Update:
Tuesday, January 25, 2005 My review of
Frank Chin's book on the resistance, Born in the USA, is now published
in the special "A Tribute to Miné Okubo" issue of Amerasia
Journal, Volume 30:2, 2004. It is available for $13 per issue plus
tax and $4 handling from: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 3230
Campbell Hall, Box 951546, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1546. For more information,
call (310) 825-2968, e-mail [email protected] or
visit the center's Web site.
However, by special permission, you can also read it here:
A story told in
Born in the USA has journalists James Omura and Larry Tajiri prowling
the hills of pre-war San Francisco late at night, dreaming about
which of them would write “The Great Nisei Novel.” It
would be an epic that spanned the immigration of their Issei parents
and the appearance of the second-generation Nisei as a new breed
of American. Little did they know how war with Japan would soon interrupt
that social progress and place them on opposite sides of Japanese
America’s response to expulsion and incarceration: whether
to cooperate or resist. Read
the rest of the review....
I would
love to hear your response to the review or the book itself. Just use
the e-mail us link above.
Update:
Saturday, February 19, 2005 For
the past several months, writer William Hohri has been developing the theory
that it was illegal under the Selective Service Act of 1940 for the U.S.
government to draft young Japanese American inmates while in the custody
of the War Relocation Authority. He published his argument in the January
2005 issue of The
Objector, in an article titled, "Free Us Before You Draft
Us." He writes, "Someone was violating the law. And it was not
the resisters. It's about time we recognized this." William shares
with us a talk for today that for one reason or another was undelivered:
Day
of Remembrance - UC Santa Barbara - 2005
Thanks for the
invitation. It's been a while since my last talk.
For the purposes
of this talk, I'd like to change "Day of Remembrance" to "Day
of Reconsideration." Of course, we have already reconsidered
the name of the camps from "Relocation Center" to "internment
camp" or "concentration camp" or "prison camp." I
would like us to reconsider the military conscription of young men
from the camps. Was it legal? Was military service via the draft
an act of patriotism by the draftee or an act of illegality by our
government?
In entry 5 of
the IV-F classification section of the Selective Service Act of 1940,
one reads this requirement, (I quote) "Is being retained in
the custody of criminal jurisdiction or other civil authority." (End
of quote.) [emphasis mine] Were we internees "being retained
in the custody of . . . other civil authority"? If we were,
we should have been classified IV-F, as unsuited for military service.
We were, instead, classified I-A, as suited to take subsequent steps,
including the physical examination, to be accepted or rejected for
military service. Most of the draft resisters resisted by refusing
to take their physical exams.
Well, had we been
retained in the custody of civil authority? The first place I looked
for my answer was in my dog-eared, nth Xeroxed copy of The Evacuated
People: A Quantitative Description, written by the U.S. Department
of the Interior and the War Relocation Authority.
Section one begins
with, (I quote) "Some 120,313 persons of Japanese descent came
under the custody of the War Relocation Authority between May 8,
1942 (the date the Colorado River Relocation Center opened) and March
20, 1946 (the date Tule Lake closed)." (End of quote) So according
to our government, the War Relocation Authority, had served as "other
civil authority" that had held us in its custody. Hence, the
draft age men should have been classified IV-F and not been draft
eligible until they were no longer being held in camp and were living
in free America.
Of course, the
definition for this custody resides in Executive Order 9066 plus
one of two Public Proclamations. Why the Public Proclamations? Well,
if you read E.O.9066 carefully, you will notice that it only seems
to order exclusion. The powers of the President of the United States
delegates the power (I quote) "to prescribe military areas in
such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military
Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded,
and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain
in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary
of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion." (End
of quote)
Note that the
main verbal expression is "may be excluded." This is followed
by legally undefined subordinate verbs, "to enter, remain in,
or leave." Of course, we remember E.O. 9066 by remembering it
on or near the date of its being signed by President Franklin Roosevelt
on February 19, 1942. But the subordinate verbs are implemented and
legally defined in two Public Proclamations, number 8 and WD-1. WD-1
seems to be the most precise and does implement "to enter," "remain
in," and "leave." (Note: proclamation 8 applied to
camps within the jurisdiction of the Western Defense Command, while
WD-1 applied to camps further inland in the states of Wyoming, Colorado,
and Arkansas.) These proclamations were published several months
later in August and October of 1942.
[Please note in
advance of the following quotation that "War Relocaton Project
Areas" is the term used for "camp sites."]
Paragraph b of
WD-1 states, "All persons of Japanese ancestry . . . are required
to remain within the bounds of said War Relocation Project Areas
are required to remain within the bounds of said War Relocation Project
Areas at all times unless specifically authorized to leave . . .
."
Thus, when E.O.9066
is combined with these proclamations, the relocation centers become
detention camps. And the inmates of the camps are being held in the
custody of the U.S. government and their young men should have been
classified IV-F.
So, on this Day
of Reconsideration, we should reconsider what it meant when 315 draft
resisters tried to challenge the propriety of conscripting young
men into military service after forcing them, with their families,
into detention camps. They were charged with committing an illegality
and punished accordingly. This is how most of us felt for the last
60 years. But they were, in fact, not violating the Selective Service
Act of 1940. It was our government that was committing the illegality.
Update:
Tuesday, March 1, 2005 Two
upcoming screenings in the Seattle area are tied to two regional reading
programs, both centered on Julie Otsuka's 2002 novella, When
the Emperor Was Divine. The Washington Center for the Book
at the Seattle Public Library is having us screen in the citys' new
world-class Downtown Library, in the Microsoft Auditorium, on Saturday
afternoon, March 26, at 2:00 p.m. Read the news
release. This one is part of "Reading
Across the Map," a multi-year project to foster reading and discussion
of works by authors from diverse cultures and ethnicities. Joining
us for the post-film discussion will be Gene Akutsu, Minidoka resister
and brother of the late Jim Akutsu,who is featured in our film.
We
will be also be screening CONSCIENCE with a post-screening talk on
the evening of March 22 at the Bellevue Regional Library, east of Seattle
at 1111 - 110th Avenue NE, Meeting Room 1, in Bellevue. It's part of
a faculty seminar and campus-wide programming, again tied to a discussion
of the Otuska book as a common text, sponsored by Bellevue Community
College with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanties.
Gene Akutsu will also be joining us for this. Both screenings are free
and open to the public.
Update:
Thursday, March 24, 2005 The
Seattle Times today published a capsule
review of our film, in advance of our Saturday screening at the
Seattle Public Library as part of the "Seattle Reads" program
for Julie Otsuka's 2002 novel, When
the Emperor Was Divine. You can read the full article here but
this is book critic Michael Upchurch's take on our film:
First up is Frank
Abe's "Conscience and the Constitution" (2000), about a
group of draft-age internees who refused to volunteer for military
service or, later, to be drafted, until their and their families'
civil rights were restored. Abe, a former senior reporter for KIRO
Newsradio and KIRO-TV, does a fine job of tracing how this draft-resistance
arose, and how it became such a bitterly divisive issue within the
Japanese-American community. The Japanese American Citizens League — which
adapted more of a "my country right or wrong" attitude
to internment and military service — was particularly harsh
in its judgment of the draft resisters.
It would be more
than 50 years before any reconciliation between the JACL and the
draft resisters was effected. The eyewitnesses in this hourlong film
are eloquent, wry and level-headed as they make their case about
the constitutional principles at stake. Abe has done an admirable
job of illuminating the issues behind the divisiveness. The film
screens at 2 p.m. Saturday. Abe will be present for a post-film discussion.
Update:
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Our film
continues to provide different points of entry and different perspectives
for audiences across the country this year. Just after screenings for
the "Seattle Reads" program, two more programs have picked
up our story: university students in Minnesota, and another humanities
program in a town north of Denver:
"I
am the co-advisor for a student organization called Asian Students
in Action at St. Cloud State University. They are organizing a
week-long on-campus event in April called Social Activism in Asian
America. As part of the event, I wanted to show your film on April
21 for a campus wide audience... I thought your film was important
in discussing not only the issue of what constitutes an American
and what it means to be loyal, but also the difficulties of social
activism especially when it creates a division within the community.
Moreover, your film itself is a perfect example of social activism – the
use of documentaries to educate people."
-- Dr. Kyoko Kishimoto, Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
"Just
wanted to let you know that Conscience and the Constitution is
a unit of a seven part series that the Estes
Park Public Library Foundation will be presenting this
summer. The Foundation has a We the People Grant from the Colorado
Endowment
for the Humanities that is titled "Pivotal Events in
American Constitutional Hisotry: Their Impact on We the People." The
video will be presented on July 30th"
-- Catherine K. Speer, Estes Park Public Library Foundation
Estes Park
lies halfway between the cities of Denver and Cheyenne, Wyoming, which
should make for a very meaningful local presentation. Denver was the
wartime home for James Omura's Rocky Shimpo newspaper, and
Cheyenne was the site for the federal conspiracy trial for Omura and
the 7 leaders of the Fair Play Committee in 1944. The screening is
to be followed by a discussion, "The
Story of Japanese-American Detention and Civil Disobedience," led
by Mrs. Lynn Young.
Update:
Sunday, April 3, 2005 While
the world is focused today on the death of the Pope, we also mourn
the passing of Fred Korematsu last Wednesday at his daughter's home
in Larkspur. Thanks to Roger Daniels for passing on the obit [Word
doc., 49K] from the New York Times. In addition to his many
public appearances on behalf of redress and his coram nobis case, Fred
was a great supporter of the resisters, recognizing that they, like
him, chose to use the courts as their wartime
battlefield. We last
saw
Fred
at
the JACL apology ceremony in San Francisco in 2002. Our
condolences to his wife Kathryn and their two children.
Update:
Monday, April 11, 2005
Two educational
forums are coming up in California this spring. At the Japanese American
National Museum, its affiliated National Center for the Preservation
of Democracy is preparing to open this fall. Our full-color poster
and ITVS
Viewers Guide for Conscienceand the Constitution will
be on display at two Educator Preview workshops on April 21 and April
23 aimed at helping Southern California instructors, as one workshop
promises, "capitalize on young people's idealism while addressing
their disengagement from civic institutions." Thanks to Teacher
Programs Manager Allyson Nakamoto for including our materials on the
resource tables, and for including our profiles and photos of Fair
Play Committee members Ben
Wakaye and Gloria
Kubora, from our PBS Online site,
in the activity cards for their forthcoming "Tool Kit" for
teaching democracy and civic action, called "Fighting for Democracy."
On
June 2 Conscience will screen in San Francisco at the "Notice
To All" symposium sponsored by the California
Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a 4-day conference intended
to acknowledge all the projects that program funded and get participants
to help map out a course for its future. Producer/director Frank Abe will
also be speaking on a panel from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. titled "Dissidence:
Resisters and Renunciants" that will also feature scholar Eric Muller,
author of Free to Die For Their Country, and some first-person
testimonies from Nisei who chose, under wartime duress, to protest by
renouncing their U.S. citizenship. More details later as the schedule
shapes up.
Update:
Thursday, April 21, 2005 Our good friend and columnist L.A. Chung of the San Jose Mercury-News
wrote
about this project at the time of our national broadcast. For her
April 15 piece on the passing of Fred Korematsu, "Honoring
an unheroic looking hero," Lisa knew her story well enough to
get a reaction from a Tule Lake draft resister, Jimi Yamichi, who like
the other resisters fought in court as a test case just as Fred did. She
also notes, "I'm proud to say, because of the number of Asian American
staffers who knew of Fred's impact, the Mercury-News was the first in
the Bay Area to report his death -- and the import of what he did in a
news story that we ran on A3, our "second front page," not on
the obituary page."
Our film
continues to provide different points of entry and different perspectives
for audiences across the country this year, including university students
in Minnesota, a humanities program in a town north of Denver, and now
a Chicana/o cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary art organization in
San Diego:
"I
am writing to request permission to screen Conscience and the Constitution
at the non-profit artspace Voz
Alta as part of a series I am curating there called Movies That
Matter … Because San Diego is a jumping off point for the Marines
and also the site of a growing resistance movement (see the case of
Pable Paredes, Ali Wassaf Hassoun, the Ya No project, Guerreroazteca
project), I feel that Conscience and the Constitution has a
very important message for people here. In addition, as a subtext to
the video, as you know, there is a distinct parallel between the climate
surrounding Japanese-Americans and Japanese residents during WWII and
that facing Middle Eastern Americans today, and with San Diego as the
location of a large Middle Eastern population, as well as a decidedly
red slice of California, it would behoove us to think carefully abut
what national paranoia and political manipulation are capable of …
I am curating this series in an effort to get people to think about
issues of civil liberty, race, media representation, and national conscience."
-- Rebecca Romani, Arabs Anonymous/No Hay Moros
Update:
Friday, May 27, 2005 Just
added to the California Conference program is a staged reading featuring
Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee members Frank Emi, Yosh Kuromiya, and
Mits Koshiyama. They will be using a script adapted by Momo from the Frank
Chin original script, "A
Conference of Japanese American Actors, Artists, Activists and Interested
Critics[21 pages, 73K, .pdf] posted
here last year. If you are anywhere
near the San Francisco Bay Area on this date, you will not want to miss
this chance to see and hear from the men featured in our film:
A Divided
Community
Friday, June 3, 2005, 7:00 - 7:45 p.m., Radisson Miyako Hotel Momo
Yashima, actor and activist, joins resistance leader Frank Emi, resister
Yosh Kuromiya, veteran Paul Tsuneishi, and resister Mits Koshiyama
in a recounting of the climate of the Japanese American experience
leading up to World War II. This 45-minute performance will recall
the circumstances that led to the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee's
decision to resist the illegal draft of incarcerated men. Free
and open to the public. Reservations recommended. Seating on a first-come,
first-served basis.
In one of our more unusual venues, the Seattle
City Council will screen our film during a brown bag luncheon, as
a supplement to their recent reading of Julie Otuska's fine novel, When
The Emperor Was Divine.
Many grew up believing
that Japanese Americans did not protest or resist the injustice of their
World War II incarceration. The reality is that tens of thousands did,
but the Japanese American community suppressed their stories in favor
of a narrative that stressed patriotism ad loyalty. This panel examines
the stories of the draft resisters, the no-nos and the nearly 6,000
renunciants at Tule Lake –the missing pages from our history—the
stories that demonstrate Japanese American resistance to injustice.
Speakers
will be scholar Eric Muller, author of Free to Die For Their Country,
producer/director Frank Abe, Barbara Takei, author of Tule Lake Revisited,
Hank Naito, a former renunciant from the Tule Lake Segregation Center,
and poet and camp playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi.
AsianWeek
recently published a review of what is by all accounts a superficial and
stereotypical attempt at Broadway musical called Making Tracks. Click
on the link to see how the author of "How
to Rewrite Asian American History 101" went out of her way to
make mention of the Heart Mountain resisters and include, in the print
version, then-and-now photos of Mits Koshiyama.
Update:
Wednesday, June 8, 2005 California
was where it was happening last week for the study of the internment, at
the "Notice To All" symposium sponsored
by the California Civil Liberties
Public Education Program. It was incredible to find old friends doing
new and exciting things, and meet new friends with ideas and energy. It
was also inspiring, as the meeting gave us all ideas of how to
frame new projects, and to seek out new collaborations. Congratulations
to the
Advisory Board for a well thought-out program and to Paul Osaki and staff
of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California for
the successful execution. Thanks to Greg Robinson for reading Resisters.com
and recommending it to others at the conference as a place to find the Lim
Report online.
Our topic today
is Dissidence. This is a meaty topic because history has shown that
Japanese America has zero tolerance for dissent: then and now. But
thanks in part to Civil Liberties programs at the federal and state
levels, the stories of the resisters and renunciants are finally
being restored to their proper place in history.
The title for our
panel is Lesser Known Stories of the Internment. If these are Lesser
Known Stories, what then is the Best Known Story? That’s
easy. It’s the JACL master narrative, the one that says our
response to this massive violation of 20th century civil rights was
either passive resignation – shikataganai, it can’t be
helped – or patriotic self-sacrifice – Go For Broke,
spill your blood to prove your loyalty.Read
more.
Professor
Eric Muller in our panel had a very pointed comment: that it is time
to drop the false distinctions between loyal and disloyal that were
forced on us by the wartime government and which we then, with help
from the JACL, internalized among ourselves. He said when victims take
on the frame of the perpetrator, when they can’t get back at
the perpetrator, they turn on each other. He said what happend with
the renunciants and no-no's was not a crisis of loyalty, but a crisis
of faith in our country.
Update:
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
The
photo above is from the staged reading of "A Divided Community," featuring
[from left to right] WW2 veteran Paul Tsuneishi, Heart
Mountain Fair Play Committee members Yosh Kuromiya, Frank Emi, and
Mits Koshiyama, and actor Momo Yashima. They read from a script adapted
by Momo from the Frank Chin original script, "A
Conference of Japanese American Actors, Artists, Activists and Interested
Critics[21 pages, 73K, .pdf] posted
here last year. Click here to
see an enlarged view [48K]. Thanks
to my brother Steve Abe for the photo. And see a photo [59K] of
our panel on Dissidence.
The Seattle
City Council recently screened our film during a brown bag
luncheon, as a supplement to their recent reading of Julie Otuska's
fine novel, When
The Emperor Was Divine:
"There
were audible gasps during the showing --and many sat in silence long
after its completion. I'm so impressed with that work, Frank. It's
a great piece that will endlessly inform and educate. It impressively
communicates that there were heros fighting for freedoms on our own
soil when the nation was at war ostensibly to defend freedom! I believe
the ultimate outcome of their struggle was to reveal that the fight
for justice against oppression will always be necessary. Your piece
effectively shows the almost overwhelming challenge these gentle
people bravely faced when they stepped forward with commitment to
ethically respond to their oppression with honesty. It's a simple
story really, but powerful. Thanks, so much Frank. I hope you know
what you've contributed. It's a great piece of work. Much admiration."
-- Jackie O'Ryan, Communications Specialist, The Seattle City Council
AsianWeek
recently published a review of what is by all accounts a superficial
and stereotypical attempt at Broadway musical called Making Tracks.
Click on the link to see how the author of "How
to Rewrite Asian American History 101" went out of her way
to make mention of the Heart Mountain resisters and include, in the
print version, then-and-now photos of Mits Koshiyama.
Update:
Saturday, September 17, 2005 I
have been out of circulation the past five weeks and just catching
up to the sad news of the passing of a critical figure in Japanese
American history and a consultant on early cuts of our film. Jack Herzig
and his wife Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig dug into the National Archives to
unearth the first version of Gen. John deWitt's "Final Report" on
the expulsion and incarceration with an incriminating footnote edited
out of the final version, a fact used to successfully show how the
government suppressed and altered evidence in the Supreme Court test
case of Fred Korematsu. Jack also took it on himself to study the U.S.
intercepts of secret Japanese cables, the MAGIC cables, revealing unsuccessful
Japanese military desires to turn some connections with Japanese American
business and cultural societies into espionage links. Jack
testified before the Congressional commission studying redress, and
as the Rafu Shimpo put it in 2003, 'he went into considerable detail
and destroyed, for all practical purposes, the ill-founded allegation
that the MAGIC cables 'proved' the Japanese Americans were disloyal." News
of his passing was carried nationwide by the Associated
Press. Paul Tsuneishi was the first to alert us:
There
was a goodly crowd (100+) at the memorial service at the Green
Hills Memorial Park south of LA...in Rancho Palos Verdes...a beautiful
cemetery that Aiko and I had gone to a few years ago for another
burial. Of course, there were JA veterans including the head of
JAVA, who flew in from the East Coast...and other folks who came
down from SF...etc...His widow, Aiko spoke, of course, as well
as her children and veterans and others....During the after service
luncheon in Gardena, a microphone was provided for persons to speak
about Jack... I took the opportunity to state that the work of
Jack and Aiko Herzig and Walter and Michi Weglyn in undearthing
government files to prove that there was NO NEED to put us in concentration
camps...was key to redress.... I had the opportunity to conduct
an oral interview of Jack and Aiko Herzig when they flew out here
from the East coast (they moved to Gardena a little over a year
ago to be near her children and relatives) about 5 years ago...for
my oral interview file...in which a copy goes to the JANM and the
Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation, and Art Hansen for educational/interpretive
purposes... My wife Aiko and I sat with Art Hansen during the service..Frank
Chin was there, of course....
And this
observation from Frank Chin himself, on what was left out of the print
obit:
Note in your note
on the the death of Jack Herzig that he served in the Pacific theater
with the 503rd Parachute RCT. Yes, he was a paratrooper. He had won
the paratrooper's badge and two marksman's badges. I didn't handle
them and don't know for what --pistol, rlfle- he had won them, or
what grade-marksman, sharpshooter, or expert he had won. He was a
company commander, a well liked company commander, from what I can
tell. . Among his decorations were a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star
with two oak leaf clusters. He fought the Japanese, was wounded by
the Japanese, in the Phillippines I think.. His service and his decorations
were not mentioned by anyone or anywhere. I saw them at the funeral.
He was buried with them. I think they deserve mention. He was discharged
as a Lt. Col.
Congratulations
to another military figure connected to our film. Nisei war hero Sgt.
Ben Kuroki, who graciously agreed to appear in Conscience and
share his story, has recently been awarded the Distinguished Service
Medal, the U.S. Army's third-highest decoration, in ceremonies in his
old home state of Lincoln, Nebraska. See the articles in the Lincoln
Journal Star and KOLN-TV,
the CBS affilliate in Lincoln. Thanks to Professor Art Hansen for tipping
me off to that.
Update:
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
This coming Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles you will have a rare chance to
see and hear three of the original resisters from the Heart Mountain Fair Play
Committee members in a live dramatic reading. Yosh Kuromiya, Frank Emi, and Mits
Koshiyama, in the center of the photo posted on June 15 above, will be joined
by WW2 veteran Paul Tsuneishi (far left) and actors Momo Yashima (far right)
and
Mike
Hagiwara
in
a reading of "A Divided Community." The event will be held Saturday,
November 19, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m., at Centenary United Methodist Church,300
South Central Avenue at the SE corner of Third, in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo.
The setting
is a familiar one, being the same location of our first resisters'
homecoming event in L.A. in 1993, another staged reading called "The
Return of the Fair Play Committee" which can be glimpsed briefly
at the end of our film, Conscience
and the Constitution. The
script is one adapted by Momo from the Frank Chin original script, "A
Conference of Japanese American Actors, Artists, Activists and Interested
Critics[21 pages, 73K, .pdf] posted
here last year. Click here to
see an enlarged view [48K] of
the photo, taken at the premiere of "A Divided Community" last
summer in San Francisco. The material covers much of the same material
presented in our film and in Frank Chin's book Born in the USA --
the Nisei draft resistance in WW2 and its suppression by the govenrment
and the wartime Japanese American Citizens League. As described in
the publicity flier:
"This reading
focuses on the Government’s persecution of Japanese America
and the resulting choices made within the community. Based on historical
facts that have been withheld from us for over 60 years, these OCTAGENARIANS
who lived through those times share their thoughts and reasons why
they chose to fight the Government and the draft."
Saturday's
reading is hosted by "Lil Tokyo 4 Peace" and is billed as
a special preview performance. That's because the program will be repeated
on March 11, 2006, at the Japanese American National Museum in their
new National Center for the Preservation of Democracy.
Update:
Saturday, November 26, 2005 Frank Chin once wrote a one-act play for Pat Morita, a brilliant
tour-de-force recounting the story of Morita spending the first part of
WW2 in a sanitorium. It was called "The Comic," but it was such
a departure Morita was evidently never willing to perform it. Pat Morita
passed away on Thanksgiving Day. You can read his obituaries in the Los
Angeles Times and the Associated
Press. But for a remembrance that only Frank Chin could offer, looking
back to a Thanksgiving weekend we all shared 27 years ago, here is what
Frank sent today:
I got a call this
morning Pat Morita was dead.
We became friends
off the set of FAREWELL TO MANZANAR. He phoned me. Said he'd seen
me on the set. He'd overheard an extra take me aside and say, "I've
been inside like you!" and offer me a joint.
"You've been
inside?" Pat said over the phone.
"Nothing serious.
County time."
Pat was lovable,
drunk, high by one in the afternoon, my friend and a coward. But
still I asked him to let me put his name on the poster announcing
the DAY OF REMEMBRANCE. If Pat Morita is a participant, standing
for redress can't be that dangerous.
Pat Morita came
up to Seattle with Mako and Momo Yashima and Ralph Brannan to be
Japanese-American stars unafraid to share the word "redress" with
their names on the same poster. The Day of Remembrance was staged
onThanksgiving weekend, at "the camp on the edge of town" to
dramatise that Japanese-Americans wanted redress from the government
that had put them in camp.
Japanese America
was so jittery about participating in the Day of Remembrance, that
no one would commit to meeting at Sick's Stadium parking lot in Seattle
and carvaning 40 miles out to Puyallup. We had gotten the National
Guard to participate. We had the Washingston State Patrol set to
escort the caravan to Puyallup. And David Ishii had offered his bookstore
as the Day of Remembrance phone number for all questions, all information.
But when I picked Pat and Mako up at the hotel and drove them to
Sick's Stadium parking lot, I prepared them for a miniscule turnout.
2,000 people showed
up. Seattle counted 10,000 Japanese Americans in their population.
Two thousand on Thanksgiving weekend was pretty good. The caravan
was three and half miles long. The Mayor spoke. The candidate for
congress spoke. A Sansei lawyer spoke. Mako was a hit reading in
Japanese from a Japanese diary. Then it was Pat's turn at the mike.
In front of Pat was a section of seats that I had packed full of
old Issei and old Nisei wearing glasses, holding canes, and looking
old. Pat with his porkpie pulled down over his glasses looked out,
over the faces in front him and said, "I haven't seen so many
Japs since camp!"
The local JACL
jerked their backs up straight, and shouted, "Get Frank Chin!" Luckily
they weren't on mike. Why me? It was Pat that said the" J" word
out loud.
Pat has shown his
courage at things I organized for redress by unfailingly showing
up with the same combination of fear, booze, dope and coke. He had
a two handed way of handling the glass, the joint, and the powdery
substance. And in his way, he helped make every event a success.
Frank Chin
Last Saturday
in Los Angeles three of the original resisters from the Heart Mountain
Fair Play Committee members took part in a live dramatic reading of "A
Divided Community." Organiizer
Momo Yashima said it went very well:
The audience was
a very mixed age range crowd and they all enjoyed it immensely. Mako
came to see it and said it was much improved ... He likes the fact
that these non-actors have lived thru the experience and have lived
to tell the tale. So those are my boyz ... Mits
Koshiyama came down for the reading and he looks so good! It's funny-
since I began this project, all of us. me included, just keep getting
better and stronger. Do you think it's the subject matter or just
the fact that we're righting a wrong?
Update:
Saturday, December 24, 2005 The
end of the year brings the end of an era in the Pacific Northwest. David
Ishii Bookseller is hanging up his fishing hat and closing his world-famous
bookstore after 33 years in Seattle's Pioneer Square. David's
store became a mecca for Asian American writers and Japanese American
redress activists as both movements burgeoned in the 70's. He was our
public face for the first "Day of Remembrance" and the Open
Letter to Hayakawa paid ad, for which hundreds of people sent small checks
and letters in 1979 addressed to "Dear David Ishii" imploring
him to keep fighting the good fight for history and redress.
David
provided a haven for writers, poets, actors and artists and hung their
signed portraits alongside a framed John Okada photograph and the baseball
cards of the Baltimore Orioles' Lenn Sakata. David is
immortalized as Milton Shiro in Frank Chin's novel, Gunga
Din Highway. Read
the Seattle Times story, "Bookstore's
closing 'the end of an era,'" and also learn his entire
from a 2004 Times magazine profile called simply, "David
Ishii, Bookseller." Ever since the news broke, book
lovers and friends have stood in line at David's store for his final half-price
sale. He'll now have time to visit friends, go to afternoon matinees,
and as he puts it, just "futz around." Thanks to Shannon Gee
for the photos.