Japanese internment : mackenzian

February 20, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

No reward for good behavior

The anniversary of Executive Order 9066 (1942), February 19, drew extra attention this year because of No. 45’s executive order on immigration and refugees. Since US legislators, executives, and judges are determined to reopen so many of the 20th Century’s civil rights debates, it makes sense to take a new look at the laws, rules, and rhetoric around the scapegoating, marginalization, exclusion, and detention of Japanese people, Japanese-Americans, and others swept up in the 1940s interment orders.

In the classic anthology This Bridge Called My Back, Mitsuye Yamada takes two essays to discuss how other communities diminish or outright ignore Asian Pacific women’s political and social contributions. In the first essay, she describes this as an “unnatural disaster” in which people overwrite actual Asian Americans with enduring stereotypes about passivity and submission. She also reflects on how her own responses to racism and stereotyping may have played into that dynamic:

I did not think anything assertive was necessary to make my point. People who know me, I reasoned, the ones who count, know who I am and what I think. Thus, even when what I considered a veiled racist remark was made in a casual social setting, I would ‘let it go’ because it was pointless to argue with people who didn’t even know their remark was racist. I had supposed that I was practicing passive resistance while being stereotyped, but it was so passive no one noticed I was resisting; it was so much my expected role that it ultimately rendered me invisible.” —Mitsuye Yamada

In the second essay, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” Yamada alludes to but curiously does not name Mitsuye Endo, the only women among four Japanese Americans to sue the US government over EO 9066. Endo was also the only plaintiff of those four to win her release, and the government changed its policy on the eve of the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling.

“No matter what we say or do,” Yamada writes, “the stereotype still hangs on. I am weary of starting from scratch each time I speak or write, as if there were no history behind us.”

There’s a lot of history behind us, behind Asian Pacific women specifically and behind all of us working in solidarity with one another today.

On reading about Mitsuye Endo, Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi, I noticed the basis on which each one was “selected” to serve as plaintiffs in these test cases.

Endo was a US citizen, a state civil servant, and second-generation Japanese-American who didn’t speak Japanese and had been fired with other Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Because of her job and her cultural distance from Japan, the US designated her “loyal” and safe enough to elevate.

Korematsu was also a second-generation Japanese-American who was engaged to a White American woman and apolitical at the time of the EO: he dodged the evacuation order to stay with his fiancee.

Yasui was an attorney and US citizen who didn’t want to be treated as non-citizens were: he accepted the government’s categories and application of rights but didn’t want to be on the wrong side of those categories.

And Hirabayashi was a Christian pacifist who objected to the military justifications for the order: he was a plaintiff of conscience, which is something the United States has often grudgingly respected.

But none of these markers of respectability saved any of them. They weren’t left out of detention just because they were easy for White America to interpret and understand. Endo was the lone successful plaintiff among these four and even she stayed detained at Tula Lake, California, and then at a camp Topaz, Utah, through 1945. (The Tula Lake concentration camp is the same one that the government sent George Takei and Noriyuki “Pat” Morita to. Morita later starred as Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid.)

Sometimes the moral high ground in a hostile society is less solid rock and more a trashy canoe in a sea storm: you can be afloat in the water, barely, and you still get rained on. There was no safety for these four plaintiffs in being comprehensible to society when their society was determined to demonize them. And 70 years later, it’s still hard to be heard over the din of stereotypes and suspicion.

Sharing this history this anniversary week is a way to be sober about that reality, and with the federal government planning a new version of its immigration/refugee orders, we need to stay alert.

December 7, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Skepticism’s high price

My friend Jeanette Brantley is a storykeeper who holds her family’s tales and represents them through narratives, photograph collections, and photo-slide videos. A few months ago, she shared today’s featured photo with me. There’s quite a story behind it.

Here are six young children, all smiling broadly. They’re siting in a cart in a field in California, during a decade when White American children and Japanese children interact enough with each other to become friends.

Jean’s sister Ruth, laughing wildly in a grid-patterned dress, is friends with Haroko, the Japanese girl with a relaxed smile on the far left of the photo. The two girls have met through Haroko’s father, who is employed on Ruth’s and Jean’s family farm.

One day in 1941, Ruth and Haroko are at Haroko’s house while local Japanese men discuss grown people’s business. Haroko translates the men’s conversation for Ruth, and tells her that Japan is going to attack the United States. At home later, Ruth reports what she’s heard to her parents. They don’t believe her.

On December 7, 1941, Japan does bomb the Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii. Within a day, US President Franklin Roosevelt declares war on Japan and leads the US into World War II against Japan and its allies, Germany and Italy.

Children knew about Pearl Harbor before the US government did, but their knowledge went nowhere because no one took their tip seriously. And theirs wasn’t the only open or secret intelligence source that pointed to an attack.

Sometimes, skepticism isn’t just costly. It’s also dangerous.

Haroko and her family weathered the US’ internment camps, just as George Takei and his family did. And Haroko and Ruth found each other after the war and remained friends for the rest of their lives.

But thousands and thousands of people died in the sinkhole that was World War II, and I can only guess at how many of them might yet be alive if someone with social power had listened to two young girls in 1941.

November 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

More on the Japanese internment

This week, George Takei shared more about his experience with socially marginalized people and marginalizing social laws.

I referred to his 2014 TED talk in last night’s post; this morning, he published a new reflection on his life in a United States internment camp.

The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?” —George Takei

Read it: “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” (Washington Post, November 18, 2016)

November 17, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Reflections on the US-Japanese Internment

Lately I’ve been honoring the Santayana quotation about being doomed to repetition by referring my readers to history:

Habit and memory are a sort of heredity within the individual… Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained[,] infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1906

As the next administration’s proxies invoke the prison camps where the United States held 120,000 Japanese-American people for four years during World War II, those who lived through that experience are recounting their memories for our benefit.

Actor George Takei shared his experience with an audience in Kyoto, Japan, two years ago. He recalled the day soldiers walked up his drive to force his family out of their house. “I will never be able to forget that scene,” he said. “It is burned into my memory.” At the time, he was five years old.

These things don’t just happen, however. They creep, and we adjust, and they creep some more.

Prior to the Bosnian genocide starting, the same Islamophobic rhetoric seen in the U.S, was spread throughout the former Yugoslavia. ‘Muslims are terrorists,’ ‘They want to spread Sharia Law.’ ‘They want your women to wear hijabs.’ All of that stuff we’ve ignored… Genocide is a slow process, you know… and it starts with words and instilling fear into the people. We’re past that in the U.S.” —Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura (November 17, 2016)

“You’re worried about a future that’s already here,” Ayesha Siddiqi also wrote last night. “[It] just didn’t touch you yet.” I joke sometimes about the U.S. government being overfamiliar with my iris patterns—because I was required to submit them with other biometric data more than a decade ago. But it’s really not a joke. It’s more than just bureaucracy.

And that’s why I keep writing about history and why others, like Takei and Buljusmic-Kustura keep recounting the targeting they’ve lived through. We do it with the hope that the more we tell these stories, the more that more of us will be able to perceive the social and legal patterns behind and around us; that we’ll use that perception to help us better notice and intervene in the experiences of others; and that, given opportunity, when the old, old story cracks open at this chapter again, we will choose differently than we have before.

Nothing will change until we do.