<Begin Segment 19>

LG: Can we shift into some reflection questions? So you kind of talked a little bit about this at the very beginning, but broad question, how do you think your wartime experiences and the experiences of your family impacted you all, whether psychologically, physically, even through the generations? Do you see that impact sort of lingering?

AN: Can you repeat that?

LG: Sure, yeah. So there's this idea of sort of intergenerational trauma from the experiences that people went through in incarceration. So I'm curious if you can see that impact psychologically, physically, in your parents, in your siblings, in yourself, from what you went through?

AN: Well, I can't say anything about my parents, they're long gone. And like I said earlier, in that generation, they didn't like to talk about it and so if you didn't talk about it, that means you were not thinking about it. In terms of people who are alive and well today, my son, the last thing in the world is to talk about World War II. Indicated that my grandson was interested in the history, and so he's much more conscious. And I haven't had a conversation, very recent, in terms of ramifications of impact on the future, but -- [coughs] -- excuse me. That's something I could touch on, impact on now... now is not the way to put it. The interaction between Japanese American community and Black American community, there have been ups and downs over the last fifty years, and I ran across archival pictures, for example, which I didn't realize existed. The 1963 March on Washington in August, the JACL was there, and I didn't realize that until about four or five years ago. In '63, Martin Luther King had invited the JACL to join -- that was in June of '63 -- to join the March on Washington. And at that point, the JACL community was divided on whether demonstration publicly is the way to go about expressing the inequities and injustices of the large white community. And so there was a convention apparently in July of that year, JACL convention in which this was discussed. And there was actually a split vote on whether JACL should join the NAACP people or not. However, a group of progressive leadership within the JACL convinced the rest of the convention that they should join. And so they ended up accepting Martin Luther King's invitation and joined the March on Washington. And then I had found, related to that, a number of photographs involving the officers, national officers of the JACL, et cetera, taken in front of the Washington Monument and so on. And you can tell from the banners and so on that this is all part of the MLK movement. But I didn't realize such a thing existed.

And so then I found out in my research that when the executive order was signed back in '41, '42, it caught the attention of the NAACP. And they were worried that, because if it could happen to a small group like Japanese Americans who were only a few hundred thousand, "It could happen to us." So they were concerned, but before they could act, the government had made moves to move people et cetera, et cetera. So the involvement of the NAACP was minimal at that point. And, of course, the shooting war and everything caught the attention of the larger public. But the point is that the interaction between the Nikkei community and the Black American community have been there, it's just that due to circumstances and so on, not too much happened. And so when the Loving v Virginia took place, that was significant. And Marutani was asked to testify, he was asked by the NAACP to do that. So the connections were there. Not big time, but no less there.

So now, in 2023, the issues of support, and one in particular is reparations. Having generated and developed reparations for Japanese Americans, which involved the participation and support of the Black American community in Congress, the question is, what can the Japanese American community do reciprocally, because the circumstances are very different. Dealing with issues of multigenerational maltreatment over slavery, et cetera, and the size of the, magnitude of the number of people involved, was humongous compared to the Japanese American population And so the things I'm aware of is that somebody has proposed a study process, putting a document together to elaborate on or define what is to be included in reparations or not, et cetera, let alone what the reparation is going to be, is it money for individual families, money for community activities, how hard you want to do it, all that's up on the air because Black American history is a lot more complicated. And while the JACL and the Japanese American community wanted to be supportive, how to do it, all that is not very clear.

LG: So you mentioned that instance where you were a child, but did you ever feel you were treated differently by anyone in a positive or negative way because you are Japanese American?

AN: Well, I mentioned a few years after we returned to California and going to school and getting beat up, it was clear that we were being beat up by bullies because we were Japanese American. After that period, I don't recall any specific instances through middle school or high school when I got involved with the yearbook or the newspaper or things like that, things that really turned around. Because relatively speaking, the Japanese population in California was visible, I guess, is the way to put it. And a lot of the businesses started coming back. My father finally abandoned his mom and pop restaurant and went to work for a Japanese high end restaurant in Mountain View where he switched over and was a head chef there, and basically retired there when he was seventy-something. So the climate had changed profoundly in ten, fifteen year time, and I don't recall particular instances through high school or even into college where I was subject to specific ethnic threatening.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.