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Culture Documents
Last week, I visited the Japanese-American National Museum in Little Tokyo Los
Angeles. Two tiny elderly women were standing next to a reconstructed portion of barracks
from the Heart Mountain, Wyoming concentration camp (official name: Heart Mountain
Relocation Center), one of 10 used to intern 110,000 Japanese-Americans citizens and Japanese
immigrants in the United States during World War II. The women were pointing and describing
They used green wood that expanded and contracted with the weather…
I asked the women if they had lived in Heart Mountain. "No," one replied. "Manzanar",
the other explained. Manzanar. Remotely located 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles and
infamous for its harsh desert temperatures and wind storms that cover everything and everybody
with dust.
Manzanar (wikipedia)
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I asked more questions about what they did there, what it was like. They told me. And
then one of them said quietly, "You know, of course, this could happen again." Wanting to
share, I told her about my visit, about 20 years ago, to the Dachau concentration camp, now
But that is not what happened as I moved through the exhibits. The words that appeared
in my head and my heart were "This could happen again," followed by an "aha" moment, a
reverie:
This is what the Salvadorans and Guatamalens in L.A. mean when they
say that friends and family were "disappeared." This why the "conflict"
in the Middle East continues and continues and continues. This was the
alternative story ending to apartheid. This horror is a human thing. It has no particular
But humans are capable of transcendence. We also contain luminous possibilities for
good, beauty, and caring for each other. This tendency is the bedrock of all social justice
activists and the movements that we embrace, hoping to advance history in the direction of the
light.
nodded and smiled. "Since you brought up Dachau", she said, "I'll tell you another story." She
told me that the first American soldiers to liberate the prisoners from the concentration camp
were G.I.'s of the segregated, Japanese-American 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. "They
weren't supposed to be there. They didn't have orders to do what they did.
But so many of them had family at home in camps like Manzanar. They had
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to do something."
While she was in Manzanar, two of her brothers were serving in the
She went on to tell me how some of the prisoners first reacted to their
liberators fearful that they were now prisoners of the Japanese. We laughed.
We could laugh across the oceans of time that separated the circumstances
my mother, who would have been their age, lived in a different kind of camp
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on the other side of the country, a refugee camp at Fort Ontario in Oswego,
New York, preserved today as the Safe Haven museum. She was one of the
the 982 Jewish refugees who sailed from Italy to the U.S. as "guests" of
pledge in writing that they would return home once the war was over. The
museum website recounts the difficult journey, elation at the sight of the
A train, a reminder of the ones bound for Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, carried the
refugees north to Oswego and a decommissioned military base at Fort Ontario. Barbed
wire fences and military personnel greeted them at their new home. Refugee Walter
Greenberg comments, "I felt deceived. I felt that I should have been free. I mean, I felt
wonderful. I had doctors. I had nurses. I had food. I came to school. Oswegonians were
very kind... What good is it to have all the amenities of life if one still isn't free?"
The Japanese American Museum is across the street from the original Nishi Hongwanji
Buddhist temple where Los Angeles Japanese Americans were boarded onto buses bound for the
camps over 60 years ago. My conversation may have been by chance, but such conversations are
institutionalized possibilities in the museum, where many of the volunteer docents are veterans
of the camps. As I left the two women to view the exhibits, docent "Babe" Karasawa, approached
me and asked if I had any questions. Babe had been interned in Poston, Arizona during the war,
a place where Japanese-American prisoners became forced labor to build irrigation and other
infrastructure for the Bureau of Indian Affairs' projected relocation of Hopi and Navajo tribes. A
Babe (yes, his nickname is connected to baseball and Babe Ruth) asked if I was Jewish
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and then directed me to an exhibit case containing the book Year's of Infamy: The Untold Story
movement. The author, Michi Nishiura Weglyn, was interned with Babe's wife at the Gila River
camp in Arizona and married to Walter Weglyn, a Dutch Jewish Refugee, one of the few
children from his hometown who did not die in the Nazi Holocaust. It was Walter who
encouraged Michi to call the "relocation camps" by their true name: concentration camps. To
Babe, and to the museum, this naming is an essential part of reclaiming history, reclaiming Little
Tokyo, and making justice new again. The museum takes great care in defining the term:
torture and death camps. Six million Jews and many others were slaughtered in the
Holocaust.
Despite the differences, all concentration camps have one thing in common:
people in power remove a minority group from the general population and the rest of
As historical themes about race and hate and exclusion re-emerge today, what actions do
we take to ensure that "it" doesn't happen again? Is it possible for the "general population" to
imagine a world where reducing inequality, collectively producing place, and restoring and
healing our cities and ourselves is our shared project? Our policy.
It is not entirely a coincidence that the initial convening of the Right to the City Alliance
in the U.S. was held at the Little Tokyo Cultural Center, a few blocks from the museum. A
young organizer from the Little Tokyo Service Center, two or three generations apart from my
museum guides, told us some history about where we were. We learned about redevelopment
and displacement, about the struggles that produced the building, the struggles that continue. We
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identified with the stories and the frame of spatial (in)justice that we shared across our diverse
As I write, tens of thousands of people are demonstrating in cities across France against a
government law and order crackdown that has targeted Roma gypsies for expulsion from the
country. Some journalists and politicians have compared the images of Roma families being
"rounded up" onto buses to "Vichy France's round-up of Jews" and thousands of gypsies, many
of whom were killed in concentration camps. These memories of (in)justice are alive in the
spaces where opposition party leaders are marching alongside Roma migrants whose camp has
In the in the U.S. activists in cities across the country are taking to the streets to protest
Arizona's AB 1070, the nation's strictest anti-immigration law in decades. Marching in the
shadow of the history of the Poston and Gila River concentration camps', many suffer arrests and
political retaliation in order to protect the side of right and the rights of all.
Yesterday I was sitting in the park outside the Downtown Library, (one of
the city's last great free spaces) reading a book, with my back turned to my
seat-mate, a nice homeless man, who got up and came over to me to say,
"Sorry, but I was reading the back of your shirt. That's deep, man. So, deep.
Its so true." He laughed with his new awareness and I laughed with him.
production of truth.
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Michel Foucoult