An American, Chiura Obata. . .
A name or whose art you won’t see at the Whitney.

A major retrospective of his work opened at the Smithsonian in November of last year.  An artist and friend  told me about it, saying “Wow, a must see!” and yet, have you read or heard about it in “the paper of record”? Or seen it in any other major news or cultural coverage?

Nor the work of American Ruth Osawa, who dreamed of becoming an art teacher but couldn’t because of  laws or discriminatory practices which excluded the ethnically Japanese from all kinds of professions and activities like being a teacher, practicing law or working for the government, etc. As a result of exclusionary race laws, she started her young adult life in “the camps.”  Her work is groundbreaking for its organic forms which astound in its simple complexity.  She is part of a major retrospective of women’s art at The Art Institute of Chicago, but her link to our understanding of American history is often obscured, this time by Mexico and Modernism.

Nor American illustrator Mine Okubo, author of an early graphic novel documenting her experience in a US concentration camp, called “Citizen 13660,” first published 1946 is largely ignored despite today’s graphic novel craze.

Or rarely is the work of American writer John Okada (about the No No Boys) included in discussions about race and class in America. . .nor are the poems of American Lawson Fusao Inada. Despite being the Poet Laureate of Oregon, 2006, most educated Americans have never heard of him or his story. 

Here’s a taste:

To This Day
Have you ever wondered
whatever happened to all the
barbed wire that defined
and confined the so-called
camp at Tule Lake? 

That’s a good question
we have a right to ask
as ordinary tax-paying citizens:
“Whatever happened
to all that barbed wire?”

When you think about it,
the very idea of fencing such an expanse of land
was a daunting challenge
for all those concerned 

because it wasn’t easy
to coordinate “back East” planning
with “out West” implementation,
along with the manufacture
and transportation of materials
from all points in between.

And it was also 
an innovative undertaking,
a historical precedent,
because this fence was to confine,
not cattle or criminals,
but residents of the American West,
who, in the western tradition,
were to be “rounded up,”
and “herded” into fenced areas –
Tule Lake being but one such place.

Now, thinking about barbed wire,
it could be easy to consider
related matters that would
take us off into a tangent
about, oh, fence posts
and other such aspects
of construction, sidetracking us
into thinking about cutting
forests for fence posts,
and all the effort, energy, expense
involved in the overall venture –
including catered lunches
for planning meetings sequestered
in the “red tape” of D.C. –
so let’s just focus on the wire
that arrived by train
on huge spools, I suppose,
ready to be unloaded
by many men with machines
who would then, over days,
depending on weather,
erect the barbed wire fence.

And let’s keep going forward,
like the war effort,
not backward to the origins
of the wire that would include
iron ore, iron mines, steel mills,
all the sweat, smoke, steam,
shoveling, smelting, stamping
of the extensive process
of manufacturing wire
and then barbing it;

Yes, let’s keep going forward,
like the war effort
not backward to the origins
of the war, or to the barb wire
trenches of the First World War,

but to the brand-new
barbed wire fence of Tule Lake.
The wire was gleaming in the sun!
And with all those barbs –
thousands upon thousands –
all those strands were sparkling!

As we can imagine –
the fence was really something!
And just imagine –
from the air, the shining structure
may have resembled –
a gigantic musical instrument,
that storms and raging winds
would strum and pluck . . .
At any rate, whatever happened
to all that barbed wire?
It’s all gone somewhere, somehow,
obviously, which is a good thing;
otherwise, it would pose a hazard
for wildlife, and rusted barbs
could cause tetanus in humans . . .
especially children.

So perhaps it’s immaterial
to dwell on such material matters
like rusted wire of the past;
rather, as we can imagine,
in this advanced day and age,
there just might be a mentality
among us, between us,
that, to this day,
serves to keep us separated
serves to keep us confined
between “them” and “us,” 

and this mentality, this condition,
invisible as it is,
intangible as it is, 

can actually function
like actual barbed wire – 

and it is up to everyone,
in the spirit of humanity,
in the name of mutuality,

to reach through the strands
with extended hands.

Lawson Fusao Inada was born in Fresno, California, and as a child during World War II, he was imprisoned in California, Arkansas, and Colorado. His books of poetry include Before the War, Legends from Camp, and Drawing the Line. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and has served as Poet Laureate of Oregon.

Nor did you find the Yellow Bowl Project at the ICP in their “For Freedoms” exhibition a couple of years ago about contemporary photographers' exploration of FDR’s Four Freedoms, nor did any major news outlets write about them, perhaps because they told a different story of Freedom and America than they were ready to share. The tea bowls were the only contemporary work of photography included in the FDR Library‘s year-long exhibition of FDR’s signing of EO 9066 in 2017, when the library was determined to try and tell a more complete story of “the Four Freedoms” back in 2017.  Even at NPR. . .where I am not unknown, no one found this interesting enough.  Often told that what happened to Japanese Americans was not relevant, "Take it to the Japan Society or the Asia Society" curators and editors would say. Among those who know - the scholars, archivists and experts in the field of immigration and the history of America's race laws written to determine who could and could not participate in this democracy by virtue of whether one was or was “not white”, citizen or not - many want to acknowledge this very American story.  It seems it’s the public media that doesn’t.  

Some say it happened over 75 years ago.   Still others say this doesn’t happen in America and didn’t. But it not only happened here, it happened within our lifetimes. It’s important because the cycle continues today. It’s important because the United States is important to the world. We think we have moved forward, but only find that History repeats itself. With this story, American history and its claim that racism ended after the Civil War doesn’t make sense. The ownership of humans may have ended, but exclusion laws took its place. Modeled after the laws to exclude Native Americans, it began 100 years of exclusionary laws written by congress and state and local legislatures around the country against those who were legally deemed by a court of law to be “not white.”  It’s the missing link which most public media doesn’t want the public to know.

But they shall not erase us. . . is what I say.

Many iconic things that we now associate with Fascist Germany ironically had its roots in America and Britain, or at least not in Germany.  I have four here to share.

1. The Nazi Salute/Bellamy Salute

This photo, taken in the 1940’s by photographer Hansel Mieth, depicts Japanese Americans imprisoned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming using the Bellamy salute in the Pledge of Alliegiance. It was named after Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance. The inventor of the Bellamy salute was James B. Upham, junior partner and editor of The Youth's Companion.

The Bellamy salute was first demonstrated on October 12, 1892, according to Bellamy's published instructions for the "National School Celebration of Columbus Day":

At a signal from the Principal, the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to align with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation; whereupon all hands immediately drop to the side.
— From The Youth’s Companion, 65 (1892): 446–447

​
2. Concentration Camps

Before the Germans used them to first control Jewish populations in Germany, this tool of empire was used in these conflicts: 

1898:  The Spanish Imprisonment of Cubans during the Spanish American War
1899 – 1902:  British had white and black concentration camps during the Anglo Boer Wars
1899 – 1902:  US used them against the Filipinos during the Philippine-American War
1904 – ​1908:  Germany used concentration camps and created their first death camps against Namibians

Historically, concentration camps were used to concentrate and imprison a particular group of people because of who they were, not what they did.


3. The Nuremberg Laws

The inspiration for the Nazi regime's Nuremberg Laws, created to separate the Jews from German society, was ironically America’s Jim Crow Laws. One of the biggest ironies of WWII was that the FDR Administration created a segregated African-American unit to help fight for freedom in Europe, only for those soldiers to return to Jim Crow Laws back home. The segregated all-Japanese American military troops faced a similar situation when they went to fight for freedom in Europe while their families were imprisoned in US concentration camps back home. 


4. The Eugenics Movement

It might surprise people that, rather than Germany, the eugenics movement has its origins in England and was the brainchild of Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, the man who coined the term in 1883. 

The American eugenics movement had a strong following in the US, with many prominent followers and was practiced for many years before it took hold in Germany.  Read more...

Trying to promote "good" genes sounds reasonable conceptually, but when you label something good, then is there a bad?  And who gets to decide those values?

Many people ask me: "Why would major news outlets, historic institutions, museums and academia have a problem with your project?"

Here is an excerpt from the BBC coverage of Trump's UK State Visit, June 3, 2019.

​​During a radio message, President Roosevelt led the nation in a prayer ahead of the D-Day landings. President Trump takes to the stage to read the same prayer:

It was a crusade. For freedom? And for whom? 

I guess people like Trump. 

According to the BBC:
The Queen and the Prince of Wales attended the commemorations on Southsea Common, along with representatives from the countries that fought alongside the UK in the Battle of Normandy including French President Emmanuel Macron, US President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 
Also attending were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as leaders from Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland and Slovakia.
  
Many Japanese Americans fought in Europe during WWII, recruited or drafted out of US concentration camps, Native Americans out of reservations and Blacks from a Jim Crow South.

My Freedom from Fear project was excluded, despite being told repeatedly my work was in the show, from The New York Historical Society, CUNY's Roosevelt House, sidelined at The Ford Museum and removed from The George Washington University Museum. I was told my work would not be included in the Four Freedoms exhibition in France at The Memorial de Caen, in Caen, France.

The last time the tea bowls visited the nation’s capital was in June of 2016. They visited two places. First, they got to hang out at the steps of the Supreme Court for a bit. While I was setting up, many curious passersby asked what I was doing with all these yellow bowls. As there were many lawyers in the area, some actually remembered hearing about one of the four cases I was showcasing: Fred Korematsu v. United States, Gordon Hirabayashi v. United States, Yasui v. United States and Ex parte Endo. However, the majority of them, tourists, had no idea. The funniest reaction I received was from a young black man and his mother who lived locally, in  Washington, DC. They were watching me set up for a while and finally had the courage to interrupt and ask what I was doing. When I told them the story of the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, the young man turned to his mother and said, “Did you know this?” His mother shook her head and said quietly, no. Then he turned to me and said, “That happened in America???  No sh--!!!”

We all broke out laughing. 

Here’s a link to an earlier blog if you want to know more about that image.

After taking that image and repacking everything, we moved over to the second spot...The Memorial to Japanese-American Patriotism which is part of the National Parks Service. It’s just a five-minute walk from Union Station.

The small park with the beautiful water feature shown at the top tells the story of American men, women and children of Japanese ethnicity and their immigrant parents who were imprisoned in ten US concentration camps in the deserts and swamps of the American west and Midwest. Carved into the stone next to the pool are the words “Here We Admit a Wrong.” It was so peaceful and quiet, with very few visitors, that in an appropriately ironic twist, it had become a popular napping spot for homeless people (as you can see in the top image if you look carefully). Ten panels line the wall of the Memorial adjacent to the pool, each with the names of the camps and the number of individuals who were imprisoned. At the center is the sculpture of a bird, a crane, entangled in barbed wire.  It’s also a memorial to the Japanese-American men and women, many of whom were recruited from these American camps, who went to fight for the four freedoms abroad, but also to win freedom for those family members who remained imprisoned at home. 

The 442nd and 100th Battalion, a segregated Japanese-American military fighting unit, would become the most decorated unit of its size and duration in US military history. 

The unit was awarded:
 
9486 Purple Hearts
4000 Bronze Stars
560 Silver Stars
29 Distinguished Service Crosses
21 Medals of Honor
7 Presidential Unit Citations

800 were killed/or missing in action. 6,000 would serve in the Military Intelligence Service as translators and interpreters, and others would serve in the nurses’ corps. In the end, its said that about 33,000 would go on to serve in the US armed forces during WWII.

Now, to today.  

As of this month, the Yellow Bowls, represented by one of the images from the Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project, can be found at the George Washington University/Textile Museum, part of an exhibition called “Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms,” which opened in Washington, DC, on February 13, 2019.

Here’s a link to an article in the Berkshire Eagle announcing the opening of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedom’s paintings depicting FDR’s 1941 Four Freedoms speech.

Essentially, the exhibition is split into two. The main floor depicts much of the commercial and propaganda art that the illustrator Norman Rockwell produced for magazines and the government leading up to and during WWII. In 1943, Norman Rockwell was paid to illustrate FDR’s Four Freedoms for the Saturday Evening Post.  His depictions met with little fanfare at first. But they would eventually become iconic after the Post and the US Department of the Treasury teamed up to sponsor a two-year touring exhibition of the paintings, exhibiting them around the nation, as a way to promote American patriotism and the sale of war bonds.  

On the second level of the museum is a non-commercial contemporary take on those Freedoms. The gallery here is filled with art that questions how universal those freedoms were and are today—but from the perspective of those who were denied those freedoms. They include images from Norman Rockwell, himself, who had advocated for Black Civil Rights and the “Right to Know” during the Vietnam War. 

My contribution to the story of the Four Freedoms should be in this section...Let me know if you find it!

​Recently, a New Zealand film crew came to our house to shoot a documentary. While they were setting up, one of the producers began asking about the divisive mood here in America and how he was really surprised to see a truck proudly streaming a confederate flag from the back of its cab as it sped past them on Route 8 near our house in Massachusetts. While it’s still rare, one thing is clear: the confederate flag is not just a “southern” thing anymore.
  
The following two articles talk about confederate flags on display in northern states:

Some White Northerners Want to Redefine a Flag Rooted in Racism as a Symbol of Patriotism 
Confederate Flag at Great Barrington School Prompts Free Speech, Student Privacy Debate

The first one basically says that some white northerners are adopting the confederate flag, with its white nationalist roots, as a symbol of white collective grievances and rebellion. The latter talks about a student at a local high school in the Berkshires who wore a confederate flag to school. The ACLU of Western Massachusetts defended his right to do so in the name of free speech.

My Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project also speaks to issues of freedom—or what had been the lack of it—for a small minority.  The local ACLU defended this boy's right to speak, however, it decided earlier this year that they were not interested in having me talk to their group regarding my question, “Who’s an American?” Perhaps they were too busy with other issues. Perhaps they were the same issues that made them turn a blind eye to this story decades ago...when the National ACLU sided with FDR and his decision to remove the civil liberties of US citizens of Japanese ethnicity 75 years ago. 

Anti-Asian history rarely gets included in the story of America but for the record, the FFF/YBP has been invited to places like the FDR Library, the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Supreme Court, to name a few. However, since Mr. Trump became President, there seems to be a renewed effort to "sweep" this story under the proverbial rug.  To give you some examples, my work was first invited then excluded from: the NY Historical Society and CUNY’s Roosevelt House in May of 2018 (despite being told not three weeks before the opening that my project would be part of a section called Freedom’s Legacy in an exhibit about FDR's Four Freedoms); a panel discussion scheduled to happen in 2018 at CCNY (canceled without explanation); a display of my tea bowls by the reflecting pool at the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA, as part of an art and education program, greeted with great enthusiasm at first, only to end in a polite “not at this time".

I have received suggestions to speak on New England Public Radio which never materialized. And perhaps most mysterious of all was the reason I was given why NPR's All things Considered declined to feature my project for the 75th anniversary of FDR's Four Freedom's Speech or the 75th anniversary of the signing of EO 9066.  Even as a travel piece it could have worked, as there are not many people who have actually been to all ten of America’s WWII concentration camps.  Their reason, I was told: my family was not in the “camps.” 

Most people say that my project belongs at the Asia Society or, even better, at the Japan Society. And yet, I submit that this history (a pattern of discrimination spelled out in hundreds of pieces of anti-Asian legislation passed in this country that spans almost a century from the 1870’s -1960’s) provided a clear road map to the present—a modern example of a deliberate pattern of exclusion which continues to affect people of color to this day. That pattern of "the other," I believe, has its roots in the 1790 Naturalization Act and its assertion that “Any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the US for two years was entitled to be called an American—and nobody else. 
 
"Any alien” meant that the first exclusion was the native born: Native Americans. This law has been used time and time again to exclude persons deemed not white, despite numerous updates to said law, and in spite of the guarantees provided by the Constitution, implied by the Declaration of Independence and reinforced by the Emancipation Proclamation.

While we say “Justice for All,” the reality has been Four Freedoms guaranteed for some. The targets of exclusion may vary, but if the rising popularity of the confederate flag is any indication, the importance of “whiteness” seems to remain an essential element of “Americanness,” maybe not to all, but to enough of us to matter.

Barbara Takei, the head of the Tulelake Committee, asked me to share this latest update on the effort to save Tulelake (CA), considered one of the most important of the ten sites where US citizens of Japanese ancestry were mass imprisoned during WWII. The Committee hopes to preserve the lessons of yesterday for tomorrow’s generation.  

"The Tulelake airport land occupies 2/3rds of the area where more than 24,000
Japanese Americans lived and where over 331 died during the years of
incarceration from 1942 through 1946. In the postwar years, homesteaders
desecrated the concentration camp’s cemetery by bulldozing it, leaving it as a
gouged-out hole in the earth. The burial earth was used to fill in the grid of
ditches within the concentration camp site so the historic site could be used for
an airport.”

The Tulelake committee’s bid to buy the land, which was more than double the price of what it was sold for, was ignored.  Instead...

"The City of Tulelake sold the land to the Modoc of Oklahoma, who have been under
investigation for misusing their tribal sovereignty to help usurious payday loan
businesses avoid government regulation. By the time of the sale, City leaders
knew of the FBI investigation, IRS investigation, FTC investigation, Federal
convictions, and over $4 million in penalties paid by the Modoc of Oklahoma.
According to local news reports, City leaders dismissed the Oklahoma Tribe’s
misconduct after assurances by the Oklahoma Tribal leaders.

At the City’s meeting to sell the airport land, a lawyer for the Oklahoma Modoc
tribe, Patrick Bergin, assured City Council members that the Oklahoma Tribe
would not support the local Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin Tribes’ pending
lawsuit to protect sacred fish and wildlife habitat."

Here is the whole report.

If you would like to help, contact:

Tule Lake Committee v. City of Tulelake, et. al.
For information, contact: Barbara Takei
btakei@pobox.com
916-427-1733

. . .or I should say 40 minutes north of Boston, where “Yellow Peril” and the "Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project” will be at the Pingree School, in South Hamiliton, MA. If you're in the area, come join me for a reception to "meet the artists" on September 16, 2018 at 1pm.

Whether we like to admit it or not, being white, and a man matters in the United States and that’s because early on in the establishment of this country, the rules of naturalization and who could become a citizen (and therefore vote) was codified into law in one of the first pieces of legislation passed by the nascent US congress in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which said that citizenship was restricted to “any alien, being
a free white person” who had been in the US for two years. “Any Alien” was stipulated to exclude Native Americans.

The politics of “exclusion” was always at the heart of this new country, although at the same time and ironically it's leaders preached Justice for All. We can now see that they meant Justice for all aliens...but only if they are men, and only if they are white and for good measure, only if they had been here for two years. These words and stipulations have changed over the decades, like the two years to three or more, or to include aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent in 1870.  But what about Asians and Asian Americans?

I could not have answered that question six years ago. But I can now. What’s most instructive about the Asian American experience today is that it shows how easily hard-won rights can be lost and that the issues of discrimination are not necessarily divided along republican vs. democrat, conservative vs. liberal or even black vs. white.

Below is an excerpt from an essay I was asked to write about this aspect of US history for The Washington Spectator. I hope you find it interesting:

I recently went to Ellis Island on a beautiful spring morning and spent a couple of hours by myself watching the light pour into the Great Hall before the museum opened to the public. I was there to arrange the most recent iteration of an art project I’ve been working on for several years, this one having to do with an historic event that happened at Ellis Island back in 1942 and a related incident in 1998. To be there all these years later, knowing what I know now, was as if someone had firmly screwed in a light bulb that had been left loose, finally illuminating a part of my story and that of an America that I had never known or fully understood.

I was born and bred in the United States and grew up in the 1960s. My immigrant parents, by any standard, had achieved the American dream, with a successful small business in New York City and a middle-class home in the New Jersey suburbs. Like most of our European immigrant neighbors, I felt we were a healthy part of this “melting pot” we called America. My father, out of gratitude for his new country, always drove an American car, a Buick Le Sabre for him and a Dodge Dart for my mother, followed by successive generations of GMs, Chryslers and Fords over the years, despite the fact that many of our neighbors were starting to buy Japanese cars in the ’70s and German ones in the ’80s.

My father taught us to appreciate the diversity and generosity of this country, and I remember the pride and excitement I felt being taken to see the Statue of Liberty as a youngster. As we stood on the windswept deck of the ferry, I imagined my parents as part of the great wave of people who were welcomed into the arms of this beckoning green lady.

What I did not know at the time was that when my father first arrived, he was not allowed to stay in this country. That’s because he was Asian and, in particular, Japanese. I did not know, growing up, that Japanese people had been banned from immigrating to America, a ban that was in place nominally from 1907 and definitively, with the Asian Exclusion Act (which banned all Asians), in 1924, and wouldn’t truly be lifted until 1965...

You can read the rest of the essay The Washington Spectator.

To learn more about the Ellis Island Exhibit in 1998, click here.