Poetry-No More Camps-Part One

NO MORE CaMPS: 10 Ways to Learn About Manzanar
by Tony Osumi
PART ONE OF TWO

Every year since 1969, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people drive hundreds of miles into the desert to remember. On Highway 395, people make their way through California’s Owens Valley to the Manzanar Pilgrimage. Manzanar is one of the concentration camps where 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during WWII.

30 years ago, I went on my first pilgrimage in 1972. My parents took me when my mom heard about the pilgrimage as a UCLA student. Being only five, I don’t remember much, but like many things our parents expose us to, it had a lasting impact.



	Tony Osumi with dad, Larry, and Grandma Chie in 1996

In college, many years later, the Manzanar Pilgrimage became a regular outing for my dad and me. One year an Asian American college professor chided me for saying I had "fun" at the pilgrimage. I knew I was in trouble as soon as the words left my mouth. I’m sure she felt the event was too serious to be taken lightly. It’s true. The words fun and prison, fun and beatings, fun and suicide, fun and being shot in the back because you get too close to the barbed wire fence, just don’t mix.

Yet, with age and experience, I’d like to restate and reaffirm my position. The Manzanar Pilgrimage is fun. Learning about American concentration camps isn’t a laughing matter, but it can be enjoyable. At least it should be. When learning situations are fun, they help create the conditions that allow our brains to grapple, make sense of, and retain new information.

As a third grade teacher, I have found that kids don’t learn when they’re bored, scared or stressed out. Who does? Research into brainbased learning reconfirmed what good teachers have always known: that students learn best when they‘re engaged, challenged, and feel safe taking chances and mistakes. Researchers call it a state of "relaxed attentiveness."

The Manzanar Pilgrimage has aspects of fun because unlike a history book, the pilgrimage provides a whole body experience. For my dad and I, the Pilgrimage starts the night before preparing Japanese American roadtrip essentials like Spam musubis, tsukemono, shoyu hotdogs, and onigiri. So right off the bat, we got the JA soul food thing going on and our tastebuds are happy.

During the four-hour ride up, we get to talk and connect. I’ll pass on the story I heard about the spoiled, green Thanksgiving turkeys sent to Manzanar that sent everyone lining up at the bathrooms all night. Then dad will recount some family tidbit, like the time the family drove to Washington and Grandma Chie skewered a bird with the hood ornament of her 56 Buick.

Once we’re at the Pilgrimage, other senses and interests are expressed. I’ll socialize with some friends, snap photos of a now rare Issei mother and Nisei daughter couple sitting together, and lay a flower on Baby Jerry’s grave during the interfaith service. Next, I listen to what’s going on with the Redress struggle, and curse the government a little. Soon, I’m singing along with Nancy Gohata on This Land is My Land. Sometime during the day, I ask myself like many do, "What would I have done back then? Could it happen again? Is it happening, again? What am I doing to help now?" Before it ends, everybody gathers in a giant circle and dances the Tanko Bushi. Sometimes on the way home, I have the beginnings of a new poem. Because it taps into our "multiple intellegences," everyone can find at least a few things interesting at the Pilgrimage.

For me, one of the main draws to Manzanar is family history. My grandparents, Chie and Yoshio (Terry) were sent to Camp at Poston, Arizona. Auntie Kimi went to Manzanar and all my great uncles and aunts from Moses Lake, Washington, like Uncle Fred were sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. When we’re connected to the things we learn, our motivation rises.

But you don’t need family connections to make the day trip. I’ve talked to non-Japanese Americans who go to the pilgrimage for their own reasons. Some make connections with Camp to the injustices of Indian reservations, Nazi death camps and political prisoners. Others find Racial Profiling similar to how Japanese Americans were wrongly suspected and imprisoned without cause.

This year, several speakers at the Pilgrimage described the sharp rise in hate crimes and harassment against those viewed as Arab and Muslim following 9/11. What’s disturbing is that many these acts are committed not by racist individuals, but by our own government. In a speech delivered at this year's Manzanar Pilgrimage by Sam Hakim of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, he stated that "today there are 1200 Arab and Muslim Americans held in US jails under the Patriot Act. The evidence against these civilians is sealed. It cannot be seen, it cannot be analyzed, it can never be challenged."

This immediately reminds me of the 1,200 Japanese Americans the FBI picked up by nightfall, December 8, 1942. Like today, they were not allowed to contact their families and their absences created huge emotional and financial hardships. The more I research the new Patriot Act, the number of civil liberties experts who’ve condemned it for eroding our civil rights and protections troubles me. Instead of strengthening America’s democratic ideas in a time of crisis, its authors may have used our fears from 9/11 to consolidate their own power.

Ironically, forty years after Camp, the 1983 Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) reported that the "exclusion, expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans was not justified by military necessity." Titled, Personal Justice Denied, the report concluded that the decision to intern Japanese Americans was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In the future what will history conclude about the necessity of Bush’s Patriot Act, his War on Terrorism, and his bombing and invasion of Afghanistan?

In recent years, the Pilgrimage has meant new things to me. Besides bonding with my dad, it also means spending the weekend with my wife, Jenni. She’s on the Manzanar Committee and helps organize the day event. She also started the Manzanar After Dark program. It’s a wonderful inter-generational program where camp survivors and young people share and learn from each other.

This year, I signed up with the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Asian Pacific American Committee’s salary point class. Every year it sends a busload of teachers to learn about Camp so they can share this American history with their students. On the walking tour, our guide, Mas Okui pointed out rock gardens, bathrooms, and other remains of Manzanar’s 10,000 prisoners. He talked about the lack of privacy, the Manzanar Riot, and the mischief he and his 10-year-old friends got into when armed with slingshots.

All this has led me to think about how I’m going to pass on the story of Camp to my own children—even if Jenni and I don’t have kids yet. If left up to the school system, they might be lucky to find a tiny paragraph about Camp in the back of their high school history book. That’s not enough. To become thoughtful, active citizens, children need practice learning from the past.

To help, I’ve come up with a 10-point plan using a collection of activities and approaches to engage not only my kids, but students and anyone about WWII American Concentration Camps. I’ve named it "New Opportunities to Mobilize, Organize, Remember, and Educate about Camp Manzanar and Places Similar." For short, I call it NO MORE CaMPS.