By SHARON YAMATO
In Karen Tei Yamashita’s brilliant new book, “Questions 27 & 28,” she rightfully calls attention to a woman who many have now sadly forgotten.
This year marks the 100th birthday of the once-championed hero whose landmark 1976 book, “Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps,” was thankfully exhumed by Yamashita’s deft reimagining of the extraordinary woman who wrote it.
Michi Nishiura Weglyn was 50 years old when her book burst onto the post-camp scene with a vengeance. Brilliantly researched, it documented a story that she knew all too well, having spent her formative teenage years at the Gila River concentration camp.
In a Rafu column way back in 2002, I wrote about the woman I had long admired for writing this life-changing book. As I said then, she “not only pushed the gas pedal to start the redress movement but also changed the way we as Japanese Americans look at our history, our government, and most importantly, ourselves.”
Speaking out at a time when no one, especially fellow Nisei, dared to defy the code of silence surrounding their incarceration, this accomplished costume designer took to her manual typewriter after years of intense archival research to write a book that openly condemned President Franklin Roosevelt for his decision to authorize and justify the imprisonment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
She did it in the best way possible: by spending countless hours in the National Archives to find the evidence to prove her case.
I remember speaking to Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig, another pioneering JA female researcher, who credited her friend and colleague with helping to locate valuable documents that led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, granting a public apology and $20,000 to each former detainee.
Equally important, her diligent guidance encouraged Herzig to search for the proof needed for the breakthrough coram nobis case that would uncover a document that revealed the racism underlying governmental lies justifying the incarceration.
You’d think that the pivotal 1988 legislation that was the product of their work would have been a sufficient catalyst to change people’s perceptions about the racism hidden under our founding father’s guarantees of “freedom and justice for all.” But beneath the rubble of those dark days lay attitudes far worse.
Even the ‘60s civil rights movement did nothing to quell the hateful attitudes toward people whose skin color makes them instant targets. We are again confronted with overt white supremacy, denial of human rights, and inhumane immigrant detention.
The situation has become so punitive that the WWII mass incarceration has sadly but rightfully become front and center in today’s media. For example, millions of people who either never knew, understood, or scrutinized what caused the mass detention tuned in to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, “Burn Order,” and saw people and plans that eerily echoed how the current administration is now targeting so-called enemy aliens with birthright citizenship, or those once referred to as “enemy non-aliens.”
Perhaps these comparisons caused journalist/editor Joe Mathews to sarcastically suggest that instead of building billion-dollar immigration centers in the midst of populated urban centers, the federal government should save money and reopen the familiar remote government-owned sites like Manzanar and Tule Lake.
As he points out from this purely pragmatic stance, reopening them “honors our carceral history, utilizes existing public lands, and streamlines our federal law enforcement infrastructure.” He concludes, “Let us stop pretending we are better than our past.”
When President Roosevelt characterized the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a “day of infamy” that Michi Nishiura Weglyn turned into “years” for all Americans of Japanese ancestry, I wonder if anyone could have envisioned how much worse things could get.
Yet something tells me Michi saw it coming when she prophesized that “even constitutions are not worth the parchment they are printed on unless vitalized by a sound and uncorrupted public opinion, and a leadership of integrity and compassion.”
Decades later, we may never recover from the years of infamy we are living in today at a time when integrity and compassion are being obliterated by our leadership.
Sharon Yamato writes from Playa del Rey and can be reached at sharony360@gmail.com. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.
Is there a photo of the book “Questions 27 & 28,” ?