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Reviews
Born in Seattle: The Campaign for Japanese American Redress
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By Robert Shimabukuro
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2001. Notes, bibliography, index. 178 pages. $16.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Robert J. Gould
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| When we forgive and forget, it is properly in the context of a pledge of "never again." When the transgression has been the utter destruction of civil liberties, such a pledge is no mere apology but must have the force and embodiment of law. Civil rights campaigns, such as the one chronicled in Born in Seattle, aim at this ultimate goal. In this sense, the subtext of the title Born in Seattle is "born in the USA — with all of our protected rights." |
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The campaign for Japanese American redress for the inhumanity of the internment camps of World War II reflects the long struggle by Japanese Americans to gain full and proper respect as Americans. A small group of Japanese American activists born in Seattle were largely responsible for the largely successful campaign for redress, whose reawakened spirit was evoked in President Ford's proclamation: "I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American Promise — that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated" (p.129). |
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The chapters of this book reflect both this reawakening process and the difficult road that activists traveled over a twenty-year period, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1988. Each chapter carries the reader along that long process: Awakening, Roadblocks, Remembrance, Circumvention, Testimony, Gestures, Determination, and Arrival. The activists achieved much of what they had sought. Passage of the Civil Rights Act and twenty-thousand-dollar payments to affected individuals constituted the apology and token compensation for the suffering endured. |
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What was not achieved was the overturning of the Supreme Court rulings on the curfew, expulsion, and incarceration. In addition, Congress did not entirely revoke Public Law 503, passed in March 1942, which, in conjunction with Executive Order 9066, provided the legal justification for internment. The pledge of "never again," evoked in regard to the concentration camps of the Holocaust and now Japanese American concentration camps, was never fully backed up in U.S. law. Because of this, Henry Miyatake, a key Seattle activist, worries that protection from the sudden loss of civil rights remains to be won. |
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Born in Seattle is the story of this redress movement told from the perspective of those who created and nurtured it. A key contribution of Born in Seattle is that redress concerned not only the suffering that occurred at the time of internment but also the suffering that continued long afterward. This suffering was not just the result of the general form of racism directed against those of Japanese descent before and after internment but a particular form of discrimination based on the wrongly assumed disloyalty of Japanese Americans during World War II. In recalling the history of internment and ongoing racism, a group of Japanese American activists from Seattle created a movement for redress that was powerful enough to overcome many obstacles and ultimately succeed. This is an inspiring story for historians and others interested in how history is made. |
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The experience of Henry Miyatake, one of the Seattle activists who spawned the redress movement, is emblematic of the particular form of racism still encountered thirty years after the internment. In 1971, Miyatake, a Boeing aircraft engineer, was facing a possible layoff in the wake of congressional cancellation of the SST (supersonic transport) program. Miyatake met with a personnel manager who patronizingly reviewed his employment status and remarked, "Looking over your record, I see all your references, all your relatives, are in Seattle. Educated here, too. Yeah, I know you people. You're not going anywhere. You have to stay here. Only place you can work. Boeing." Then, to Miyatake's surprise, the personnel manager pulled out a copy of the Japanese American Creed, written in 1941 by Mike Massoka, the Japanese American Citizens League national secretary, which, sadly, seemed to legitimatize discrimination while ensuring a kind of blind loyalty. The personnel manager read the document out loud to Miyatake to dramatize how assertions of Japanese American loyalty could be used to justify a huge wage reduction, just as those assertions of loyalty had been used to justify internment thirty years earlier. Then the personnel manager said that Miyatake could keep his job, with a 25 percent pay cut. The personnel manager knew that he had a virtually captive employee — a captive of racism and Japanese American assertions of loyalty in the face of the massive distrust created by the whole internment process. |
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Born in Seattle is quite readable and is suitable for high school and college curricula. Suggested lesson plans, including a timeline, would be a helpful addition to the appendix. The only obvious error that I caught was the mis-identification of Portland's Multnomah County Library as the "Portland City Library" (p. xiii). The many extended quotations enliven the reading and make it quite personal. The chronological order of the chapters will help students understand how a civil rights movement gets started, evolves, and adapts to changing conditions. Scholars interested in the Japanese American experience and the tragedy of internment in particular will appreciate this important addition to their collection. The specific focus of the book — the campaign for redress — is easily and properly contexualized, making it scholarly without being tediously objective. |
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