Breaking the Silence

review by Kent Chadwick
Free Press staff writer

The Japanese American community had always valued reticence, obligation, and conformity, so in the post-war years it was easy for a painful silence to gather around the internment experience. How that silence was broken, how redress was won - in good measure by activists in the Seattle Japanese American community - and how that redress movement changed the community's understanding of itself are the compelling themes of Yasuko Takezawa's anthropological study, Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity. Takezawa's clear and intelligent writing sets the human drama of the Japanese American internees and their families into a conceptual context that amplifies the meaning of the injustices they suffered and the victories they have won.

Takezawa is a Japanese citizen and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tsukuba. In 1986, while doing graduate studies at the University of Washington, Takezawa attended a performance of Nikki Nojima Louis's play Breaking the Silence by Seattle's Northwest Asian American Theater. The play inspired Takezawa to make the Japanese American redress movement her focus of research, and in honor of that play she used its title for her book's as well. A Japanese edition of her research was published in 1994.

Takezawa spent eight years observing and participating in Seattle's Japanese American community. She conducted ethnographic interviews with fifty-five people, including both second-generation (Nisei) and third-generation (Sansei) Japanese Americans. She admits having begun her research with the misperception that "Japanese Americans lay somewhere on a cultural continuum between the two poles of Japanese and Americans." However, Takezawa came to discover that ethnicity for Japanese Americans, and, by implication, for other groups, is more a product of historical experience and individual members' interpretation of that experience than of genetic and cultural traits.Takezawa's study gave her a good vantage point for evaluating the impact of internment and the movement for redress, because the Seattle Japanese American community has often been a leader and sometimes "a renegade" among Japanese American communities in the nation. The first official Japanese immigrant to the United States arrived in Portland, Oregon and then moved to Seattle in 1883. Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island were the first in the U.S. to be removed under Executive Order 9066, which President Roosevelt issued on February 19, 1942. Gordon Hirabayashi, a college student at the University of Washington, was one of several men who refused to comply with the evacuation orders in order to legally challenge the constitutionality of the internment, only to lose their cases when the U.S. Supreme Court joined in the war hysteria by ruling that "military necessity" justified the violation of Japanese Americans' civil rights. The Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League drafted the controversial redress resolution that was adopted by the national JACL in 1976, which called for the federal government to make monetary payments to all people who were evacuated or interned during World War II. And the Seattle Evacuation Redress Committee organized the "breakthrough" Day of Remembrance event on November 25, 1978, in which over two thousand people re-enacted the Army evacuation of Japanese Americans to the Orwellianly-named Camp Harmony internment assembly center in Puyallup.

The Day of Remembrance proved cathartic to Seattle's Japanese American community. Issei (first generation immigrants) and Nisei who had been in the camps were able to release long-held emotions. The Sansei, born after the war, were given a window on their parents' suffering. One participant told Takezawa, "I remember being surprised at, how they were stripped of the niceties and they were left with just the simplest of amenities.' And the pictures of the camp, the barbed wire-'Gosh, did they need that?' ... Being a Sansei and not fully understanding and not feeling what they were feeling, because this obviously evoked a lot of memories that maybe had been suppressed for years ...." The Day of Remembrance was widely covered by newspapers, television, and community papers. It became an annual event and it inspired similar events in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The political campaign to win redress took a decade more of organizing and lobbying until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan. It publicly acknowledged that a "grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War II." But the individual redress payments of $20,000 that the Act approved only began to be distributed in October 1990 after much more political activism by the Japanese American community.Takezawa's study offers us a sophisticated perspective on ethnicity. Her intriguing conclusion is that "the redress campaign and its victory have strengthened the identification of Japanese Americans as American and has furthered assimilation in behavioral patterns, norms, values, and ideologies. At the same time, it reawoke and enhanced their sense of themselves as Japanese Americans."

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Contents this page were published in the July/August, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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