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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2004Japanese American internees draw strength from pilgrimageOakland, Cal.--As I rode the bus this July 4th weekend on my fifth biennial pilgrimage to Tule Lake (near the Oregon border) everything seemed pretty much like previous times. As before, we introduced ourselves over the PA system, folded origami cranes, and watched videos in preparation for our visit to the dry lake bed where the largest of ten War Relocation Authority internment camps once stood. But by the time we met the other six buses at the dorms of Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) in Klamath Falls, I had a feeling things were only the same on the surface. That night in the OIT auditorium the theme of our pilgrimage, dubbed "Citizens Betrayed," was introduced: renunciation. It was the first time the Tule Lake Committee solicited participation of internees who had renounced their U.S. citizenship during World War II through a special government program that replaced lengthy court actions with the mere signing of a statement. The theme was not without risk, as renunciation created a rift in the Japanese American (JA) community that remains an open wound today. Shortly after they realized they had been fooled into making a hasty decision, many "renunciants" sought the counsel of ACLU attorney Wayne Collins. Collins managed to get a federal judge to agree that the special program was a scam because the renunciants had not signed out of free will, as required by law, but under great duress generated by the government. The judge ruled the renunciations invalid. However, his ruling was overturned on the government’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court. The Department of Justice then developed 22 categories of renunciation, which had the effect of forcing Collins to retry nearly 5,000 cases individually. Just a few years before his death in 1974 he finally completed that Herculean task. It occurred to me that the government, in an attempt to hinder class action litigation, had inadvertently backed into a truth: that for every renunciant there was a unique motive for the action. Thus every story deserved a hearing, at least by the pilgrimage attendees if not the JA community as a whole. Perhaps "hearing" is the wrong word, for it suggests that some sort of accounting or justification is forthcoming. In the panel discussion on renunciation later on in the pilgrimage, none of the former renunciants offered an explanation. Rather they spent most of their time honoring Wayne Collins. One panelist recalled correspondence in which Collins maintained that he was only doing his job and that the real heroes were those who demanded their citizenship back. Indeed, the court battles and community confrontations took more than a modicum of inner strength. Only in recent years have some of them felt safe enough to speak about themselves in a public way. Even though the blame rested squarely on the shoulders of the federal government, no amount of legal confirmation that the renunciants were victims of a racist, vindictive policy could ease the sense of guilt for making a decision they would later regret. I met a man who said he was still ashamed of emulating the Hoshi Dan as a five-year-old kid. The Hoshi Dan was a militant group of renunciants whose rejection of the U.S. was total. In their anti-America/pro-Japan zeal, members of the Hoshi Dan frequently badgered other internees into joining their ranks. Collins argued in court that this harassment went on with government consent and even encouragement. Why were acts in defiance of a government that betrayed these citizens remembered with such regret? In one group discussion, I opined that renunciation was what Hegel might have called a first negation. Renouncing citizenship is a total "negation of what is," in the sense that the country you belong to means everything in wartime, particularly when you look like the enemy. As with negation in and of itself, there was little if anything for JA renunciants beyond renunciation. "Repatriation" to Japan was basically deportation to a foreign land. Very few, even among the Hoshi Dan, had dual citizenship. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of a second negation in the lives of the former renunciants who attended the pilgrimage. To be sure, regaining citizenship was a negation of renunciation. Of course, it was not simply a matter of picking up where they had left off. They probably felt like new immigrants, except in this case there was no JA community in which to immerse themselves. That was partly because there were no such communities to speak of in the postwar period and partly because, even if there were, former renunuciants would not have been welcome. Still, it was at least a new beginning. Marx said time is the space of human development. This must be so especially when one spends time with others. I think it is the development of a new "we" that makes every pilgrimage unique, no matter how familiar things look. Even if your fellow pilgrims are the same ones you saw last time, we have all absorbed two years of personal and collective history. Some attendees could barely finish something they started to say for all the sobbing that unexpectedly overtook them. Nothing of the sort had happened to them on previous pilgrimages. Why this time? No one knew or cared why, any more than we cared why the renunciants did what they did. What matters is what they made of their lives afterwards, just as what matters to us is what we make of our time together, whether it’s at a place we’ve been to before or not. --David Mizuno’Oto * * * Hiroshima Day—August 6, 1945 A day that will live in infamy See Raya Dunayevskaya's "Lecture in Japan on Hegel," in THE POWER OF NEGATIVITY. |
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