January 29, 2020
Dear Brynn,
Thank you for this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you. Ever since the Yonsei Memory Project gave me an opportunity to write the story of my sister Aiko, I have been wanting to do some more writing, but failed to follow through.
As I think about stories I want to tell, a few come to mind:
A. There is the story of my father’s death 21 days after we were sent from the Fresno Detention (“Assembly”) Center to one of the 10 permanent Concentration Camps in the swamp land of southeast Arkansas. When we arrived at the Jerome Concentration (“Relocation”) Camp, our flimsy barracks had no heat. The weather had turned extremely cold, with snow. My father who was not in the best of health caught pneumonia and died in a make-shift barrack hospital.
B. There is the story of my mother turning to the Christian pastors in the Camp to conduct a Christian Funeral Service for my father and having her whole family baptized on Christmas Sunday on Dec. 20, 1942, four Sundays after the funeral, although our family had always been Buddhists and had never attended a Christian church.
C. There are some valuable lessons I learned through life that have impacted my life and made a great difference in helping me to live. One experience as a stutterer during my ministry was a big impact on my life. Ever since my third grade, I have had great difficulty speaking in public. All through Elementary, High School, and in College I was not able to speak in public. I barely got through Theological School in preaching.
D. I want tell my version of why the Nisei were so silent about our imprisonment in Concentration Camps during WWII, and the struggle to speak up about injustice, and how this impacted our future generations. As a Nisei (children of the immigrants), I was told to be proud as a Japanese, but my experience growing up as a minority did not support what I was told to believe. Mentally I was told to be proud, but emotionally I felt inferior and had a low self-image. As a Nisei, I did not grow up fighting for equality “eyeball to eyeball.” We gained our “reputation” by accommodation and kowtowing to the majority. The so-called “good reputation” was a fragile and insecure status. When African Americans were demanding justice in the 1960’s, very few Japanese Americans stood up for them. We were quiet, labeled “quiet Americans,” almost like a compliment because we did not riot, demonstrate and cause any ruckus, “like the Blacks.” Sadly, that was no complement? It was a judgement. We JA's who were so wrongly put in America’s Concentration Camps during WWII, should have been the first to support African Americans in their demand for justice. By accommodation and kowtowing, we lose our integrity and self-respect, any gain is hollow and shallow. We need to live eye-eyeball to eyeball to gain self-respect and integrity.
E. A more difficult story is about how our future generations might become advocates for justice and civil rights.
Each of these ideas plants the seed of a future story, one I would like to write and tell.
For now, I will close with some thoughts on what I want our future generation to know:
1. Live your life with faith in God. God's ways are higher than what we could ever imagine. You will live an unbelievable life, believe me
2. Live your life to make it better for others and the next generation.
3. Life is not meant to just make lots of money, but to make life better for all. Make your life count, doing worthwhile things to help others
4. Money and material things do not satisfy the human spirit and heart.
5. ??