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Posts Tagged ‘concentration camp’

Facing Up to Japanese Internment

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 10, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Photo: AP.
Housing barracks at the Amache internment center near Granada, Colorado, where Japanese Americans were relocated during World War II, June 21, 1943.

Many Americans today are unaware that the country actually set up concentration camps for Japanese Americans in WWII. We weren’t gassing people, but what we did was pretty dark. In today’s story, we learn how a school near one camp decided that facing that dark history was important for healing.

Sarah Matusek reports at the Christian Science Monitor, “The wind sings a wordless song across the Colorado plains, making acres sway. Out of the brush rise concrete remains of a camp that imprisoned over 10,000 people.

“Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker, a toddler during World War II, lived at this Japanese American internment camp, called Amache. She sat atop her father’s shoulders with a scarf around her face – a shield against wind-whipped sand – as they lined up outside for food. Her parents were United States citizens.

“After their release, stigma followed her to Denver, she says, where kids would pelt her with rocks after school. For the rest of her childhood, Amache was ‘a topic that we never discussed,’ remembers Ms. Tinker, a retired biology teacher living in California. …

“[In March], President Joe Biden designated Amache as a national park, but for some it was, in essence, already serving as one. For years, camp survivors and descendants have visited the site that once confined their families, welcomed by a local educator in the nearby town of Granada.

“Over almost 30 years, John Hopper, dean of students at Granada School District RE-1, and hundreds of his pupils have helped preserve the rural site and run a museum in Granada. Their sense of civic responsibility has built bonds across cultures and generations, transcending a dark chapter of American history.

“ ‘It’s taught me a lot about empathy,’ says Bailey Hernandez, a junior. ‘You start to think, well, how would I have reacted if my family was forced into one of these camps?’

“One of his predecessors toured Ms. Tinker around Amache in 2004, her first trip back. She remembers feeling uplifted.

“ ‘These kids are really, really amazing to be so dedicated,’ says Ms. Tinker. ‘They know how important it is and they want to preserve this story.’ 

“Two months after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. That led to the forced removal of more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes into internment camps. …

“Amache mostly held American citizens – who were seen as potential enemies and subjected to loyalty questionnaires.

In spite of these conditions, internees beautified their arid captivity by planting trees and gardens, even creating a pond.

“The U.S. government under Ronald Reagan formally apologized in 1988; reparations checks followed. And now with [the] signing of the Amache National Historic Site Act, oversight of the property will transition to the National Park Service. …

“Despite being recognized for his work – including praise from the consul general of Japan in Denver – Mr. Hopper says he prefers to ‘be on the sidelines’ and center his students.

“ ‘It is a heavy, heavy topic, especially when you talk about civil liberties,’ he says. ‘But that’s part of my job I enjoy talking about – needs to be talked about.’

“Mr. Hopper, who does not have Japanese ancestry, first visited Amache as a new Granada high school social studies teacher in 1990. …

“In 1993, some ‘really bright and willing students’ wanted to pursue an Amache project and began interviewing a survivor whom Mr. Hopper’s family knew. That year the teacher established the nonprofit Amache Preservation Society (APS). What began as extracurricular activities eventually formalized into a class. Collaboration with survivors, descendants, and the town, and partnership with groups like the Amache Club and Amache Historical Society, have been key to building trust.

“Over the years, students have divided their time between physical preservation of the site – mowing or renovating a cemetery or other landmarks – and interpretive efforts. APS students present to other schools and groups, and help keep up the Amache Museum, where they double as docents. …

“When Mr. Hopper retires, he plans to pass the mantle of APS leadership to social studies teacher Tanner Grasmick, who joined APS as a high schooler.  The teacher credits his experience as one of Mr. Hopper’s students as the reason he became an educator himself. 

“ ‘You hear what they had to go through, the adversities that they had to face, and for them to come back and just be so grateful [for the preservation efforts] … it’s amazing,’ says Mr. Grasmick.”

More at the Monitor, here.

Be sure to check out Alden Hayashi’s novel Two Nails, One Love, which includes a vivid description of his mother’s experience as an American of Japanese descent during WWII.

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Two Nails, One Love

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 18, 2021| 2 Comments »

Art: Jana Brenning.
The above novel by Alden Hayashi came into being partly because he wanted to write about his mother’s WW II trauma and the incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans in camps. It’s also about the difficulty of coming out to a very cautious parent as a gay man.

I’ve been telling friends, especially friends in book groups, to check out Alden Hayashi’s novel. It’s based on his relationship with his reticent Japanese American mother, who suffered injustice at the hands of the US, her birth country — a history she long kept hidden. Since publication, the book has found an audience not only in the Japanese American community, but among other Americans. After all, this is our history, and we need to Face History.

Alden had a lot of experience from his day job ghost-writing books for management consultants and others, and he thought it would have been ideal if he had been able to ghost-write his mother’s story. But as he explained in one of the online book discussions he’s been invited to attend lately, his mother didn’t begin to open up about her history until late in life, and he could tell that some of the dates were getting confused. He had already learned a lot on his own by research into obscure government documents and by attending a Japanese American group’s visit to his mother’s infamous camp in Arkansas. (Americans used to refer to these camps as “internment camps,” but they are more properly called “concentration camps.”)

I do not think that making this history part of a book about the gay son coming out in a family conditioned against being the “nail that sticks up” has kept it from being a good novel. If anything, the mother’s story made the son’s feel more real, and the son’s story helped show the consequences of an early trauma for a future parent.

But the aspect that will rivet you the most is learning that many of these Americans were rounded up from the camps to be exchanged with Americans trapped in Japan and occupied Asia. The first group that went “home” were in fact Japanese people who wanted to go. But for Americans like Alden’s mother, home was Hawaii, her birthplace. She had never even visited Japan. And her family was being sent to a country they felt they were at war with. In fact, her brother fought and died for the US alongside other Japanese Americans. The family definitely did not find a warm welcome when they got to Japan.

I’d read many intriguing vignettes about this history on Alden’s Facebook page and was thrilled it got into a book. No wonder he bristled during the years 2016-2020, when a whole religion was considered terrorist by some powerful people. He was so afraid of history repeating itself.

Be sure to look for the moment when the mother in the novel visits the Statue of Liberty with her grown son. Find the book here.

Check out this interesting conversation between Alden and another Japanese American author.

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Film: “Desert of Forbidden Art”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Have you read any of the articles in the NY Times about the Russian art collector who saved Uzbek folk art and modern Russian art from destruction by collecting thousands of pieces for his museum? The museum was long unknown to most of the world, located as it was in a remote desert area of Uzbekistan (near the dried up Aral Sea), a region called the Republic of Karakalpakstan.

The first Times story, published in January 1998, is posted here. It stunned the art world. Igor Savitsky, who died in 1984, had seen the beauty of the modern art that was considered “degenerate” by Stalin and the post-Stalin Soviet Union. He tracked down artists and artists’ relatives and squirreled the works away in the desert museum.

Savitsky was sly and often got government functionaries to pay for an acquisition without their realizing what it was exactly. Many thought his museum housed only the ancient artifacts uncovered in state-sponsored Central Asia archeological digs. The collector even got government money for devastating works by a woman who had been sent to the Gulag. He didn’t tell the authorities that the pictures detailed the horrors of the Gulag but said they were of Nazi concentration camps.

We watched “Desert of Forbidden Art” Saturday and highly recommend it. Read about the documentary in the NY Times.

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