Memorial Day isn't the day I usually reflect on my father's death. I usually do so on the anniversary of his death. This year feels different to me for two main reasons.
This year will be the 50th anniversary of his death.
This year, the emergence of Obama as a Presidential candidate imbues my father's sacrifice with a bit more meaning for me.
Please allow me a few minutes of personal reflection on the passage of time and the passing of a good man who I don't remember, but whose sacrifice in some manner resonates with the Obama candidacy.
My father was the eldest son of a shopkeeper on the Big Island of Hawaii. His father was a consular agent to Japan, meaning that he reported births, marriages, and deaths to the Japanese Consulate. Because of this activity, he was taken from his home in the middle of the night immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor and held in detention in Tennessee. For six months, his family did not know where he was, or even whether he still lived, in spite of the fact that most Japanese Americans living in Hawaii remained in their homes under martial law because they were too numerous to transport to the mainland.
Six months into the war, my grandfather was transferred to an internment camp in Arkansas. The family was finally notified and had to choose between remaining in Hawaii, where they could live under martial law along with the other Japanese Americans, or joining him in confinement, which would require relinquishing their family store and abandoning all belongings they couldn't carry in their arms. They chose to join him.
The family remained incarcerated for the remainder of the war. My father was 12 or 13 when the family was reunited at the Jerome Relocation Center in Jerome, Ark. After their release, he attended the University of Minnesota, where he majored in philosophy and math. Then he joined the Air Force.
He wanted to become a test pilot but his eyesight wasn't perfect, so he became a navigator on test planes instead. After marrying my mother in Alexandria, Louisiana (where they weren't sure whether to sit at the front or the back of the bus), he was transferred to England, where I was born. A few months before he was scheduled to be transferred back to the States, his plane crashed over Belgium. I was a month shy of my second birthday. I don't have any memory of him at all, but there's a picture of him holding me and smiling. It's apparent that he loved me very much, although my parents had two boy's names and no girl's names picked out when I was born.
After spending a few months with a sister in Seattle, my mom moved us to San Francisco, where her mother lived with her eldest brother. My mom and I participated in the same peace marches, she with the Japanese-American activists and I with the environmental activists. I grew up ashamed of what my country was doing in Viet Nam and wondered whatever led my father to serve, and give his life for, the country that had incarcerated his family.
All this brings to mind my feelings about Obama and the way he embraces the ideal of a unified America. Despite the difficulty of growing up bi-racial in a culture peppered with intolerance and bigotry, he personifies for me the type of healing and forgiveness that I imagine my father felt when he enlisted in the Air Force, the sort of healing and forgiveness that I've had difficulty finding in my own safe, sheltered life.
This Memorial Day, I wish to find the good in us all, the hope and optimism for a better future for ourselves, our descendants, and our world. I've already experienced a moment of joyous synchronicity. While searching for links to information about the detention camp in Jerome, I discovered that the Smithsonian exhibit on the Japanese American experience during the war, where one of the barracks from Jerome had been reconstructed, giving me a glimpse of how my father and his family might have lived in the camp, had been called A More Perfect Union - Japanese Americans and the U. S. Constitution.