Executive Order 9066

Granny and her first boy.  Circa 1945

In 1942 President  Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the order that sent nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps.  Robbing them of their homes, livelihoods and families.  I am ashamed to admit that I was an adult before I knew this had really happened.  Growing up in the South Pacific and Hawaii I always had Japanese friends. On Ford Island one of my favourite people was our Japanese neighbor. Mieko served as a sort of unofficial nanny, confidant, giver of parties and provider of one of my earliest canine loves.  When she brought a puppy to us named Skoshi San, the puppy "spoke" only Japanese and would look at us quizzically when we would talk to her.
it took weeks before she would respond to us speaking English.  Sitting at Mieko's bathroom vanity; my ears were pierced with needle and an ice cube by a U.S. Army nurse while my parents partied in another room. She was big, big part of my life. This was on Ford Island, in Pearl Harbor, in view of the sunken battleship the U.S.S Arizona. Circa 1971. What a strange world it must have been for her. Befriending a haole girl and her family.

One of my mother's closest friends was a Taiwanese woman called Michi.  She and her husband Rick were great friends of my parents, sharing several duty stations and decades of stories.  Taiwan was a Japanese colony,  Taiwanese Americans were interred along with the Japanese Americans. How could they stand to be our friends knowing what our government did to their families?

In  May of 1942 the entire  Japanese American population of Calistoga, California was loaded onto buses and shipped to the Tule Lake Relocation center.  They would live and die there until 1945.  They had only days to sort, store, sell and pack their belongings.  They could take only what they could carry, and they could take nothing that was explicitly Japanese. Dolls, kimono, food, ancestor shrines all left behind.  Most left with a suitcase each and a shared family trunk with linens, cooking supplies and other necessities. Short of inadequate shelter the government provided little.  My newlywed grandparents knew many of the interred families.  Calistoga was a very small town. With my Grandfather in boot camp  and about to deploy to North Africa, my  Granny packed her basement and  garage with the belongings left behind by several of the interred families.  The families were renters in a complex of  homes that abutted my grandparents house. The internees had been told their belongings were safe stored in the rental homes.  It was lie.  Within days the landlord was tossing belongings into trucks and carting them off to the dump.  My very pregnant Granny ( no doubt with help) hauled everything she could into her home. Labeling each box.  Keeping precious family heirlooms and mundane household items safe. This was not a popular move.The landlord and the local constabulary, including her father, threatened her with all kinds of dire actions.  She received threatening letters and was accused of unamerican activity by the local papers.  Not the first, or that last time that my Granny would defy popular opinion.  My Grandfather was frightened for her and for their first son.  And certainly wondered what sort of trouble he would find her in when he returned from the war. My Granny, and later my Grandfather kept those belongings safe for three years until they could return them to the families that left them.  For people who had lost so much it must have been a mixed blessing to have those items that were saved.  Knowing how much more had been lost.  Businesses, homes, lives.

I knew nothing about this until 1988 when President Reagan signed The Civil Liberties Act of 1988  I was 22 years old and had never even heard of the internment of Japanese American citizens. My Granny was dying of lung cancer. She was frail and I was distracted by all the very important things in my life.  But I listened to her talk about her friends, about how scary it all was. How she felt as a young bride and new mother, that it was wrong.  And that she would want someone to do the same thing for her family. She spent her life defying popular opinion, going her own way.  Taking in lost people, and pets and belongings. Making the world a little better than she found it.   I don't know if it was then, or if it was later that I felt angry that no one had told me.  No teacher, no TV programme, no parent, no one had told me.  It was a lost event.  This month is the 25th Anniversary of the signing of The Civil Liberties Act of 1988.  It was a watershed moment for  survivors, and descendants of the internees.  Too late for many. Too painful for some.

How many times do we repeat the same mistakes?  As a country, as individuals, as parents? The only way we can insure that we stop doing stupid things is to make them known.  Daylight them.  When we talk about people in broad groups, all Gays, all Muslims, all teenage boys with brown skin, all women wearing "rape worthy" clothes, we set the stage to marginalize them even further to set ourselves up to see them ( those people, not us) as less than human.  Less deserving of the rights, privileges and protections guaranteed by our Constitution. Less worthy of our compassion.  I know I still find myself thinking in stereotypes, or making dumb sweeping generalizations.  Could it happen again?  I think so.  I think we have locked  up people only because they resemble the group currently occupying the space of our worst fears. Some of them are truly bad, deserving of incarceration, some are unfortunate collateral damage. The truly unlucky are somewhere in between.  Will we ever see the mass deportation and incarceration of families of Persian, Salvadoran, Tibetan or Russian descent.  Probably not.  But we can do a lot of damage in other ways.  The thing is we have to stop seeing people as extensions of their government.  Our government. 

Would I do what my Granny did?  Would I stand up and be counted against a popular opinion? I hope so.  That is why I tell these rambly olde timey stories for my kids.  They should know.  They should know what their government is capable of, what their fore bearers did. They should have the chance to stand for themselves.  They cannot defend against something that they don't understand.

 Very near here there is a moving memorial to the "Day of Forced Removal".  Located at the site of the ferry dock where nearly three hundred men, women and children were forcibly removed from their homes. The motto and mission of the memorial is Nidoto Nai Yoni, translated as "Let It Not Happen again.  

Indeed, It must never happen again.