Earlier this week I was asked to write a follow up article in DAILY KOS about the Nisei Veterans Committee (NVC) here in Seattle, WA. I have previously offered some observations following my participation in the formal dedication of the NVC Memorial Hall on March 15, 2008. I served as a representative of American Legion Post 19 in Renton, WA at the ceremony. The Hall stands at 1212 South King Street in Seattle's International District. It is well-worth visiting. Take your kids, if you have any. This is the kind of Americana our young people need to know more about.
For those who do not know the history of the Nisei (2nd generation Japanese-Americans) on the West Coast of the United States during World War II, the story is both heroic and heartbreaking in how the American government treated its own citizens during "the global war for freedom." Allow me to emphasize the populations impacted went far beyond the Nisei but for the purposes of this article I am addressing that segment of the Japanese-American population in WW II. Even though the forced relocation of loyal American citizens to internment camps echoes the ironies and incompatibilities found in other chapters of American History, this story somehow stands out as one that should be told and retold among the generations of Americans to come. The scar on the American character and promise of freedom is permanent. It cannot be erased or forgotten. Ever.
The Nisei Veterans Committee (NVC) Memorial Hall in the ID (International District) in downtown Seattle was originally purchased for use as a Dojo (training facility) for Kendo (martial artists engaged in traditional Japanese sword fighting) in 1938. It was then abandoned in the spring of 1942 following President Franklin Roosevelt's issuance of Executive Order 9066, authorizing the Secretary of War to establish military areas from which any persons designated by the military could be excluded from residing within. That spring (1942) senior military officials, using the Executive Order as leverage, declared the U.S. west coast and other parts of western states as military areas. The impact on Japanese-American citizens living in and around the West Coast was devastating, life-changing.
What began as voluntary evacuations in populations centers in California became mandatory (forced) removal of Japanese-Americans up and down the west coast. In time, nearly 120,000 of them were forced to leave their homes and businesses to be imprisoned in internment camps established in California, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho.
FAST FORWARD TO YESTERDAY, MARCH 6, 2010.
On Saturday afternoon, purely by coincidence, while attending a memorial/visitation of a Nisei who had recently died here in Seattle (she was over 90 years old at the time of her death), I was able to speak with her husband (he is several years older than his wife was when she passed). The couple had been married for 65+ years. "We were married just as the relocation program began in the Puget Sound area, in fact, it was because of the evacuation that we met and married. We spent our first three years of marriage at Minidoka." (Minidoka: internment camp in south-central Idaho). I asked him if he had been a victim of theft, like many others in the camps who only been given a few hours notice to pack and gather the family and leave, losing farms, houses, businesses, and many other dear possessions. Many of those losses were permanent when unscrupulous citizens snapped up those properties and possessions while the owners were in the camps, never to be returned to their rightful owners.
The novel SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS, by Seattle-area author David Guterson, offers an excellent glimpse of the period, although the theme of the book focuses on a murder-mystery.
The old man responded to my question about losing property by saying, "I had a friend--he was white--who agreed to look out for our farm while we were gone. When we came back home at the end of the war we found out he had not only kept up the (mortgage)payments, he had actually paid the mortgage off. My friend then refused to accept any repayments from our family. This did not sit at all well with my father, a proud man." It is not a stretch to state that many victims of the relocation chose not to talk about the humiliation in the years that followed their release to freedom. From a cultural perspective, the shame of what happened was too great. It was simply inappropriate to dwell on the war years, for many victims of the relocation program.
The other half of the World War II Nisei story has to do with the valiant service by Nisei soldiers in the war (much of it in the rugged Italian peninsula campaign). In a disgraceful irony of unimaginable proportions, while their families remained behind wire in tar-papered plywood shacks on barren patches of land in the middle of nowhere, the 100th Battalion / 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated regiment comprised of Nisei soldiers, became the most decorated unit for its relative size and strength in U.S. Army history.
The NVC Memorial Hall at 1212 South King Street in Seattle, tells the story of the 442nd by listing individual heroes and also showing artifacts and other memorabilia from the Second World War. A visit is a must, in order to gain a clear understanding of what really went on behind the scenes of what some have called THE GREATEST GENERATION. This is not to diminish the sacrifice of all our countrymen in preserving the world for democracy. It is instead to suggest that people of different cultures and color did more than their fair share of the lifting, and have only recently been recognized for their efforts. American history is NOT a "whites only" story. It is not a stretch to conclude that a major failing of the Greatest Generation was to pass on the pressing civil rights issues of their day not just in integrating America's military but in society in general, to the generation that followed. Harry Truman's "after the fact" integration of America's Armed Forces seems almost too late, although he deserves some recognition for finally making it happen. Dwight Eisenhower seemed to have little stomach for it, judging by his indifference to the civil rights conflicts raging in the South when he was President.
In 1988 the Civil Liberties Act was signed into law by President Reagan, apologizing for the transgressions of the U.S. government against Japanese-Americans in WW II: "So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong. Here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law. Each survivor of the internment received a $20,000 payment from the U.S. government.
As part of the ongoing celebration of the NVC Memorial Hall, a capital campaign is now underway to build a memorial outside the Hall: Seattle Times Article.
The goal of the drive is $1.2 million. The campaign has raised $960,000 to date. The drive began in May 2009 and has set Sunday, September 5, 2010 as the date for the dedication of the memorial.
The NVC is a 501(c)(3), with donations fully tax deductible. Mail-in contributions should be sent to:
NVC Foundation
1212 South King Street
Seattle, WA 98144
To donate online:
Donate Online Here
Recommended reading about this subject:
A FACE AWAY FROM FREEDOM: Japanese-Americans and World War II, by Ellen Levine, G.P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1995.