Dear John!
I am a fourth generation Japanese American, yonsei. The internment of my family during World War II impacted my family, my community and my own life profoundly. While my family did not speak directly of the experience while I was growing up, I was both surrounded by its lasting presence, yet keenly aware that I was not supposed to talk about it.
I knew my grandfather and his family had been farmers in the Central Valley, and that they were sent to Amache, a war relocation center in Colorado where people of Japanese descent were forcefully incarcerated, and where he and his entire family were imprisoned during World War II. I knew that my grandmother’s family had owned a laundry and went to Topaz, another internment camp in Utah for people of Japanese descent during the war. My grandparents marked time as “before camp” or “after camp”. My grandmother recalled standing on top of a toilet to escape a scorpion, and always having to shake out her shoes to make sure there were no scorpions hiding inside. Pieces of internment were present – keepsakes from Topaz, photographs from Amache, a piece of luggage – yet, growing up I never heard them speak directly about the injustice they had suffered, what it had meant for them to pack up and leave everything with no idea where they were going or if they would ever return.
Despite their silence, I could feel social justice and the fight for human rights calling to me. I did not have the name or understand why, but I knew it was a calling I needed to follow.
When I was in college, I decided to unearth the missing pieces of my family’s story by visiting the Japanese American National Museum. It was May Day 2006 in Los Angeles, and a million people were in the streets protesting a proposed unjust immigration bill that was before Congress. As we drove to the museum, I remember driving through the protest, reading the signs and seeing the faces of the families who were marching. When we arrived at the museum, the first thing I remember reading about was the xenophobia and racist laws that created an environment where something like internment could happen — the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Gentleman’s Agreement, the Alien Land Law Acts, and the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed), the law that established an unfair country quota system. As I read about immigration laws that targeted Japanese and other Asian immigrants, I could still hear the honking of the cars from the protest outside. It became clear to me that my family and my community’s struggle was connected to that of so many others, and that if I did not want to see internment repeated, I needed to be part of this fight for social justice and human rights. In that moment, I understood what others before me had long known: none of us are free until we are all free.
