Since the 1970s, Japanese Americans have observed the Day of Remembrance on February 19, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 that authorized the forced removal and incarceration of all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Activists conceived DOR as a radical act to bolster the then-faltering movement for redress and reparations.

Today, it largely is embedded in mainstream Japanese American culture, but this year’s musical commemoration at the Getty Center in Los Angeles—“120,000 STORIES with Nobuko Miyamoto and Guests,” presented in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival—reconnected it to its radical origins and linked it to today’s racial and social justice activism.

Nobuko (as I call her) is an icon of Asian America who has melded art, culture, and politics in her life and work since the 1960s.

A professional dancer early on in her career, Nobuko was a rare Asian cast member of the original West Side Story film and performed on Broadway. But before all of that, she was one of the roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans the U.S. government incarcerated during World War II.

The “120,000 STORIES” are for all of those incarcerees, and the program begins with songs about their experiences at camp, as Nobuko and all of the other Japanese Americans I know, including my own family, learned to call it—just camp, not modified by internment or incarceration or concentration. Her first song is familiar to me: Nobuko going to the camp at the Santa Anita Racetrack, holding her obaachan (grandmother)’s hand on the way to the toilets with no privacy, wondering if they would be interned there all their lives.

Camp—camp plays, camp music, camp art, camp photography—has been our default genre for so long that it can be hard to imagine any other Japanese American genres. But breaking through the camp narrative has been part of Nobuko’s life’s work, and this is reflected in the expansive performances and stories shared on stage that night. This is why, alongside stories of her family moving to Boyle Heights after the war and of her brother-in-law biking from Pasadena to Santa Anita Racetrack searching for his Japanese American neighbors, she includes a narrative about joining her mother-in-law, Mamie Kirkland, who is Black, on a pilgrimage to her Mississippi hometown nearly a century after the family was forced to flee from a lynch mob.

Nobuko also performed songs by the late Chris Iijima, who she traveled the country in the 1970s with making Asian American folk and protest music. Collaborating with musician Charlie Chin, they eventually recorded Grain of Sand, considered the first album made by artists who called themselves Asian American, embracing the pan-ethnic term coined by activists in the late 1960s.

And Nobuko spoke about her fears of raising her Black son, who was only 10 weeks old when his father, Attallah Ayyubi, was killed at the Ya-Sin Mosque, a major gathering place for Black Muslims in 1960s and ’70s Brooklyn.

By the end of the show, nearly 20 musicians joined Nobuko on stage, from shakuhachi and taiko players to violinists. Los Angeles musicians and community organizers Atomic Nancy of the Atomic café, Sean Miura of Tuesday Night Project, artist Dan Kwong, and Quetzal Flores were among those who brought their own radical histories and musical lineages into the room.

Nobuko’s work gathers and galvanizes artists and audience, musicians and activists, alike. Sitting in the theater that night were the aunties and uncles of the 1960s and ’70s Asian American movement. They were members of Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, who won reparations for those incarcerated people; of Gidra, the monthly newsletter that was “the voice of the Asian American experience” from 1969 to 1974; and of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, which fought against redevelopment in their downtown L.A. neighborhood in the ’70s and ’80s.

Their stories, and Nobuko’s, are as primal as any folktale or origin story for me, and for so many others. They are embedded into the work of reimagining our narratives today.

In January 2021, JTOWN Action and Solidarity—a group I co-founded, but of which I am no longer an active member of—started weekly mutual-aid actions at the main encampment of unhoused residents in Little Tokyo, providing electricity to charge their devices, personal protective equipment, food, and other essential items. These weekly “Power Ups” became a way to build connections among community members, housed and unhoused, and today include open mics, communal tables, and birthday celebrations. But the effort provoked conflict with and within the community. Some of Little Tokyo’s small, legacy businesses, struggling through the pandemic, believed that supporting the unhoused and bringing visitors back to the neighborhood were mutually exclusive.

The conflict escalated on the Day of Remembrance, when JTOWN Action and Solidarity released a statement about reparations. They asked why only Japanese Americans had received redress—in contrast to other groups also forcibly removed and incarcerated during the war, such as Alaska Natives or Japanese Latin Americans. By extension, they questioned the very possibility of reparations to address injustice, given that they are functions of an inherently unjust, illegitimate state that continues to forcibly colonize indigenous land. To some, this was a denigration of hard-won battles. To others, it was a show of urgent solidarity.

But despite such conflicts, the people in the audience that day, and the Japanese Americans engaged in this work, were raised by the stories of 120,000 incarcerated to believe in the possibility of a better world. That evening at the Getty brought us together and reminded us of this shared endeavor. It sought to highlight our intimacy in all its thrilling, maddening contention.

And at our center was Nobuko, the feminist troubadour who used her voice to create our folk songs, manifestos, and mythologies, for whom multiculturalism and coalition-building was the source and handiwork of her life-art.

When introducing “Not Yo’ Butterfly,” a song that shares its title with her recently published memoir, she addressed Giacomo Puccini, the Italian composer who wrote Madame Butterfly, the opera “that has plagued Asian women ever since.” All those aunties who were the Asian American Movement got up and danced, a joyous rejection of Madame Butterfly, and all her progeny, the fantasized figures of weak Asian women, subject to the desires and violence of a racist world.

One of Nobuko’s last songs of the evening was “Bambutsu.” Before performing it, she taught us the looping choreography of the accompanying dance in the style of Bon Odori, the traditional Japanese folk dance performed in a circle during the summer festivals that honor the harvest, spirits, and ancestors. Because of the pandemic, it had been a long time since I last danced Bon Odori in temple parking lots or on the streets of Little Tokyo. But there we were, in the auditorium, together. We all rose to our feet, guided by Nobuko’s movements, guided by our memories.

The post Nobuko Miyamoto and the 120,000 Stories of Japanese America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sato’s photo series, “The Go For Broke Spirit: Portraits of Courage,” which was exhibited earlier this year at the Go For Broke National Education Center in Los Angeles, records the images and shares the stories of many of these veterans. This is an edited and condensed version of a conversation between Sato and Zócalo.

I was born here in Los Angeles, but my dad’s side was from Hawai‘i. The Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i weren’t interned in concentration camps during World War II, because they were more than 50 percent of the workforce, and without them, the islands would’ve shut down economically. A few of my uncles, on my dad’s side, fought in the 100th Infantry Battalion of the U.S. Army. Some of them might have been in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but they passed away such a long time ago that we didn’t get a lot of information. My portrait series is of veterans who were in the 100th, the 442nd, and the Military Intelligence Service.

On my mom’s side they were from Visalia, California, so they were put in a concentration camp in Poston, Arizona. So my family had both experiences: One side didn’t go to camps but they fought in the war; the other side was interned and lost their land.

I tried to get personal stories from the veterans. In Hawai‘i we call it ‘talk story,’ and it’s something where people are just hanging out, talking, and they start telling their stories, personal stories.

It wasn’t easy. I’m Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American. But for the Nisei—or second-generation—like my mom and my dad, it was almost universal that they didn’t talk to their kids about the war or talk about the camps. Some say it was too traumatic or it was too shameful. So all my friends didn’t know about this until we were much older.

To get the men even to take the photos was a challenge in itself. The best way I found to obtain their cooperation—what I called my secret weapon—was to find the one lady who all the veterans talk to. There’s always someone who’s just hanging out, drinking with the veterans. And they would congregate around her. And the veterans would do anything that she asked.

The hardest part was to get them to put the uniform on. Some still would not do it, and I can understand that. I’m lucky enough that when I was working in Hollywood, I worked with a lot of celebrities. I worked on movie sets, things like that. And they don’t give you a lot of time, nor did they give you a lot of input. So it’s kind of the same thing with the veterans. I study their faces and decide what I want to try and bring out, what I know of them. Are they proud that they made it? Are they reflecting? Are they sad for what happened? I remember one man was crying the whole time, and I got him to just kind of glance up. And that’s another thing with Nisei men: Very rarely do you get a lot of emotion out of them. They’re very stoic, especially with photos.

I spent a lot of time working on the feel of these pictures, and I did a lot of tests. Asian Americans were always portrayed as weak, or feeble, or goofy—never strong. What I decided to do was add a lot of contrast. For me, that adds strength. And for this series, I desaturated the photos and I did many layers of work. I didn’t want to make it too glamorous or too bright. It should be a somber mood, but strong. Even if the veteran is glad he survived, it’s still something that he had to go through.

There was one veteran I was talking to, and we did a little interview over the phone. And he said at the end, “Can I tell you something?” I said sure. And he went on to tell me that he was a medic, and how this soldier had died in his arms. And he knew the man, and he felt that if he’d done his job better he could’ve saved his life. And he said he’d never told that story. He told me he wanted to get that off his chest. And so he had never told that story for 70 years. He kept that inside him.

I hope this series will bring back that history, and let not only younger Japanese Americans—but all Americans—know that this existed, that the camps existed, that it should never happen again.

The post Portraits of Loyalty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One man stayed downstairs to guard the elevator while the rest snuck upstairs using skeleton keys to make their way to the back rooms. They brought along a safecracker—a convicted felon sprung for one night to help them—as well as local policemen and FBI agents, who set up patrols outside during the operation. Once the safe was open, Ringle’s crew photographed its contents item by item, putting everything back in place before leaving the building.

Though the United States had not yet entered the war, it had launched fledgling espionage efforts with an eye toward the possibility. The Navy had chosen Ringle to assess the Japanese threat in 1940 because he had previously lived and worked in Tokyo and was one of only a handful of U.S. sailors who could speak Japanese. He had gone on to build a network of contacts on the West Coast, determining which cultural organizations were harmless and which might be dangerous.

As a result of the break-in, Ringle made two key discoveries. The first was that he now possessed the consulate’s list of agents and secret codes. The second was that the Japanese government distrusted the Nisei, the generation born in the U.S. to Japanese immigrants, and was thus unlikely to make use of them as spies.

Ringle’s discoveries that night should have been powerful enough to prevent internment of Japanese Americans during the war. But, in wartime, his knowledge would prove an insufficient weapon against manufactured hysteria and deference to the Army.

After the devastation of Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Naval Operations assigned Ringle to write a report on the loyalty of U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. He delivered a 10-page report six weeks after the attack stating that “the entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion,” largely due to racial prejudice. “[T]he removal and internment in concentration camps of all citizens and residents of Japanese extraction … ,” he wrote, would be “not only unwarranted but very unwise.”

It was an insightful, detailed assessment. And nearly all of its recommendations would be ignored.

The story of the detention of nearly 120,000 residents of Japanese descent during World War II has become a mythic narrative, giving Americans the impression that the internment was an inevitable error born of simple ignorance and fear. Acting in haste after Pearl Harbor, the story goes, U.S. officials had no idea that concentration camps would be unnecessary and counterproductive.

But, in fact, senior cabinet members and the president himself had accurate information, and some did not favor internment.

The cinderblock jail at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, which held Japanese American prisoners during World War II internment. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Long before the attack, the federal government had developed a plan for the treatment of enemy aliens in the event of war: targeted individuals would be rounded up and detained by the FBI, then provided a hearing before a review board, which would determine whether they should be given liberty without restriction, liberty on parole under the supervision of a sponsor, or continued detention. Just three days ahead of Pearl Harbor, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who also held the official position of assistant director for the Office of Civilian Defense—announced that noncitizens with “no criminal nor anti-American record” had nothing to fear in the event of war and would not be interned.

In the wake of the bombing, the government stuck to its plan at first. Ringle worked with FBI agents coordinating arrest squads in the hours after the attack, capturing those known or suspected to be spies from his lists. Restrictions and extra guards were put into place in sensitive military areas.

But other voices spread disinformation. A week later, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had advocated internment long before Pearl Harbor, accused Japanese Americans in Hawaii of betraying the nation, announcing without evidence that outside of Europe, “the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii.”

On December 19, the man put in charge of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, first declared his intention to exile all Japanese Americans over the age of 13 from the West Coast. But he initially balked at his subordinates’ request to detain the entire Japanese American community, saying, “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen.”

As he worked on his report after the bombing, Kenneth Ringle had the support of presidential advisor Curtis Munson, who advocated a measured response. The Washington Post concluded near the end of January that “The Alien Program Is Working Well,” noting that only those actually suspected of espionage had been arrested.

But in the background, other dramas were unfolding. U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle closed the Mexican and Canadian borders to all incoming Japanese individuals, and authorized raids of Japanese immigrant homes without warrants. In the days after Pearl Harbor, many Japanese Americans lost their jobs and lived in fear of violence or arrest. It was particularly bitter that white Americans accused Japanese immigrants of disloyalty, when U.S. court decisions had universally barred them from receiving citizenship for decades.

By the end of January 1942, two factions had emerged. The Roberts Commission, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to investigate Pearl Harbor, delivered its report on January 23, making vague allegations of “Japanese spies.” The Commission did not distinguish the nature of the spying or whether it was committed by U.S. citizens or aliens. Yet rumors of espionage were seized on by opportunists to inflame prejudice across the country. The governor of California, Culbert Olson, announced that his state’s residents “don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.” In mid-February, journalist Walter Lippmann argued in a column that the lack of any real sabotage by Japanese residents along the coast to date was actually evidence of a future planned attack.

Pushed by zealous staff members, DeWitt requested control in early February over all citizens and aliens in zones established under his command. That spring, he would reverse his statement about an American citizen being an American citizen, explaining that, “A Jap is a Jap.”

Meanwhile, Ringle’s supporters pressed the case for restraint. On his side were crucial cabinet members: despite harsh measures taken against some noncitizens under his authorization, Attorney General Biddle backed measures focused on aliens rather than citizens. Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a man not known for moderation, agreed that calls for universal internment rose out of political pressure rather than necessity.

Japanese graffiti on the interior wall of a farmer’s shed in Tulelake, California. The shed originally housed Japanese American detainees during World War II. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Ringle turned in his assessment just days after the Roberts Commission filed its report, and it appeared that FDR agreed with Ringle’s supporters. But with Navy leadership unwilling to oppose the Army, by the time Ringle’s assessment wound its way to the White House three weeks later, public outrage and DeWitt’s demands had interceded.

Though Eleanor Roosevelt still stood against internment, her husband ultimately sided with DeWitt. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, sealing the fate of not just Japanese aliens but also of some 70,000 Japanese American citizens of the United States. The Ringle Report had failed to block the Army’s drive for mass internment. But it would return to play a role in postwar events.

The shift toward internment began with the division of the exclusion zone into segments, in which Japanese American residents were given as little as two days’ notice to prepare for departure to temporary detention centers—mostly improvised camps at fairgrounds and racetracks. The War Relocation Authority was soon established, and before the end of 1942, purpose-built camps had been set up in isolated locations around the country, from Arkansas to Wyoming.

As Japanese Americans were forced from the West Coast, they had to sell their businesses and belongings, while the community argued over whether or not to protest. Nisei journalist James Omura condemned the policies of relocation and internment, drawing the wrath of Japanese American cultural organizations that did not want to appear disloyal to America. Other Japanese Americans launched legal challenges to the curfew and exclusion orders that barred them from their rights as citizens. The most famous among them, Korematsu v. United States, became the landmark Supreme Court case on the question of wartime internment.

When Korematsu was heard in 1944, a government attorney alerted U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fahy to the existence of the Ringle Report, noting that failure to acknowledge it in his filings to the Supreme Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” But Fahy ignored this warning and directly indicated to the court that all U.S. government and military assessments were unanimous in support of internment.

The Supreme Court expressed discomfort with mass internment’s failure to address individual guilt or innocence, but was already prone to defer to the executive branch and military leaders in wartime. Unaware of the additional evidence which had been withheld, the court accepted the Army’s argument of the “military necessity” of detention.

The public and the Court would not learn of the solicitor general’s omission until decades later, when a reporter discovered material in archived files. By then, Ringle was dead, with a funeral wreath sent to his widow by the Japanese American community in honor of his efforts to protect them.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that his report, which should have settled the question of universal internment, became the central piece of evidence used by the original plaintiffs to demand justice in court. And it would take three more decades until acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal wrote a public repudiation in 2011 of his predecessor’s actions in Korematsu.

If the Ringle Report could not prevent the tragedies that had been suffered—the degradation of U.S. citizens, the financial losses, and mass dislocation—its reappearance did at least set the historical record straight.

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