A No-No Boy Goes To Washington – Hiroshi Kashiwagi

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Playwright Soji Kashiwagi, who is active with the Tule Lake Committee, has even more reason to be proud of father Hiroshi Kashiwagi, also a playwright and a “No-No Boy,” who was recently invited to an event at the White House, where he got a chance to meet President Obama and the First Lady. He recently wrote about his father’s experience in our nation’s capital.

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PASADENA, CA — For my father, Nisei playwright, poet and actor Hiroshi Kashiwagi, the journey up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the heart of Washington, D.C. was steep and arduous. Now 88 years old, he moves much slower than he used to, but he was determined to reach the top, slowly, step by step, because for my Dad, a steep climb up some steps is nothing in comparison to the long journey he has taken throughout his life to reach this moment.

From a small, country store in Loomis, California, to behind barbed wire at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II, his road to Washington has not been easy. Branded and stigmatized as “disloyal” and a “troublemaker” by members of his own community for his refusal to answer two deeply flawed U.S. Government imposed “loyalty” questions, he has lived a shadowy life of a “No-No Boy,” once considered the “lowest of the low” among those Americans of Japanese ancestry who protested their unjust World War II incarceration in America’s concentration camps. Read more of this post