Surviving Citizens: The American-Japanese
In the 1970s, the West was not as exposed to the East like it is now… as a young boy, I remember how not many people could distinguish between people from different Asian countries – everyone who was Asian were assumed to be Chinese.
Growing up within the Kalmyk community in New Jersey, I’ve experienced my fair share of discrimination. In school, I didn’t get picked on as much as the other Asian kids… probably because I was tall for my age, and generally got along with everyone.
The Kalmyk community who first arrived in the US experienced a lot of hardship during WWII. In 1941, the German army invaded the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic… and 2 years later, the Red Army accused the Kalmyk’s of collaborating with the Germans and forced the relocation of the entire population within 24 hours… all done without notice and in harsh winter conditions.
I came across the article below and was shocked to find that the American-Japanese experienced similar treatment during WWII in 1942. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the U.S. government ordered the removal of Japanese Americans.
Termed the “internment of Japanese Americans”, an order was issued by the then US President for the forced relocation and incarceration of anyone with Japanese ancestry. It was believed that there was possible collaboration between the Japanese government and American-Japanese.
The number of people affected ranged between 110,000 and 120,000, where 62% of the internees were US citizens. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans, nearly all who lived on the West Coast (including all of California, much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona), were forced into interior camps. Their land, housing, businesses and lives were all taken away.
Below is an article based on before and after photographs of those affected by the internment taken by Paul Kitagaki. Do take a look at the pictures and accompanying article.
Tsem Rinpoche
Moving Photographs of Japanese American Internees, Then and Now
Photographs by Paul Kitagaki Jr. (Fri May 22, 2015 6:00 AM EDT)
“We were citizens, but now we were not.”
In early 1945, the federal government started to open the internment camps where it had held 120,000 Japanese Americans for much of World War II. Seven decades later, photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. has been tracking down the internees pictured in wartime images by photographers like Dorothea Lange (who photographed Kitagaki’s own family—see below).
So far, he’s identified more than 50 survivors, often reshooting them in the locations where they were originally photographed.
Seven-year-olds Helene Nakamoto Mihara (left, in top photo) and Mary Ann Yahiro (center) were photographed by Lange as they recited the Pledge of Allegiance outside their elementary school in San Francisco in 1942. Both were sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah. Yahiro (right, in bottom photo) was separated from her mother, who died in another camp. “I don’t have bitterness like a lot of people might,” she told Kitagaki.
Lange photographed 19-year-old Mitsunobu “Mits” Kojimoto in San Francisco as he waited to be sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California. “We were being kicked out of San Francisco,” he recalled to Kitagaki. “It was kind of shocking, because as you grow up you think you are going to have certain rights of life, liberty. And to be sitting there was very disheartening. I was really wishing that somebody would come and save us. We were citizens, but now we were not.”
Kojimoto volunteered for the army and received a Bronze Star for his service in France and Italy. “I felt, I’m going to volunteer,” he said. “Why not?…We were behind barbed wire, and we should put our best foot forward and volunteer.”
In one of the best known photographs of Japanese American internment, 70-year-old Sakutaro Aso and his grandsons Shigeo Jerry Aso and Sadao Bill Aso wait to be deported from Hayward, California, in 1942. “When I look at the picture, I can see my grandfather realized that something terrible was happening and his life was never going to be the same again. That was the end of the line for him,” Bill Asano told Kitagaki about his grandfather. His brother, Jerry Aso, agrees: “So, [grandfather’s] dream of coming to the United States, his dream of making a life, his dream of having his children working in this business, to support them all were totally dashed.”
“My parents and my grandparents seldom talked about the internment experience, even though I know that it was a searing memory,” said Aso. “And I think because it was so searing, that they didn’t want to talk about it. But I think also, also the idea that, if you try to explain the unfairness of the whole situation, the explanation itself kind of falls on deaf ears.”
Below, seven-year-old Mae Yanagi before being sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, where her family spent several months in a horse stall before being shipped to a camp in Utah. The Yanagis left their home and nursery business in Hayward, California, in the care of a businessman. “When we got back, it had been sold,” Mae Yanagi Ferral told Kitagaki. “It was there, but somebody else was living there. We didn’t talk about it.” Her father had to start over as a gardener in Berkeley. “He had the most difficult time with the relocation and he never accepted the premise that they were doing it for our benefit. For many years he was very angry. My father felt the injustice of the interment, and my older siblings really felt the injustice of it. We just didn’t say anything about it.”
Harvey Akio Itano was interned in 1942, forcing him to miss his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was awarded the school’s highest academic honor in absentia. In the summer of 1942, he was allowed to leave Tule Lake War Relocation Center to attend medical school. Itano went on to help discover the genetic cause of sickle cell anemia while working with Dr. Linus Pauling at Cal Tech in 1949. He also worked as the medical director of the US Public Health Service and as a pathology professor at University of California, San Diego. In 1979, he became the first Japanese American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 2010.
“We should be careful not to incarcerate whole groups of people, as they did,” Anna Nakada told Kitagaki. “We need to be very wary of that.” As a girl, Nakada was photographed during a 1945 performance at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. After the war, Nakada became a master of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. Internment, she reflected, “displaced our family in kind of a positive way rather than negative. It didn’t drag us down. In fact, it gave us some chances.”
Kitagki located former Boy Scouts Junzo Jake Ohara, Takeshi Motoyasu, and Eddie Tetsuji Kato, who had been photographed during a morning flag raising ceremony at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. “I didn’t feel anything until later on,” said Ohara, who later became a pharmacist. “I got kind of angry, because of all the experiences that we went through, the losses, not for myself but for the parents and the older guys that had already graduated high school. You start to think about those guys.” After Takeshi returned home, he became an electrical engineer. “I think for us young guys it was not too bad,” he said. “They fed you, they clothed you. It’s just the persecution from you being the enemy, that’s the only thing that would bother you.”
Ibuki Hibi Lee stands in the exact location in Hayward, California, where she and her mother waited to board a bus with their belongings 70 years earlier. Her parents, Matsusaburo Hibi and Hisako Hibi, were artists who documented life in their internment camp in Utah. “You have to think of camp from the view of injustice,” Lee said. “And it was really an injustice to Japanese Americans and those who were citizens. It had to do a lot with economics, racism and politics.”
Lange photographed Suyematsu Kitagaki and Juki Kitagaki as they sat with their children, 11-year-old Kimiko and 14-year-old Kiyoshi, at the WCCA Control Station in Oakland, California, before being detained in May 1942. In the photo, a family friend hands Kimiko a pamphlet expressing good wishes toward the departing evacuees. The Kitagakis were later sent to the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah.
More than 60 years later, Paul Kitagaki Jr. joined his father and aunt outside the same Oakland building where they had been photographed with his grandparents. From left to right: Agnes Eiko Kitagaki (his mother), Kimiko Wong (his aunt), Paul Kiyoshi Kitagaki (his father), Sharon Young (his cousin), and Paul Kitagaki Jr.
Source: http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/05/japanese-american-internment-kitagaki-photos
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It is sad to see what happened to the Japanses citizens in the US at that time and how they were threated without any reason beyond being of Japanses origins. It is very disappointing for the Japanese who came to the US had to suffer such an injustice being interned only because of their origins in their new country.
Many are fortunate and are able to enjoy the life without discrimination. In the 70’s Rinpoche experienced also racism by being in the Kalmyk community in the US as shared above. Things have changed since you would say but as Dorje Shugden practitioners for example, we are still discriminated in 2019 and can’t have the religious freedom everybody should have.
Shocking to know the history of the American-Japanese during the WWII in 1942, where discrimination did happened at that time. The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people is really sad. Rinpoche did experienced the share of discrimination within the Kalmyk community in New Jersey years back. Looks like it happen every now and then in our society. Many thousands of Japanese Americans suffered badly , sent into interior camps, land, housing, businesses and lives were all taken away. Thanks to the photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. who has been tracking down wartime pictures. Looking through pictures, paints a thousand words of sorrow, suffering those Japanese Americans had gone through. Even what they went through , they did not give up but made them stronger in fact to be what they are today. They were citizens of American yet it was an injustice to them. There are similarities happening to those who practiced Dorje Shugden. The practitioners were denied services to schools, medical treatment, hotel and so forth.
Thank you Rinpoche for this sharing.
It’s really unbelievable how racist America can be yet it is also known the land of the “free”. Makes me realise at the end of the day samsara is samsara. However, being in America also allows for laws to be changed and evolve as the government change and evolves from time which is not much I can say about the Tibetan leadership.
Yes, this article certainly reminds me of the similarities the prejudice and discrimination the Shugden exile Tibetans are facing right now still. And it is harder for them, because unlike in America where today people will speak up and pretest against their government and speak their minds, in exile Tibet if you do that, you will immediately invite death threats as many will take it personally into their hands to strangle your voice. So in this way the Tibetan leadership fakes the democratic laws to claim to adhere to. Because there is just way too much evidence to point out they are not so democratic as they play it out, unfortunately >>> https://www.tsemrinpoche.com/tsem-tulku-rinpoche/current-affairs/the-buddhist-divide-an-unholy-campaign-against-religious-freedom.html
Also from this article I can’t help but realise the resilience, patience, strength and tolerance of those Japanese people. It is amazing strength of survival that they did not give up and pull through to survive up till this day and that some of them are so forgiving still… “I don’t have bitterness like a lot of people might,” she told Kitagaki.
And some would put their best foot forward and even “protect” the very country that condemns them, to me this is the human compassion and forgiveness that transcends any religion, any laws, any race… and it is because of such human strength, this is what makes who they are, successful people who have made it in America today. “Success” is subjective, and I don’t mean “rich” or have some kind of great “status”, success in my opinion is that they never gave up and that they are not bitter about their negative experiences, instead the moved on and made the best of it and they themselves are happy about it now. The difficulties and suffering they went through did not hamper their human spirit, and that is the beauty of it all. Hence we should never give up peaceful fight to lift the Dorje Shugden ban, no matter what they call us and continue practising to uphold the lineage for the next generation.
See the examples hate/threat/vulgar messages we Shugden people get on a daily basis. One cannot help but to wonder does the His Holiness condone to all of this?
People should not never be discriminated by their own country and government and definitely not en masse.