As a result of Executive Order 9066, which was both unconstitutional and executed without due process, entire families of Japanese Americans on the West Coast and in Hawaii were rounded up like criminals because of race prejudice, wartime hysteria and failure of political leadership. Their bank accounts and assets were frozen, and many farms, homes and businesses were stolen. These families were forcibly sent to prison camps where they endured nearly four years of living hell solely because of their Japanese heritage. Many had lived in the United States for decades, but were all, by law, denied citizenship. At the closing of these American concentration camps in 1945, most people rebuilt their lives with little to no resources, relying on the resilience of the individuals, family and the community.

Now, the few living survivors are once again being threatened with forced eviction from their homes at the Sakura Gardens in Boyle Heights. This intermediate care and assisted living/memory care facilities were created to provide culturally sensitive services for Japanese American elders and sits on the site of where the Jewish Home for the Aged once stood.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the international Pacifica Companies plans to turn Sakura Gardens into a 45-unit luxury apartment building, putting at risk the lives of 200 of its most vulnerable residents by forced eviction. Many of the residents are women in their eighties and nineties, and who, as children, grew up in the concentration camps in some of the harshest terrains in America — all behind barbed wire and armed soldiers watching them from military towers with weapons ready and pointed at those inside the camps.

In 2018, when the Trump administration started to cage Central American refugees, families and children at the border, Japanese American concentration camp survivors and their descendants came out to protest this inhumane treatment and remind all Americans that we cannot “let it ever happen again” or repeat these acts that add to the long and shameful history of discrimination against people of color.

By ignoring these and other tragic American stories, we would be complicit in being silent and allowing racist behavior to continue and escalate in policies that treat people of color without any regard to human rights, without kindness, without compassion.

Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans and Latinos have a great deal in common. In America, beside our Native American communities, we are absolutely and undeniably, a nation of immigrants, no matter how many generations have been here. In fact, the first “DREAMer” was a Korean American student. Our respective languages, foods, traditions and cultures are vital to our self-preservation, enrichment and the bonds to where our ancestors came from. We can, and some do, serve as bridges to countries around the world, and are, at the same time, all-American.

Let’s all help protect our seniors at Sakura Gardens and stop this cultural interruption. Sakura Gardens is one of the last traces of the once-large Japanese American community that helped build and that thrived in Boyle Heights. Before 1942, over 35,000 Japanese Americans made the East LA area home due to segregation that prohibited Asian Americans from living in other communities because those communities were deemed white-only.

Displacing our seniors who have long contributed to the rich culture and history of Los Angeles during this time of the COVID -19 pandemic is unconscionable and cruel and would cause harm to residents and families for years. We need to hold Pacifica Companies accountable for its failure to adhere to its agreed-to sales conditions by retaining the bilingual and bicultural character promised to its facilities. We cannot allow profit and gentrification to dictate what goes into our neighborhoods without investigating the impact on our communities. We demand that the Pacifica Companies provide transparency of its plans to the residents of Sakura Gardens/Kei-Ai facilities and their families so they can determine what is best for these seniors who raised us all.

Join us for a Save Our Seniors (SOS) car caravan and media event at the Kei-Ai Los Angeles Healthcare Center on February 25 at 11 a.m. Let us extend the care given at Sakura Gardens so that these resilient residents may enjoy their golden years in comfort, safety and security, with familiar food, and with people who understand them. Let’s all ask ourselves, “How would you feel and what would you do if they were your parents?” Together, can move forward to SOS.

Strength in Unity! Pa’lante

Carlos Montes is co-founder of the Brown Berets, a Chicano self-help organization similar to the Black Panthers from the late 60s and 70s. Montes was one of the leaders of the Chicano Blowouts, a series of high school walkouts at East Los Angeles High School to protest racism and inequality in East LA schools. Montes also helped organize the largest anti-war protest, known as the Chicano Moratorium. Montes lives in Boyle Heights. Tamlyn Tomita is a Japanese-Okinawan-Filipina-American actress. A native of Los Angeles, she can be seen reprising Kumiko in “Cobra Kai” (2021), the Netflix series based on the original “The Karate Kid” films. She is also well known for her role as Waverly in “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and numerous other movies and TV shows. Her Japanese American father was incarcerated as a child with his family at Manzanar Internment Camp.

#LosAngelesCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #DayOfRemembrance #BoyleHeights #ExecutiveOrder9066

San José, CA – On June 24, more than 75 people gathered at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose (JAMsj) in San José’s Japantown for a program on the struggle for justice by Japanese Latin Americans.

The program began with the film Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story. The film explained how Art Shibayama, a Japanese Peruvian, and more than 2000 other Japanese who immigrated to Latin America or were born there were taken by the U.S. government during World War II. They were held in Department of Justice internment camps along with thousands of Japanese, German and Italian immigrants to the U.S. who had been arrested in the days after the U.S. declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy. The U.S. government planned to use the Japanese Latin Americans as hostages to be exchanged for Americans held by the Japanese government.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. government classified the Japanese Latin Americans who they had taken by force as ‘illegal immigrants.’ 40 years later, the U.S. government denied Japanese Latin Americans equal reparations with Japanese Americans who had been put in concentration camps during World War II. In March of 2017, after more than 20 years of seeking justice from the U.S. government, Art Shibayama and others testified to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), to seek a ruling against what the U.S. government had done and to call for full redress for Japanese Latin Americans.

After the film, Art Shibayama’s daughter, Bekki, spoke about how the internment had affected her family. Grace Shimizu of the Campaign for Justice spoke the audience about how they could help the campaign. She urged supporters to sign a petition to the IACHR in support of the Shibayamas and other Japanese Latin Americans (see below for a link).

At a potluck dinner after the program, Joyce Oyama said that she had first heard of the Japanese Latin Americans at a Day of Remembrance, and that “it just wasn’t right” that they were denied the same reparations that Japanese Americans had received. [Day of Remembrance is an annual commemoration in Japanese American communities of Executive Order 9066, which was issued on February 19, 1942, and led to concentration camps for 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II]

Readers of Fight Back! can support the struggle by signing the petition at: https://www.change.org/p/inter-american-commission-on-human-rights-justice-now-for-the-shibayama-brothers

#SanJoséCA #AsianNationalities #ExecutiveOrder9066 #Antiracism #JapaneseAmericanMuseumOfSanJoseJAMsj

Berkeley, CA – Long time antiwar activist Iwao Lewis Suzuki was awarded the Clifford I. Uyeda Peace and Humanitarian award at the Day of Remembrance program in San Francisco, California on February 19, 2012. Dr. Clifford Uyeda was a long-time Japanese American community activist who championed redress and reparations for Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. He also publicized the almost 300 Japanese Americans who refused the military draft during World War II because their families were in concentration camps and spent on average two years in prison each for their courageous stand. Dr. Uyeda also worked to educate people about the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army during their occupation of China, including the Rape of Nanking. Fight Back! interviewed Mr. Suzuki at his home in Berkeley after the Day of Remembrance program.

Fight Back!: Would you like to tell our readers what you told the audience at the Day of Remembrance event in San Francisco when you received the Clifford Uyeda Peace and Humanitarian award?

Iwao Lewis Suzuki: I tried to say three things. First, that our country, the United States, is the only country that has used atomic weapons. We need to raise our voices to say that atomic bombs should never be used again. No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! (1)

Second, the United States should withdraw our military from Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. troops are not there to liberate people, they are an occupying force.

Third, the Okinawan people’s movement to have U.S. military bases withdrawn from Okinawa is very strong. The United States should withdraw all of its military bases from Okinawa.(2)

Editors notes:

(1) The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and August 9th, 1945. Hundreds of thousand of civilians were massacred, mainly women, children, and the elderly. Under the U.S. military occupation of Japan, it was against the law to give out information about the atomic bombings.

(2) The United States has a number of military bases on the island nation of Okinawa, which is part of Japan. Over two-thirds of all U.S. military forces in Japan are on these islands, which have only 1% of Japan’s population and ½ of 1% of Japan’s land area.

#BerkeleyCA #AntiwarMovement #AsianNationalities #JapaneseAmericanInternment #DayOfRemembrance #NuclearWeapons #Nagasaki #Hiroshima #IwaoLewisSuzuki #ExecutiveOrder9066

The theme of the Day of Remembrance program was “Civil Liberties Under Siege”. The NOC keynote speaker, Will Kaku, said, “We remember the judicial debates on terrorist detentions, the USA Patriot Act, National Security Registration System, last year’s congressional commissions that singled out Islam and terrorism. And just a few months ago, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act that contains a provision that allows the indefinite detention of American citizens and yet we had to remind people once again that our families were also held without the due process of law.”

A special guest speaker was Karen Korematsu, of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education. Karen’s father, Fred Korematsu, along with other Japanese Americans, fought a legal battle against the concentration camps all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. While the original U.S. Supreme Court decision which upheld the concentration camps in the interests of national security was later vacated (overturned on a technicality) in the 1980s after another long court battle, the U.S. Supreme Court never ruled that the camps were unconstitutional.

Another special guest speaker was Zahra Billoo, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ms. Billoo spoke of the government repression of American Muslims following Sept. 11, 2001 that continues to this day. She also thanked the Japanese American community for its solidarity with American Muslims during these difficult times.

Local Japanese American congressperson Mike Honda also spoke and a spontaneous cheer broke out when he said that he voted against the National Defense Authorization Act. Mike Honda and his family, including his 95-year old mother, participated in the candle-lighting ceremony to honor the memory of those incarcerated in the camps.

The program wrapped up with an award to PJ and Roy Hirabayashi, founders of San José Taiko. San Jose Taiko is a Japanese American drum ensemble that has become a regular performer at the Day of Remembrance events, and they played a special number called Day of Remembrance at the event.

#SanJoséCA #AsianNationalities #JapaneseAmericanInternment #DayOfRemembrance #ExecutiveOrder9066 #FranklinRoosevelt