7/31/81
Members of the Commission:
A series of questions concerning biographical information was sent to me as a preliminary to requesting a statement for the commission. I found that the major portion of it did not apply to me since I was born in 1948 during the period in which my family was beginning to re-establish its direction any lifestyle. Frankly, I'm dumbfounded that it has taken the entire span of my lifetime before serious action could be taken on the issue of Japanese internment. I have heard it started many times that since I was not born yet the imprisonment experience had nothing to do with me... yet I feel a debt is owed, that something has been and always will be unpaid.
Since I wasn't there, I can only state what I know:
-I know my father has a badly maimed left arm from wounds received while fighting for a country which held his family in prison for the duration of the war... he received two purple hearts
-cont-
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-And other decorations as well as riding in General Mark Clark's car in a hero's parade while his sister (my aunt) was being investigated by the government as a subversive spy or some such absurdity... (I was named after the general by the way)
-I know that my mother spent five and a half years in prison camps, and was released with my grandmother in 1946 almost a year after the war was over! She is now an author and has published an instructional book in art, and has never committed a crime in her life...
-I know that with three and a half years of university education my father could get nothing but second rate jobs until 1956 when he got on with Boeing.
-I know that the word "Jap" was and still is used derogatorily by whites indiscriminately toward myself and all the members of my family as I grew up... I've lost count long ago of the number of fights I got into growing up because of that word. I don't fight anymore, but I still feel a nearly blinding
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anger when I hear it. Imagine that... and I wasn't even born yet...
-I know that some I know, as well as myself, felt no obligation to serve in the Vietnam Conflict for a country which made such a mockery of the constitutional and human rights of our people without so much as an apology.
-I can recall in high school always feeling alienated from my fellow students. An attraction and an aversion to white women... confusion about Japanese women who seemed interested only in white boys. "Japanese boys are not cool" ... funny how much we weren't affected by the camp experience isn't it? (Statistics of Japanese American Sanseis marrying non-Asians are amazing to see... apparently we don't like each other very much...)
There must be more under the tip of the iceberg, but I, not unlike my parents and my dead grandparents who were forgiven nothing, don't like to think too much about it... often chalk experiences up to just that, but, still, a debt is a debt.
Mark Ota