Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey, shown here during the
42nd Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage
on April 30, 2011.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

LOS ANGELES — President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 31, 2011, allowing indefinite detention without charge or trial to be codified into law. As a result, Americans citizens and others could be subjected to imprisonment without ever being charged or convicted of a crime. This provision of the NDAA denigrates the very foundations of this country, and undermines the Bill of Rights. Without question, it threatens the very foundation of our democracy.

Seventy years ago, 110,000 members of the Japanese American (Nikkei) community, our families and friends, were subjected to imprisonment without ever being charged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he signed Executive Order 9066. The Nikkei community was denied habeas corpus, rounded up by the United States military and incarcerated behind barbed wire in desolate places.

Indeed, indefinite detention is an indelible part of our experience. In this sense, the Nikkei community is part of the democratic conscience of the United States.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not protect our community from unjust incarceration. It took decades of struggle, testimony, and countless challenges for the government to even recognize this injustice as an act of “race prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

The experiences of the Nikkei people during World War II demonstrates that freedom, even in this democracy of ours, must be protected. Now, on the 70th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, we witness a direct assault on the rights of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights.

We must remember our history and oppose any and all attempts to undermine the Constitution of the United States of America. We must remember, and we must be vigilant, because it appears that the Congress and the President of the United States have forgotten.

Post 9/11, the Manzanar Committee, along with many in the Nikkei community, condemned the persistent and virulent racist acts against the Muslim community. Echoes of the past—hysterical, baseless fears, fueled by racism, sounded so similar to what our families and friends endured prior to, and during World War II, and, now, in an eerily familiar fashion, baseless fears are leading to the erosion of our civil rights.

For more than four decades, the Manzanar Committee has organized an annual Pilgrimage to the site of the former Manzanar concentration camp to pay our respects and honor the survivors. We demanded the government recognize this injustice and that this never happen again. Today, Manzanar and the sites of the nine other War Relocation Authority camps are historical landmarks. Some area units of the National Park Service, staffed by rangers telling our story. The Pilgrimage continues and has grown. Manzanar At Dusk, led by college students and other young people, has grown. Hundreds participate in this intergenerational event, where abstract stories of endurance and struggle come alive.

Yet, despite all the progress made in reclaiming our rightful place in American society, it appears that the fundamental lesson of the incarceration of 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry has yet to understood in the halls of power. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us, on this very important anniversary, to redouble our efforts to defend the Bill of Rights, and, in so doing, honor our civil rights heroes like Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui and Fred Korematsu.

This is our legacy.

Bruce Embrey is Co-Chair of the Manzanar Committee.

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Related Stories:

• Open Letter To President Obama Protesting The Signing Of The National Defense Authorization Act
• Deporting “Troublemakers” Redux

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Barbara Takei (left), shown here with Manzanar Committee member Joyce Okazaki (center), and Mako Nakagawa (right), during the
2011 Manzanar At Dusk program on April 28, 2011, at
Lone Pine High School in Lone Pine, California.
Photo: James To

Time of Remembrance observances are coming up in another few weeks, a good time to do something to assure, “never again.”

This year, in the context of the National Defense Authorization Act that provides for indefinite military detention of the accused, we need to be more vigilant than ever, especially with two companion pieces of legislation introduced this session of Congress. The two bills, S. 1698 and HR 3166, resurrect the spectre of the little-known government denationalization and deportation program that the Department of Justice used to strip nearly 6,000 Americans of their U.S. citizenship while they were imprisoned at the Tule Lake concentration camp during World War II.

Denationalizing Dissidents at Tule Lake

On July 1,1944, Public Law 405, that originated from racist California legislators and drafted by then U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, was signed into law by President Roosevelt. This law, known as the 1944 Renunciation Act, led to thousands of Japanese Americans imprisoned at Tule Lake to be categorized as “enemy aliens” no longer protected by the Constitution. The government prepared to deport these so-called “disloyals” and “troublemakers” to Japan when the war ended.

This unprecedented deportation program, aimed at thousands of Japanese American dissidents, almost worked. The deportations were stopped by Northern California ACLU attorney Wayne M. Collins, who spent the next twenty years in a lonely, but overwhelmingly successful fight to restore citizenship to thousands of Japanese American renunciants.

The denationalization program was one of World War II’s extreme instances of the abuse of power, used against American citizens who protested the denial of due process, and the injustice of their incarceration in America’s concentration camps. Yet, the government’s mistreatment of Japanese American “troublemakers,” and the unprecedented program to purge thousands of American citizens through the denationalization process, is unknown to most Japanese Americans, and to the general public. The victims who renounced their devalued citizenship were silenced, stigmatized by other Nikkei, and marginalized by the perpetual government-created loyal/disloyal paradigm that defined protest as disloyalty. The Army and the Department of Justice suppressed details of their maneuverings, thus avoiding scrutiny and subsequent legal challenges to their actions.

The Enemy Expatriation Act, S. 1698 (Lieberman) and its companion bill, HR 3166 (Dent) await action in Congress. These bills would enable the government to strip American citizens of their U.S. citizenship if they are accused of “engaging in or purposefully and materially supporting hostilities against the United States.”

The bills are also being described as closing a loophole in the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on the eve of 2012 by President Obama, that provides for indefinite military detention of the accused. The denationalization legislation could be applied to U.S. citizens who are indefinitely detained, stripping away their rights as American citizens and enabling their treatment as foreign enemy combatants.

These companion denationalization bills are an assault on our nation’s belief in civil liberties and civil rights, threatening unpopular groups with the same type of mistreatment that dissident Japanese Americans experienced while imprisoned at Tule Lake.

During this time when Japanese Americans and other civil rights advocates are planning Day of Remembrance programs—memorializing the 1942 Presidential removal order Executive Order 9066 that banished 110,000 persons with Japanese faces to desolate concentration camps, stripped of their rights, their humanity and their dignity—we must not close our eyes to what is happening again.

Unless we wish to render the phrase “never again” meaningless, we must continue speaking out to prevent other human and civil rights travesties like Executive Order 9066, the Renunciation Act of 1944, and streamlining the deportation of people who are deemed “troublemakers.” More than ever, we need to renew our efforts at education and advocacy.

Takei is CFO of the non-profit Tule Lake Committee. For the past decade, she has researched and written about Tule Lake’s segregation history, and has served as an advocate and fundraiser for the Tule Lake concentration camp site.

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Text of House Resolution 3166/Senate Resolution 1698
112th Congress, First Session
Introduced In Both Houses on October 12, 2011
House Sponsors: Charlie Dent (R-PA) and Jason Altmire (D-PA)
Senate Sponsors: Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Scott Brown (R-MA)

A Bill To add engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the “Enemy Expatriation Act.”

SEC. 2. LOSS OF NATIONALITY.

(a) IN GENERAL.—Section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1481) is amended—

(1) in subsection (a)—

     (A) in each of paragraphs (1) through (6), by striking “or” at the end;

     (B) in paragraph (7), by striking the period at the end and inserting “; or”; and<

     (C) by adding at the end the following: “(8) engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.”; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

     “(c) For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war.”

(b) TECHNICAL AMENDMENT.—Section 351(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1483(a)) is amended by striking “(6) and (7)” and inserting “(6), (7), and (8).”

NOTE: As of this writing, H.R. 3166 was referred to the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement on October 24, 2011, and. S. 1698 was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary on October 12, 2011.

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Playwright Soji Kashiwagi, who is active with the Tule Lake Committee, recently wrote a letter to President Barack Obama, criticizing him for signing the National Defense Authorization Act on December 31, 2011. Kashiwagi, who writes from Pasadena, California, has graciously permitted us to repint it here.

Soji Kashiwagi
Photo courtesy Discover Nikkei

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Obama,

Before I begin, I must say that I have the utmost respect for the Office of the President, and I want to thank you for the job you are doing under difficult circumstances and in an oftentimes hostile environment.

That being said, I must also express to you my deep disappointment and outrage at your “under the radar” New Year’s Eve signing into law of the National Defense Authorization Act.

I know you are aware that the law’s provision that gives the President authorization to order the U.S. Military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial, civilians, including American citizens, suspected of terrorism, anywhere in the world is a complete breach of our U.S. Constitution. You also know that the 5th Amendment provides, in part, that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” This new law, according to writer Andrew Sullivan, “is a legal and indefinite abolition of habeas corpus.”

The words, “authorization to order the U.S. Military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial, civilians, including American citizens” and “suspected” sends a chill down my spine. These words became a tragic reality for 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 authorized the U.S. military to forcibly remove American citizens, without cause or due process, and imprison them in ten desolate concentration camps located in the badlands of America—for over three years. It wasn’t until many years later that these “suspected” citizens were found to be innocent and this completely unnecessary—and unconstitutional—action against them has been proven to be a massive civil rights disaster unprecedented in American history.

Having read your books, I know you are very aware about this dark chapter—and how our Constitution was trampled on in the name of “military necessity” (which was later proven to be false). I know you have voiced “serious reservations” about this bill when you signed it. And yet, instead of vetoing the bill, you signed it, and with that signature, you have opened the door for future presidents to do the exact same thing that was done to my family and the families of 120,000 other Japanese Americans.

I know you know that this was wrong, and yet you did it anyway. And I’m here to remind you that the consequences of those actions and the long-term damage done to Japanese Americans over 70 years ago are still being felt to this day. Allow me to share just a few of them with you.

My father, Nisei American Hiroshi Kashiwagi, was born in California, and grew up as a loyal, patriotic American, just like the rest of those of his generation. He had never been to Japan, and had no loyalties to Japan. And yet, based on his Japanese race, he was branded a “non-alien,” forcibly removed from the only home that he knew and detained with the rest of his community at the concentration camp at Tule Lake, California. And because he refused to answer two deeply flawed, government-issued “loyalty” questions, he was branded a “disloyal,” a “troublemaker” and one of the “bad Japanese Americans” for daring to defy the U.S. Government and protest his unjust incarceration. By refusing to answer, he says, “I was fighting for our civil rights.”

However, history has not been kind to those who protested against these infamous loyalty questions. The “disloyal” stigma of shame they have carried for all these years has been a heavy load to bear, and sadly, the wounds from this experience are still not completely healed, and probably never will be. Tragically, thousands who answered “No-No” to the loyalty questions have already gone to their graves with this heavy—and might I add unnecessary—burden still on their shoulders.

Along with my father and other protesters, there was another civil rights hero by the name of Gordon Hirabayashi, who recently passed away at the age of 93. Hirabayashi believed the Government’s actions were racially discriminatory. He refused to go to camp on Constitutional grounds, and went to prison because of it. His appeal against the U.S. Government went all the way to the Supreme Court.

“When my case was before the Supreme Court in 1943, I fully expected that as a citizen the Constitution would protect me,” he was quoted as saying. “Surprisingly, even though I lost, I did not abandon my belief and values. And I never look at my case as just my own, or just as a Japanese American. It is an American case with principles that affect the fundamental human rights of all Americans.”

Over 40 years later, Hirabayashi’s conviction was overturned when it was proven to the courts that the incarceration was based on racism against Japanese Americans and not on military necessity.

Before he was exonerated, Hirabayashi said: “I want vindication not only for myself. I also want the cloud removed from over the heads of 120,000 others. My citizenship didn’t protect me one bit. Our Constitution was reduced to a scrap of paper.”

Our Government’s failure to defend our Constitution has had long-term negative consequences on a large group of innocent Americans. I have given you just a couple of examples, but the stories of suffering, hardship and loss are in the tens of thousands. I know you have said that you will not enforce parts of this law that encroach on the Constitutional rights of American citizens. However, Andrew Clark Arand, a professor of government at Georgetown University, said it best in a January 6, 2012 Reuters article: “Signing something and saying you are not going to follow portions of it is problematic,” he said. “I believe that the framers of the Constitution would have felt that’s exactly the kind of legislation you need to veto.”

I agree, and believe our Founding Fathers are turning over in their graves at the thought of this law. So is Gordon Hirabayashi. My mother, who was a nine-year-old girl when she was imprisoned at Tule Lake, wants you to know that she’s disappointed in you. My father, now 89, was outraged and wants to know, “What were you thinking?”

Last August, I was appointed as a Human Relations Commissioner for the City of Pasadena, California. At the swearing in ceremony before the Mayor and members of the City Council, I took a solemn oath to “…preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It is the same oath of office that you took. In the future, my hope is that you will continue to live up to this oath and steadfastly refuse to render our Constitution a worthless scrap of paper. My hope is that the mistake that is now signed into law will not come back to haunt our fellow Americans in the future. It has happened before, and for the sake of all the innocent Americans who suffered in America’s concentration camps, we must not let it happen ever again.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Soji Kashiwagi

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

A portion of the crowd attending the 42nd Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage
on April 30, 2011, at the Manzanar National Historic Site.
The cemetery monument is featured in the background.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

Each year, hundreds of students, teachers, community members, clergy and former incarcerees attend the Pilgrimage. Planning is underway for the afternoon event, as well as for the Manzanar At Dusk program, scheduled from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM that same evening at the Lone Pine High School gymnasium, located at 538 South Main Street (US Highway 395), in Lone Pine, nine miles south of the Manzanar National Historic Site, across the street from McDonald’s.

Manzanar At Dusk is co-sponsored by the Cal Poly Pomona Nikkei Student Union, the UCLA Nikkei Student Union, the UCSD Nikkei Student Union, Lone Pine Unified School District, and Lone Pine High School.

Further details about the Pilgrimage and the Manzanar At Dusk program, including information on bus transportation from the Los Angeles area, will be announced at a later date.

Pilgrimage participants are advised to bring their own lunch, drinks and snacks as there are no facilities to purchase food at the Manzanar National Historic Site (restaurants and fast food outlets are located in Lone Pine and Independence, which are nearby). Water will be provided at the site.

The Manzanar Committee is dedicated to educating and raising public awareness about the incarceration and violation of civil rights of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II and to the continuing struggle of all peoples when Constitutional rights are in danger. A non-profit organization that has sponsored the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage since 1969, along with other educational programs, the Manzanar Committee has also played a key role in the establishment and continued development of the Manzanar National Historic Site. For more information, send e-mail to 43rdpilgrimage -at- manzanarcommittee.org, call (323) 662-5102, or check their blog at http://blog.manzanarcommittee.org.

-30-

Manzanar National Historic Site

Lone Pine High School

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Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

Editor’s Note: The following piece by Jenni Kuida, a tribute to former Manzanar Committee member Grace Harada, was originally published in January 2002, in the Rafu Shimpo, and on her family’s web site. She posted a link to her story on Facebook on January 18, commemorating the tenth anniversary of Harada’s passing. We thought it would be a fitting tribute to publish it here as well.

Former Manzanar Committee member Grace Harada (center), shown here with Jenni Kuida (left) and
Sue Kunitomi Embrey (right), who passed away in 2006.
Photo: Jenni Kuida

Sadly, she passed away on January 18 at age 76. Only one week earlier, she suffered from a massive stroke and slipped into a coma. Just like that. At the memorial service for Grace at Senshin Buddhist Temple, Reverend Mas Kodani spoke fondly of Grace, using the words “gracious” and “graceful” to describe Grace. He talked about how Grace loved to dance. She lived her life doing what she loved to do. She found true joy in dancing, and in teaching dance to others.

She did not perform for money or fame, but she danced for the community, for her daughters, her grandchildren, and her two great grandchildren. She danced for the pure love of it. Rev. Mas’ advice was to find what you love and do it. Accept that you’ll make mistakes along the way, but to find your joy in life. Like Grace did.

People like Grace are true gems in the community. She wasn’t a high profile person. But she was a leader by example. Through Grace’s love of Bon Odori, she shared her knowledge of Japanese folk dance with literally thousands of people on the last Saturday of every April at Manzanar, and each summer throughout the obon season. She even helped create new Japanese American dances at Senshin. I can’t imagine how many people have danced with, beside and behind Grace, following her graceful feet and arm movements.

Grace was one of my favorite people on the Manzanar Committee. I started volunteering with the Manzanar Committee about six years ago, but Grace has been with the Committee since its beginning. I think she only missed the pilgrimage once, when she was having problems with her knees. She was that dedicated.

What I liked most about Grace was her cheerful spirit and her deep compassion concern for others. After Sue Embrey, Manzanar Committee Chairperson, stopped driving recently, Grace would always make sure that Sue had a ride. I also remember her speaking more than once about how easy her life had been, compared to the struggles that her parents and other Issei faced living in America.

Every year at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, we would end the day with the traditional tanko bushi, honoring the 10,000 former internees who lived at Manzanar. Grace would always be out there, whether it was in the extreme desert heat, or the bitter cold wind, wearing her turquoise blue yukata jacket, head tilted, fingers together, demonstrating the movements, and showing us what to do.

I have seen pilgrimage first timers join in the tanko bushi without hesitation. I think it was Grace’s generous nature and her smiling face, that put people at ease. She had a way of making it look so easy, accessible, and fun.

A lesson for us Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei is to learn all we can from the wisdom keepers like Grace, who hold knowledge about these Japanese and Japanese American cultural traditions. Because without them, these traditions and cultural practices will die with them. Grace was a role model to young people, but she was not alone.

There are hundreds of every day people like her, volunteering their time, sharing their knowledge at every turn, from their own inner circles. Whether they are dancing at obon, helping to maintain or build their community centers, telling children about their wartime camp experiences, or continuing to fight for redress, we have many gems in the Japanese American community. Gems who are unrecognized for their efforts, but do so because it is what they love to do.

Finally, Grace’s sudden passing is a reminder to us all that we should not take friends and family for granted. We should treat people with kindness and honesty, as Grace did. I don’t know who will lead the tanko bushi at the pilgrimage this year, and that makes me a little sad.

But I know that as we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 in 2002, that she would want someone to take her place, to teach a new generation of dancers and pilgrims. I also know that Grace will be dancing at Manzanar in spirit, gracious and graceful.

Sansei activist Jenni Kuida, a former secretary and webmaster for the Manzanar Committee, writes from Culver City, California.

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

Gordon K. Hirabayashi.
Photo: University of Alberta, Edmonton

A native of Auburn, Washington (just northeast of Tacoma), Hirabayashi defied Executive Order 9066, the United States Government’s decree on February 19, 1942, that resulted in the mass roundup and incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in American concentration camps during World War II.

Indeed, Hirabayashi, along with Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui, chose to defy the government’s orders, and filed a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the incarceration. The case eventually made it to the United States Supreme Court.

Hirabayashi’s former wife, Esther, also passed away on January 2, at the age of 87. Their son, Jay, announced the passing of his parents on Facebook.

“My Dad, Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who was ninety-three, passed away early this morning,” he wrote. “He was an American hero, besides being a great father, who taught me about the values of honesty, integrity, and justice. My Mother, Esther Hirabayashi, who was eighty-seven, also passed away this morning, about ten hours later. She was a beautiful, intelligent, generous soul. Although my parents were divorced, they somehow chose to leave us on the same day. I am missing them a lot right now.”

Jay Hirabayashi also indicated that his father suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Gordon Hirabayashi was a senior at the University of Washington when the curfew order came in March 1942.

“After the curfew order was announced, we knew there would be further orders to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast,” Hirabayashi wrote. “When the exclusion orders specifying the deadline for forced removal from various districts of Seattle were posted on telephone poles, I was confronted with a dilemma: Do I stay out of trouble and succumb to the status of second-class citizen, or do I continue to live like other Americans and thus disobey the law?”¹

“When the curfew was imposed, I obeyed for about a week, Hirabayashi added. “We had about twelve living in the [YMCA] dormitory, so it was a small group, and they all became my volunteer timekeepers. ‘Hey, Gordy, it’s five minutes to eight,’ and I’d have to dash back from the library or from the coffee shop. One of those times, I stopped and I thought, ‘Why the hell am I running back? Am I an American? And if I am, why am I running back and nobody else is?’”²

“I think if the order said all civilians must obey the curfew, if it was just a non-essential restrictive move, I might not have objected. But I felt it was unfair, just to be referred to as a ‘non-alien’—they never referred to me as a citizen. This was so pointedly, so obviously a violation of what the Constitution stood for, what citizenship meant. So I stopped and turned around and went back.”³

Originally, Hirabayashi had no intention of challenging the constitutionality of the government’s actions.

“About two weeks before my time came up, I said to myself, If I am defying the curfew, how can I accept this thing? This is much worse, the same principle but much worse in terms of uprooting and denial of our rights, and the suffering,” he wrote. “So that’s when I began to mull it over and I kicked it around with my roommate, Bill Makino, and he agreed with me. So we said, Let’s investigate this further and think about it. And we both decided we can’t go along with it. It’s an absolute denial of our rights.”⁴

“I had no plans to bring a test case,” he added. “Today, if I violate anything on the grounds of principle, I would spend some time thinking about the legal aspects, the court battles and so on. But at that time, I was just a student. I had read of World War I and constitutional cases, but I didn’t give it very much thought. I did anticipate that I would be apprehended, but I didn’t know very much about the legal procedures in these things. I just felt that something was going to happen to curtail my freedom.”⁵

Hirabayashi turned himself in to the FBI after defying the order to be removed from Seattle, and was tried and convicted in October 1942. He spent ninety days in prison.

In 1943, Hirabayashi’s case was heard by the Supreme Court, which ruled against him in a 9-0 vote.

When my case was before the Supreme Court in 1943, I fully expected that, as a citizen, the Constitution would protect me. Surprisingly, even though I lost, I did not abandon my beliefs and my values, and I never look at my case as just my own, or just as a Japanese American case. It is an American case, with principles that affect the fundamental human rights of all Americans.⁶

Some forty years later, during the Japanese American community’s fight for redress, Hirabayashi’s, Korematsu’s and Yasui’s cases were reopened, with attorneys filing a petition for a writ of error coram nobis in federal court, noting that the government suppressed, altered and destroyed crucial evidence during World War II that would have virtually destroyed the government’s use of “military necessity” as their justification for the incarceration.

A writ of error coram nobis allows for judicial review of a judgment based on factual errors not known to the court at the time the judgment was delivered.

Three years later, in a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Hirabayashi conviction, citing that his attorneys had proven their allegations of governmental misconduct.

“As an American citizen, I wanted to uphold the principles of the Constitution, and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them,” Hirabayashi told the late University of California, Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki. “It was not acceptable to be less than a full citizen in a white man’s country.”⁷

Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey hailed Hirabayashi as champion of civil rights.

“With the passing of Gordon Hirabayashi, we have lost a true hero, a true champion of civil rights,” said Embrey. “Asking for nothing more than equal treatment under the law, and demanding his Constitutional rights, he made history.”

“His historic stand in defense of the Constitution, and against the incarceration of the Nikkei community, serves as an inspiration to all who cherish democracy and human rights,” added Embrey. “On behalf of the Manzanar Committee, I want to extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends and loved ones. He will be sorely missed.”

Hirabayashi, who earned a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Washington after the war, was Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He is survived by his wife, Susan Carnahan, daughters Marion Oldenburg and Sharon Yuen, and his son, Jay (all children were from his marriage to Esther Hirabayashi); a sister, Esther Furugori, a brother, Professor James Hirabayashi of San Jose State University, nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

A memorial service for Gordon Hirabayashi is scheduled for Friday, January 6, in Edmonton.

^1-6Hirabayashi, Gordon (1990). “Gordon Hirabayashi v. The United States ‘Am I An American?,’” In Irons, Peter (Ed.), The Courage Of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way To The Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 50-62. ISBN-10: 0-1401-2810-7. ISBN-13: 978-0140128109.

⁷ Takaki, Ronald. Strangers From A Different Shore: A History Of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown And Company. 1989, p. 393. ISBN-10: 0-3168-3109-3. ISBN-13: 978-0316831093.

Related Stories

• Gordon Hirabayshi, 1918-2012 – Angry Asian Man
• Gordon Hirabayashi, Civil Rights Icon Who Resisted Wartime Incarceration, Dies – Nichibei
• Gordon Hirabayashi Has Died; He Refused To Go To WWII Internment Camp – NPR – The Two Way
• Civil Rights Icon Gordon Hirabayashi Dies at 93 – Rafu Shimpo

The Manzanar Committee is dedicated to educating and raising public awareness about the incarceration and violation of civil rights of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II and to the continuing struggle of all peoples when Constitutional rights are in danger. A non-profit organization that has sponsored the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage since 1969, along with other educational programs, the Manzanar Committee has also played a key role in the establishment and continued development of the Manzanar National Historic Site.

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

Manzanar Committee member Kanji Sahara (left), shown here during
the 2011 Manzanar At Dusk program on April 30, 2011.
Photo: James To

Editor’s Note: On December 9, 2011, the New York Times published a review of the new museum at the Heart Mountain National Historic Landmark, which opened on August 20, 2011. But it was clear that the author failed to do thorough research. In fact, he was careless, sloppy, and as a journalist, his work was shoddy, at best. As a result, the story ended up perpetuating the falsehoods that many continue to believe about the Japanese American Incarceration experience, giving the reader the idea that the incarceration was somewhat justified.

Many in the Japanese American community were outraged, including Manzanar Committee member Kanji Sahara, a Nisei (second generation American of Japanese ancestry), who was incarcerated at the concentration camp in Jerome, Arkansas during World War II. Sahara submitted the following as a Letter to the Editor, and has given his permission for us to publish it here as well.

by Kanji Sahara

Edward Rothstein’s “The How of an Internment, But Not All The Whys” (Art & Design, December 9, 2011) reviews the new Heart Mountain museum and propagates incorrect facts regarding the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans.

After World War II started, the FBI arrested and detained a few thousand German, Italian and Japanese aliens. These were “monitored aliens” that the FBI tracked before World War I and considered dangerous. However, the 120,000 Nikkei (Japanese emigrants and their descendants) put in camps were not treated as individuals but members of an ethnic group. There is a distinction between arresting monitored aliens and mass incarceration of an ethnic group.

Rothstein repeats several myths regarding “suspicious acts” by Nikkei which led to call for their removal. There is not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity by Nikkei on the West Coast. FBI Director Hoover stated mass removal was not necessary. In 1983, the Congressional Committee said Evacuation was due to race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.

Rothstein states Internment had large loopholes. This is because only the Nikkei in the West Coast states were put in camps. Thus Colorado’s Amache Camp housed California Nikkei, while those Nikkei living in Denver were free.

Rothstein cites “…jobs held outside the camp.” In 1942, western sugar beet farmers needed workers to harvest the crop. About 10,000 young men temporarily left camp to harvest sugar beets.

Rothstein states “…its newspaper editors working in Cody.” This is because every Saturday, the Cody Enterprise printed the Heart Mountain Sentinel.

Targeting of Muslim Americans has occurred since 9/11. The best antidote is to know the truth concerning the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Related Stories:

• A Response To New York Times’ “The How of an Internment, but Not All the Whys” – 8 Asians
• New York Times Museum Review Offers Possible Justifications For Internment? – Angry Asian Man
• The Ugly Side of Selective Memory & Revisionist History – Asian Nation
• Letters: When Japanese-Americans Were Interned in Camps – New York Times
• Scholars Take Issue with NYT Review of Heart Mountain Museum – Rafu Shimpo
• Insinuations and Innuendo About Internment – Rafu Shimpo
• The Ugly Side of Selective Memory & Revisionist History – The Color Line

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

Manzanar Committee member Joyce Okazaki was a child when she was incarcerated at Manzanar, shown here in this famous photo by renowned photographer Ansel Adams.

The Manzanar Committee encourages those with questions to feel free to contact us. We don’t always have the answers, but if we don’t, we can usually put people in touch with those who do.

Manzanar Committee member Joyce Okazaki, who was incarcerated at Manzanar as a child, answered some questions sent to us by Terry Healy, who teaches a sixth grade class at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Manhattan, Kansas.

by Joyce Okazaki

I was sent with my family to Manzanar, California, and arrived there on April 2, 1942. I was a second grader, and when I left in August, 1944, I finished fifth grade. I had a difficult adjustment to regular school, but did not suffer any discrimination from people in Chicago, Illinois.

The following are my answers to often asked questions by students in schools across the country, when assigned by their teachers.

1. What was the reaction of those who were sent to the camps?

In that day and time, the Japanese Americans were a silent and obedient minority, who went along with whatever was ordered for them by the authorities. There were very few, only three out of 120,000 people, who refused to obey the curfew, or to register and be forcibly removed from their homes to go to an unknown place.

Although I was a child then, I went with my parents, who obeyed orders. But imagine if you are an adult, forced to leave your comfortable home, leave your job, and sell or store your belongings and furniture, because you don’t know where you are going and how long you will be gone. No one tells you anything other than you have to leave, and you can only take what you can carry. If your parents have young children, they have to carry everything for the children as well as themselves.

2. What is the best way to describe the camps? We have heard internment camps, prison camps, concentration camps, and relocation camps?

The best description is concentration camp, because I was incarcerated in one, surrounded by barbed wire fencing and eight guard towers with armed sentries. I was a citizen and denied my civil rights. There was no hearing, and no charges for any crimes.

An internment camp for internees are for enemy aliens during a time of war. We were citizens.

A prison camp is for criminals who are convicted of crimes usually after being tried in court.

A relocation camp is for people who have to be moved away from a hazard, such as a toxic or polluted area. An evacuation of an area happens during a time of hurricanes, fires or floods to move people from their homes, but are eventually moved back within a short period of time.

A concentration camp is a place where people are imprisoned, not because of any crimes they committed, but because of who they are. During World War II, America’s concentration camps were distinguishable from Nazi Germany’s camps, which were torture camps and in some cases, death camps or extermination camps. Concentration camps have existed in the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Bosnia. All of these camps had one thing in common: the people in power removed a minority group from the general population and the rest of society let it happen.

3. What was the impact on the families that were sent to the camps short term? Long term?

Manzanar Committee member Joyce Okazaki (seated to the left of the gentleman in the blue shirt) participates in a small group discussion
at the 2007 Manzanar At Dusk program.
Photo: Gann Matsuda.

Families also had to learn to go outside to another barrack to shower, use the toilet, and do laundry.

The long-term impact was that Japanese American adults did not talk about this period in their lives for many years to their families, friends and the community, and some of the people may never have spoken about this event. This is probably because of the perceived shame of being sent to a prison for no reason, and many could never understand the reason why this had to happen. They were silent to their graves.

4. Did many people leave the camps to go to other parts of the United States or remain there?

The West Coast of the United States was designated as a restricted military zone, and was closed to all who were incarcerated in concentration camps. The Japanese Americans were not allowed to move back to the West Coast. Once the US Supreme Court decided, in December of 1942, that the Japanese Americans, who were determined to be loyal, could leave, some applied for permission to leave the camp, provided that they had a sponsor at the destination.

Each person leaving camp was given a one-way ticket to wherever they chose to go and $25. My father requested permission to leave and was given a train ticket to New York. He found a job that was in Chicago, Illinois, and moved there. He sent for us and we left camp in August 1944. We lived in Chicago for eight years before Dad got a transfer to Los Angeles, and we moved.

Many of the people who settled in Chicago have remained there all of their lives. Others moved to New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Denver, Colorado, Salt Lake City, Utah, Seabrook, New Jersey, and various other cities that were accepting of the Japanese Americans.

After December, 1944, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) decided to lift the restrictions of moving back to the West Coast. My grandparents then moved back to Los Angeles in March 1945. After the war ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, those remaining in the camps returned to the West Coast, and suffered from a housing shortage. The last camp to close was Tule Lake, California, which closed on March 20, 1946.

5. Did the court case of Fred Korematsu make any difference?

The original decision of Korematsu vs. US was tried all the way to the US Supreme Court. The Court ruled that the US Government was justified in placing all Japanese Americans into concentration camps because of military necessity. Documents stated that there were instances of spying and sabotage recorded. All of this was later found to be false after documents found in the National Archives in the early 1980’s actually showed that documents were falsified to justify their position. One such document, of which there were ten copies, was the only one remaining in the files, because the other nine copies were destroyed, was discovered by a researcher, Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga. With this document, constitutional lawyers then set about to open the case by a writ of error of Coram Nobis, an old procedure, to attempt to appeal Korematsu’s case, The appeal was filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court decision was eventually vacated, freeing Korematsu of being a felon in 1984.

The views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

PILGRIMAGES: After talking about the origins, history, and the status of the present-day Manzanar and Tule Lake Pilgrimages, the focus of an October 8, 2011 event at the Japanese American National Museum turned to the future of both pilgrimages, along with that of Japanese American community organizations.

Tule Lake Committee members Barbara Takei (left) and Stan Shikuma (right)
were panelists during an event discussing the origins, history and
future of the Manzanar and Tule Lake Pilgrimages at the
Japanese American National Museum on October 8, 2011.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

The panelists included California Assemblymember Warren Furutani, Bruce Embrey, Co-Chair of the Manzanar Committee, and Stan Shikuma and Barbara Takei, both with the Tule Lake Committee.

After concentrating mostly on the origins and history of each pilgrimage (see Panel Looks At Past, Present And Future Of Manzanar And Tule Lake Pilgrimages During JANM Event), the focus shifted towards the future.

With the Manzanar Pilgrimage entering its 43rd year, and with the Tule Lake Pilgrimage now 37 years old, panelists grappled with question of what role the two pilgrimages will play in the Japanese American community, not to mention society in general, and what lies ahead for both long-standing traditions.

One challenge facing the Tule Lake Pilgrimage is finding a way to allow more people to participate.

“We travel together on the buses, and the buses, in a sense, form communities, spending four days together, processing, sharing stories, getting to know people,” said Takei, a Sansei from Sacramento, California, whose mother was incarcerated at Tule Lake before it became a segregation center, as well as at the Amache camp. “I think this is the thing about the Tule Lake Pilgrimage. When you’re traveling together, eating your meals together, you’re living together in the dorms, and going and visiting the site together, there’s a lot of sharing that goes on, and I think that is one of the very powerful parts of the experience.”

“But we can’t accommodate the numbers that [attend] the Manzanar Pilgrimage, which is usually over 1,000 people,” added Takei. “That’s the thing that we’re looking at in the future, trying to find ways to accommodate more people, because the healing process continues.”

Takei, who co-authored, Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History and Guide to the Tule Lake Internment Camp Site, with Judy Tachibana in 2001, also stressed that the pilgrimages should always shine a bright spotlight on addressing injustices, and not only those facing Japanese Americans.

“The story of wartime incarceration is such a powerful story of the violation of civil rights that all Americans should care about it,” she noted. “Those of us who have family members who experienced it have the opportunity, that personal connection, to share that story, and to find ways to connect the Japanese American story to other stories, incidents and events in social justice.”

“One of the worst parts of the experience for our family members was the sense of isolation, that they were removed, and no one really cared, no one reached out,” she added. “The only group that reached out were the Quakers. In hindsight, we can look back and see the terrible pain that isolation caused. Perhaps we’ll be in a better position to respond when others civil, or other kinds of injustice.”

Embrey emphasized that the Japanese American community has a special responsibility to speak out against injustice.

Students are the ones who really started the pilgrimages, both Tule Lake and Manzanar. When we did that, it’s not like we had all the answers. We were searching for answers. Sometimes, we were just searching for the right questions. But we were willing to take action, and that’s really important, I can’t stress enough how important is it to not be satisfied with just studying the question and saying, ‘hey, that’s not right,’ but going out and doing something [about it]. — Stan Shikuma

“Our community has a unique place in American History, and you can say that Native Americans do too, because, in many ways, reservations were concentration camps,” Embrey stressed. “But our community, as a whole, not just those who were in camp, has a special responsibility to ensure that this country, the broader public, understands what happened on its soil, understands how far the government went to violate our Constitution, and understands the profound economic, psychological—the social dislocation that this act—how it impacted an entire community.”

“We occupy a special place in history, and in this country,” Embrey added. “It is incumbent upon us—actually, we have a responsibility to continue to educate, and continue to bring up the issues of Constitutional rights. This is an ongoing issue that can erupt at any time.”

Historically speaking, what Embrey and Takei described above are what both pilgrimages have been all about since their beginnings in 1969 (Manzanar) and 1975 (Tule Lake).

“Once somebody goes to one of these pilgrimages, it’s a profound transformation,” Embrey noted. “I had an African American reporter come up to me [at one of the recent Manzanar Pilgrimages] and she burst into tears. These are not little vacations, or tours of a historic site. You’re looking at ruins, but they have a profound psychological impact.”

“You’ve got to get people to go, and you have to educate people about what happened,” Embrey added. “This isn’t something that’s easily absorbed. It was very difficult to even get people to talk about it. For decades, people didn’t talk about it, and it took decades for people to come to grips with the camp experience, and to [begin to] heal.”

“The healing process still has to go on. It has had an impact on our community to this day. The Yonsei and Gosei need to understand that it has impacted their families, and their own lives. There is an indirect, empathetic quality that’s very powerful. But there’s also the direct question of how does this relate to some of the struggles going on today, some of the struggles that I face. You have to get people to go to these pilgrimages. It’s incumbent on you, it’s incumbent upon us, to try to draw these lessons for people, and urge them to get involved.”

Beyond The Pilgrimages: Getting Involved

“The pilgrimages are very powerful, spiritual experiences, and are really touchstones for who we are, said Takei. “It’s a very emotionally deep experience. But from there, then what? After the pilgrimage, how do you then integrate it into your life?”

Takei’s question goes to the core of what the two pilgrimages are all about…educating and empowering people so that they can act.

One such issue is the current movement to use appropriate, non-euphemistic language when referring to the camps and the camp experience.

“There’s a debate on how we’re going to talk about the camps,” said Shikuma, who became involved with the Tule Lake Committee in 1978, as a member of the Asian Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley. “Are they going to be presented as ‘relocation centers,’ as the government’s propaganda portrayed it in 1942, or are they going to be called ‘concentration camps’ that the United States set up for its own citizens? You can get involved in that debate. It’s going on right now.”

“Much of the language that we’ve been using to talk about the camps is the language of the oppressor,” Takei explained. “It’s the language of the WRA [War Relocation Authority]. The purpose of that language was to hide and minimize what was going on.”

Shikuma then issued a challenge to the students.

“As students, you’re in institutions of higher education, you’re in a learning situation, so, start by educating yourselves,” he stressed. “You can’t help other people if you don’t know what’s going on. Once you start down that path, help educate others. You can put on educational program, go on the pilgrimages.”

“Students are the ones who really started the pilgrimages, both Tule Lake and Manzanar,” he added. “When we did that, it’s not like we had all the answers. We were searching for answers. Sometimes, we were just searching for the right questions. But we were willing to take action, and that’s really important, I can’t stress enough how important is it to not be satisfied with just studying the question and saying, ‘hey, that’s not right,’ but going out and doing something [about it].”

“I would encourage all of you to try to have an impact on the world.”

UCLA Nikkei Student Union member Hiromi Aoyama (at left, behind podium) was one of the students moderating the
discussion with panelists (from left) Barbara Takei, Stan Shikuma, and Bruce Embrey.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

Although the UCLA Nikkei Student Union (NSU) moderated the discussions, they seemed to get much more out of the event than they put into it.

“My grandparents, one was in Amache, and I think she moved around [to at least one other camp],” said Sacramento native Alyssa Matsuo, a twenty-year-old Biology major at UCLA, and a member of NSU. “My grandfather was in the [United States] Army, so they had to write letters back and forth.”

“One of my uncles was in Tule Lake, so I had family there, but I haven’t heard much about Tule Lake or Manzanar, because I didn’t have family at Manzanar,” added Matsuo. “I didn’t know there was a jail at Tule Lake. I didn’t know about the Tule Lake Pilgrimage at all. I think that would be an interesting one to go to, since it’s different from all the other ones.”

“I really want to have the first-hand experience. I’ve heard stories through my grandmother’s experiences, so I guess I want to learn more. I would like to go [to the Manzanar Pilgrimage] this year, if I can, just so I can get that first-hand experience.”

NSU President Matt Ichinose also had a family member behind the barbed wire at Tule Lake.

“I enjoyed listening to the presentations about Tule Lake, because my grandfather was incarcerated there, so I have a family attachment to that,” he said. “I enjoyed hearing about what they do at their pilgrimage.”

“Because we’re always involved with the Manzanar Pilgrimage every year, it’s important to know how much we can learn from the panelists, and how NSU can go forward in terms of its involvement with the Manzanar Pilgrimage,” he added. “For our organization, it was a good chance to hear about a different pilgrimage, because all we hear about is the Manzanar Pilgrimage, because that’s the one we go to. Hopefully, this will spur interest in the other pilgrimages as well.”

Turning The Tables

Although the program began as a traditional event where the audience listened to the remarks made by the panelists, it took an abrupt turn.

Indeed, the focus shifted from the panelists to the students, who suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of questions from the panelists about how they learned about the camp experience, their experiences at the Manzanar Pilgrimage, how they deal with questions of identity and race, and more.

Although this kind of dialogue between the panelists and students was not part of the original plan, the event turned out to be exactly what JANM organizers had hoped for.

“I really wanted to tell the Japanese American story, the history of the story, and not just talk about the past, but how we could learn from past mistakes, and that we could talk about the community in the future,” said Koji Steven Sakai, Manager of Public Programs at JANM. “What I didn’t want it to be was everyone talking about the history, just reminiscing, and going over the same details, over and over.”

“What I really wanted was the students to be able to learn something, and get something out of it,” added Sakai, who served as the primary organizer of the event. “As they think about our community going forward, the Yonsei, the Gosei, and all the generations after that, I want them to think about what they can learn from the Sansei, how they can use those lessons, and continue the Japanese American community.”

The students were taken by surprise.

“I was actually surprised about that,” said Ichinose. “I thought it was going to be more about them talking about their experiences, and the history behind the pilgrimages. But it ended up being more interactive between the students and the panelists.”

“It was a very good way to interact with the panelists, to become more a part of the event, to share our perspectives and find out what they think about our views about the pilgrimages,” added Ichinose.

The spotlight that shined so brightly on the students served to illuminate much more than their views on the camp experience and the pilgrimages.

I think a lot of community organizations are struggling with the question of how to carry on to the next generation. I feel like the only way we can move forward as a community and get the young people involved is to actually involve them, to ask them questions, and really hear what they have to say. — Koji Steven Sakai

“We could’ve had a fine program with the panelists we had, with what they were talking about in terms of what was going on, historically, and why the pilgrimages are important,” said emcee Chris Komai, JANM’s Public Information Officer. “But that other aspect of why this issue is still relevant today, especially with young people—that’s the ultimate question for all of our Japanese American organizations.”

“If the young people in our community aren’t interested in these kinds of things, what’s going to happen to all of our organizations,” added Komai. “The fact that we found so many of them, and so many of them who expressed, in such a very fine way, their feelings, is something that makes me very hopeful for the future.”

Involving the younger generations in a manner in which they feel that they are respected and valued has been a mostly overwhelming challenge for Japanese American community organizations for many years—many have failed to bridge the generation gap, let alone attempt to do so.

“Even though there’s a lot of community organizations, and a lot of people want to involve Yonsei and Gosei, I think they want to involve them [in terms of the] Sansei telling the Yonsei and Gosei about themselves, or about what happened in the past, but [the communication] doesn’t go back the other way,” said Sakai.

“I think a lot of organizations are talking about involving the younger generations, and having their voices in there,” added Sakai. “From my perspective, I’m relatively young, 34 years old. I tend to be the youngest person, and I know there are a lot more younger people who have totally different experiences than I’ve had. I just feel, as a community, like we’re not listening, and we don’t want to listen. We just want to tell.”

“I felt like it might be an interesting change to see what the Yonsei and Gosei had to say, or what the shin-Issei had to say. In fact, to hear what the shin-Issei had to say was really interesting, and I thought, worked out the best in the whole program.”

Komai noted the importance of engaging young people in dialogue and respecting them and their views, rather than just talking and expecting them to be glued to every word.

“I think that’s something that, educationally, is really good, because, the thing is, if you really want to get people involved, you really need to ask them ‘why,’” he noted. “You need to find out what interests them. If you just try to lecture them, if you just try to force feed them everything, just from my own experience as a student, that doesn’t work.”

“But if you’re suddenly taking an interest in me [as a student], and asking me what is my story, what is my background, why would I be interested in the story in the first place, I think that opens it up, and we have two-way communication, and I think this program worked very well along those lines,” he added.

“I think a lot of community organizations are struggling with the question of how to carry on to the next generation,” Sakai emphasized. “I feel like the only way we can move forward as a community and get the young people involved is to actually involve them, to ask them questions, and really hear what they have to say.”

One interested party would love to involve students, but not quite in the way Sakai has in mind. Nevertheless, the experience would be invaluable.

Les Inafuku, Superintendent of the Manzanar National Historic Site, was in Los Angeles for the event, and, having seen these students in action over the years at the Manzanar At Dusk program, he sees an untapped resource, not to mention a relationship that would be mutually beneficial.

Indeed, Inafuku said that the site has research, on-site development work (historic/archeological sites within their boundaries), and many more tasks that he cannot place on the shoulders of his already overworked staff.

“It’s hard to say with the federal budget, not knowing where we are—maybe our partners can help us with funding for student interns, right on site, or, it could be worked out that it could be time spent here in Los Angeles, and time at Manzanar to work on projects,” said Inafuku. “We’ve got lots of research needs. Then there’s social networking. We don’t have time for it, and we could certainly use help with that.”

But Inafuku is also looking beyond internships. Indeed, he is hoping students, especially Japanese Americans, will consider working full-time for the National Park Service, especially at Manzanar, after graduating.

“Asian Americans are very underrepresented within the National Park Service, and we really need to have more,” he noted. “I think it’s a shame that I’m the first Nikkei employee at Manzanar National Historic Site.”

For those counting, Manzanar National Historic Site was established by an act of Congress on March 3, 1992.

“We have Caucasians who are interpreting Nikkei history to the American public, and to people throughout the world. They’re doing a great job, but they would do a better job if there were Nikkei on staff from whom they could learn even more.”

Unattributed views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Related Story:

• Panel Looks At Past, Present And Future Of Manzanar And Tule Lake Pilgrimages During JANM Event

Unless otherwise specified, all stories, images, video and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story, image, video or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original article on this blog are required.

Manzanar Committee Comment Policies

PILGRIMAGES: The origins, the history, and the future of the Manzanar and Tule Lake Pilgrimages was the focus of an October 8, 2011 event at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo. The following is the first of two stories covering the event.

California Assemblymember Warren Furutani broke down
the origins and history of the Manzanar Pilgrimage during
an event at the Japanese American National Museum
on October 8, 2011.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

During Community Builders: Japanese American Activism, 1960-1980 (Part 1), JANM brought together a diverse group of voices representing the past, the present and the future of both pilgrimages to discuss the origins, the history and what is on the horizon for both of the annual events.

Starting off the event was California Assemblymember Warren Furutani, who represents the 55th Assembly District, which includes the cities of Carson, Harbor City and Harbor Gateway, Lakewood, parts of Long Beach and Wilmington.

Furutani was one of the founders of the Manzanar Pilgrimage back in 1969.

“I remember when Victor Shibata and I were going to Oceanside to be in an anti-war march,” he reminisced. “The idea was to take the issue of the Vietnam War directly to the Marine base [Camp Pendleton]. I don’t know how smart that was, but we went down there to work with a group called Green Machine. The leader was a young woman named Pat Sumi, who asked us to come down and help.”

“We were sitting there, talking about marches,” he added. “I think we had the Poor People’s March in Washington, D.C., the farm workers had just marched to the Capitol to talk about their issues. Victor and I said that we had to march somewhere, and that’s when the idea came up of marching to Manzanar.”

“[Manzanar] was the closest, so logic said we can march to that, and, in those days, we didn’t have Google Maps, so we took out the map. [A little over 200] miles—that doesn’t sound too far, so we went.”

With that, Furutani and Shibata, along with a group of about 150 others, made the trek to Manzanar in what would become the first Manzanar Pilgrimage on a cold, winter day in December 1969. But their limited knowledge of the camp experience, and Manzanar in particular, led them astray.

“Our first turn off of Highway 395 [the road that runs past Manzanar in the Owens Valley] after we went past the [former Manzanar High School auditorium, now the Interpretive Center at the Manzanar National Historic Site]—that was the landmark that we were told about,” said Furutani. “There was a sign called Manzanar [Reward] Road, and I don’t know if the sign is there [anymore] because we stole the one that was there at the time [it has long since been replaced]. But it went east. So, instead of going west, we went east, in the opposite direction.”

“We came upon the old [Manzanar] Airport,” added Furutani. “It had old asphalt that criss-crossed [the old runways]. With our limited knowledge, we started imagining those were the roads in the camp, and the barracks must’ve been here. We were trying to put it together with a really limited amount of knowledge.”

Then things got a bit more exciting.

“Off in the distance, a pick-up truck started coming towards us,” Furutani recalled. “There was a cloud of dust, and it kept on coming closer, and as it got closer, we started to pay more attention. We could see the guys in it had cowboy hats on. As it got closer still, we could see there was a gun rack in the back window.”

“When they pulled up on us, they rolled down their windows and asked, ‘what are you boys doing here,’ Furutani added. “We said, ‘we’re not boys, we’re men, and we’re looking for Manzanar, which was a camp that people like you put us in.’”

“We were pretty [gutsy] in those days.”

But that chip on their shoulders got knocked off very, very quickly.

“They started laughing, which really [angered] us,” said Furutani. “‘What the hell are you laughing at,’ we asked.”

“They said, ‘well, if you’re looking for Manzanar, it’s on the other side of 395.’”

Tule Lake Committee member Stan Shikuma.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

“So, with our tails between our legs, we got in our cars and drove to the other side of 395, and that’s when we found the [cemetery] monument,” he said. “It was stark, it was weather-beaten, but it was still white, and it was interesting, because the backdrop was, literally, [Mount Williamson], and the Sierra Nevada mountains. There was an elegance to it, a starkness. It was very dramatic during a cloudy day, which provided all the environmental drama that helped fill in all the spaces relative to the limited knowledge we had.”

“We started walking around, and it was like discovering a shallow grave, where the elements had blown the top layer off, and then the grave was exposed, and you could see a whole history,” he added. “We didn’t understand it, because we didn’t have the information. The only book out at the time, was called America’s Concentration Camps by Allan R. Bosworth. Of course, we didn’t have any movies, or any of the things we have now relative to the experience.”

Not long after the first Manzanar Pilgrimage in 1969, momentum began to grow to make a similar pilgrimage to the site of the Tule Lake Segregation Center, which is now part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, administered by the National Park Service.

“The Tule Lake Pilgrimage started in 1975,” said panelist Stan Shikuma of the Tule Lake Committee, sponsor of the Tule Lake Pilgrimage. “I missed the first couple of pilgrimages, but, [by 1978], we were taking about 300 people to Tule Lake, which is very close to the Oregon border.”

“Out of the 300 people, I would guess five were Nisei,” added Shikuma, who was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, at the time. “Everyone else were students, so there wasn’t a lot of first-hand knowledge. It was kind of limited. But, starting in the early Eighties, after the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings in 1981, there was a real opening up among the Nisei, in particular, to share their stories, so we started seeing more Nisei. In 1982 and 1984, we actually had ten or 15 Issei come and join us.”

One of the primary motivations for the Tule Lake Pilgrimage was to promote healing within the community.

“One of the people who was involved at the time, Stephanie Miyashiro, had a very firm conviction that the Pilgrimage wasn’t just about learning history, and it wasn’t just about seeking artifacts and looking at ruins,” Shikuma noted. “For her, the central core of what the Pilgrimage was all about was a healing process for the community, that there had been this great damage to the community, as a whole, [as well as] to individuals, and that the healing had never happened.”

“In order to help with the healing, we needed to start talking about what happened, and how it affected us,” Shikuma added. “Her idea was that you couldn’t do that in a big setting with 300 people, and it would take too much time to have 50 or 60 people come up and talk.”

The answer was to break up into smaller discussion groups.

Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey.
Photo: Gann Matsuda

“For many of us, we feel that was the core of what the Tule Lake Pilgrimage was all about, those intergenerational discussion groups, where people can talk about what happened, how it happened, how it made them feel, how it affected their families, and how it continues to affect their families,” Shikuma elaborated. “For those of us who weren’t born yet, how did we find out about [the camp experience], how did we feel about it, and how did it affect our lives? That’s a key thing.”

The Manzanar Committee added intergenerational discussions to the Manzanar Pilgrimage experience in 1997, during an evening event called Manzanar After Dark.

“We actually stole it from the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, where they have an intergenerational component to their pilgrimage,” said panelist Bruce Embrey, Co-Chair of the Manzanar Committee. “There are fewer and fewer incarcerees at the Pilgrimage, so it’s more difficult to get those direct stories.”

Since then, the event has evolved into a much larger program that is now known as Manzanar At Dusk, and has become a key part of the Manzanar Pilgrimage experience.

“[Manzanar At Dusk] is one of the most important parts of the Pilgrimage, because it allows an exploration of what actually occurred in an individual way, but in a much more intimate setting where people can draw out some of the lessons about what happened in camp,” Embrey explained.

“[Manzanar At Dusk] is so powerful because the younger generations are right there with the Nisei, so I think it’s one of the best things,” Embrey elaborated. “This past year, [college students] actually re-enacted some of the stories of people who survived camp, and you thought, ‘well, here’s some 18, 19 or twenty-year-old,’ but it was very effective, and very powerful to watch the younger generation portray what people had gone through.”

Students from the UCLA Nikkei Student Union (NSU), who were among the students Embrey mentioned above, moderated the discussions.

“[NSU was involved with this event because] we’re always involved with the Manzanar Pilgrimage every year,” said Matt Ichinose, President of the UCLA Nikkei Student Union. “It’s important to know how much we can learn from the panelists, and how NSU can go forward in terms of its involvement with the Manzanar Pilgrimage.”

“I enjoyed listening to the presentations about Tule Lake, because my grandfather was incarcerated there, so I have a family attachment to that,” added Ichinose. “I enjoyed hearing about what they do at their pilgrimage.”

“For our organization, it was a good chance to hear about a different pilgrimage, because all we hear about is the Manzanar Pilgrimage, because that’s the one we go to. Hopefully, this will spur interest in the other pilgrimages as well.”

The event was also sponsored by The Aratani CARE grant, and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

In the next story about this event, the future of the Manzanar and Tule Lake Pilgrimages, and the role students might play in them, not to mention throughout the Japanese American community, will be examined.

Unattributed views expressed in this story are those of the author, and are not necessarily those of the Manzanar Committee.

Related Story:

• Future Of The Nikkei Community, Not Just The Manzanar And Tule Lake Pilgrimages, Was The Topic Of JANM Event

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