
before dishonor.
Gary Miyake, speaking for Betty Uyeda announced that among the
messages received were telegrams from Secretary Norman Mineta and
Senator
Diane Feinstein.
Only Feinstein’s message was read. Mineta’s message
was mentioned and pointedly ignored.
Frank Chin
