Chapters: Season Five Introduction

[00:02:02] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Welcome to the fifth installment of the Chapters podcast series. I'm your host, Jon-Barrett Ingels. On February 19 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, a response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which authorized parts of the Western United States to be prescribed as military zones where any and all people could be excluded. This allowed Western Defense Commander John L. DeWitt to exclude, forcibly remove, and incarcerate over 100,000 Japanese Americans.

This is a history in the US that we are all told, but not really taught. It comes up in maybe a paragraph or two in history books. In 2018, when we launched our Chapters podcast, we wanted to share stories and history from that traumatic moment of our past and turn it from a few paragraphs into its own chapter. We had also identified parallels to current civil liberties being stripped away during that same time. In his first term in office, President Trump attempted to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, put in place by his predecessor, President Obama. The program allows children brought into the US by parents or other immigrants to be able to go to school and get jobs with temporary protection from deportation. Removing that protection would have affected hundreds of thousands of young people living and working and going to school here in the states. In 2018, months before we started recording our first episodes for chapters, thousands of children were separated from their families who were seeking asylum here in the US. These kids were kept in warehouses, in cages, in tent cities under the desert sun.

The similarities and racism behind these decisions and the incarceration of Japanese Americans following Executive Order 9066 were hard to ignore, and we examined them in the early life of our chapters program. As we expanded our program, what became apparent was the need to share the stories and history of those who lived through the incarceration and celebrate organizations and individuals who continue to honor their legacy.

Whether out of shame or pride or not wanting to rock the boat or stir up the past, many families who lived through the Japanese American incarceration wouldn't discuss their experiences. And as we are 80 plus years after the camps, those who experienced it are gone or were too young to remember the details. This is a history we wanted to preserve, a blemish on America's past we wanted to highlight to prevent us from repeating the same mistakes. We also wanted to connect to current civil liberties being infringed upon to showcase the connections to history, whether it be immigration, LGBTQ rights, anti-Asian sentiment, indigenous rights, religious rights. These are all chapters in our history as a nation that need to be expanded upon.

In our fifth season of chapters, our idea was to explore the word incarceration and how it changes the way we tell the history of the 120,000 Japanese Americans and how we tell the story of the almost 2 million locked up under our current criminal justice system. The inspiration came from an article in the Los Angeles Times in 2023 from Teresa Watanabe. The article reflected on the Times decision to stop using the word “internment” when describing what happened to the Japanese Americans in 1942, and to use the word “incarceration” instead.

[00:05:51] Teresa Watanabe: The LA Times was one of the primary institutions on the West Coast that had really fanned the flames of yellow peril. I went back into the archives to read what the LA Times had said about it, and it was really shocking. The racist coverage that they had, the way that they completely painted all Americans of Japanese ancestry as unworthy of trust, and they needed to be rounded up. For the protection of America, they had to be sequestered somewhere in some remote camp. I think we even ran a column by a columnist that said something like, just round them up and just put them away. So the fact that the LA Timesfinally came around on the 75th anniversary was gratifying, but it was really long overdue.

[00:06:43] Jon-Barrett Ingels: As our first guest in this series, Teresa explained the difference between incarceration and internment.

[00:06:50] Teresa Watanabe: My grandfather was one of the first Japanese nationals to be rounded up. The FBI came to the house and my father was not there, but my uncle was there. And he recalls that it was so traumatic, they just came to the house, they picked him up without any explanation why, and then they took him away and the family had no idea where he went. But he was in fact, sent to an internment camp. He had a hearing, and he said that he was not a threat to national security. He was a peaceful man living in Seattle where he ran a produce stand in the Pike Place Market. And he was not a threat, but his plea was rejected and he was interned for the duration of the war, versus what happened to my parents and aunties and uncles after they took our grandfather away, my grandfather away.

In 1942, the US government put out an announcement that all people of Japanese ancestry were ordered to leave their homes on the West Coast. They could only take what they could carry in one suitcase. So you could imagine it was so traumatic and tearful. And then they were all shipped off to Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho. And they were just stuck there. It was desolate, it was remote. There was almost nothing there other than hastily erected barracks. It was so cold during the winter, it was so hot during the summer. There was a lot of winds that blew dust into the barracks. And it was just super miserable. And there they were incarcerated. It was really traumatic all the way around, but there was a distinct difference because my grandfather was given this hearing. He was given due process, even though he was not a US citizen. And the irony is that my parents were born and raised in Seattle as US citizens, and they were given no due process. Nobody was. And so that's what was so outrageous about it.

[00:09:08] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Our goal with this season was to share stories and experiences of the Japanese Americans incarcerated at the camps and connect it to the experience of those incarcerated currently in prisons and detention centers. We wanted to look at legal representation or the lack of, as the over 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated without due process.

[00:09:32] Donald Tamaki: By March 2nd, again, note the speed of this, 1942, Congress passed Public Law 503, declaring in very self-contradictory language, anybody who enters, remains in, or leaves a military zone shall be guilty of a crime. If you stay, you're a criminal. If you leave, you are guilty of a crime. These were diametrically opposite contradictory orders within Public Law 503. Because of that, the roundup began in earnest. And literally by March, April, people are herded into temporary prison camps while these 10 concentration camps are being built. Long story short, the government said, if a military general, John L. DeWitt, tells us that this is necessary for the safety of the nation, then we believe him. And without trial, without any evidence, it ruled that an entire racial group, men, women, and children, the young, the old, the healthy, and the infirm, could all be rounded up and put into concentration camps. And those cases stood for the next 37 years.

[00:10:44] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Donald Tamaki, part of the legal team, which reopened the 1944 U.S. Supreme Court case of Fred Korematsu, overturning his criminal conviction for defying Executive Order 9066.

[00:10:58] Donald Tamaki: There were three people who defied these orders, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu in California, San Francisco, Minoru Yasui, a young lawyer in Oregon, and Gordon Hirabayashi, a student at the University of Washington, all born in this country, all American citizens, who made the decision to defy these orders. But by and large, everybody else got rounded up.

[00:11:23] Jon-Barrett Ingels: All three of these men were tried and found guilty and sent to camps as their cases went all the way to the Supreme Court, where they were denied justice.

[00:11:33] Peggy Nagae: When I was in college, I wanted to do my senior thesis on the Korematsu, Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Endo cases. But my thesis advisor said, well, after you say that the Supreme Court had made some racist decisions, what else are you going to say about the cases? And so he talked me out of actually doing my thesis on that. And then in law school, when I was in Con Law class, and I was reading Korematsu, we were reading Korematsu, I thought, if I could ever do anything to write these cases, it would make these three years of torture worthwhile. But what could we do? I mean, they went to the U.S. Supreme Court, you know, what's the next court? The court of celestial something well-being. So little did I realize, but I thought a lot about that.

[00:12:22] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Peggy Nagae, lead counsel for Min Yasui's Korem Nobis case, and part of the team that brought the three cases back to court almost 40 years later, after new evidence was discovered.

[00:12:34] Peggy Nagae: John DeWitt, who was the commander of the Western Defense Command, started to make military proclamations, one of which was proclamation number three, to a curfew order that said that you had to, all persons of Japanese descent had to be in their homes between 8pm and 6am, I think. And the day after that was promulgated, Min decided that he would be the test case. He tried to get somebody else to be a test case, you know, World War One veteran, a family person with children, etc. He couldn't find anybody. So he decided he would become his own test case.

[00:13:13] Dale Minami: The general, Lieutenant General in charge of the West Coast, who issued the orders for exclusion, the banishment, had written a rationale for it. And the rationale said, you know, it's not a matter of time. We have plenty of time. It's just that, in a sense, it's paraphrasing. These people are inscrutable. We'll never be able to tell the loyal from the disloyal. When the supervisors in Washington, D.C. of the War Department saw this, they said, we cannot argue. This is patently racist. The Supreme Court will not accept an argument like this. And they forced the general to change his report 180 degrees. We had plenty of time, and we can't tell from these people because they're inscrutable, to a simple rationale that there was just not enough time.

[00:14:02] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Dale Minami, lead counsel for Fred Korematsu's Coram Nobis case, and coordinating attorney for all three cases.

[00:14:10] Dale Minami: Fred was an interesting man. And the reason he was interesting is he was, they called him an ordinary citizen, which he was. He didn't have any spectacular life before he was arrested. What he did have is a rock-solid belief that he was an American. He should not have been, he shouldn't be given his civil rights.

[00:14:31] Kathryn Bannai: In 1942, he was a student at the University of Washington. He was aware of the curfew order, but also aware that his friends who were international students were not subject to the curfew order, whereas he as an American citizen of Japanese ancestry was. And so he decided that he would refuse to obey the curfew order. And then as time went on, he reflected upon it further and decided that he would, in fact, not submit to the removal orders because of his strong beliefs about his rights as an American citizen, and also because of his belief in the wrongness of Japanese-Americans being treated as a racial group en masse in this manner.

[00:15:26] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Kathryn Bannai, lead counsel for Gordon Hirabayashi's Coram Nobis case.

[00:15:32] Kathryn Bannai: I don't think he thought of himself as a martyr. I think he thought himself as someone who was an ordinary American citizen who did what was necessary to stand up for his rights, and that that was a necessary act for him to take if he were to believe in this country and its principles and its constitution.

[00:15:56] Donald Tamaki: Each of these three litigants said that it was unlawful for an American citizen to be rounded up, be deprived of their property, their freedom, and for some of these Japanese-Americans, even their lives, without trial, without evidence, without any showing of any wrongdoing, and merely because of their racial ancestry. They didn't know each other. Each, you know, defended these cases on their own in their jurisdictions, and they lost. All of them lost. By...within the next two years of their arrest, 1943 and 1944, these cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

So the question is, how did the government defend itself? The 14th Amendment of the Constitution, the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, says this is unlawful. So what did the government argue? The government argued that Japanese-Americans were engaging in spying, in espionage and sabotage. And because of the urgency, the national emergency of the situation, it was too overwhelming to have individual loyalty hearings. So they were only left with one option, to round the whole of them up and put them away in concentration camps.

Thirty-seven years later, researchers Heiko Yoshinaga Hertzig and Peter Irons were researching government archives. They couldn't find...Peter couldn't find Fred Korematsu's Justice Department file. He wanted to write a book about Fred. Two weeks later, he gets a call from our archivist saying, we found them. They were misfiled in the Commerce Department. So Peter goes to the Commerce Department, not the FBI Justice Department, but the Commerce Department. No one would ever know these documents existed. He opens this box that obviously hadn't been disturbed or opened in over 40 years. And at the very top are memos within the Justice Department writing on the eve of these cases being heard before the U.S. Supreme Court saying, you know, we're about to tell lies to the U.S. Supreme Court. Every intelligence agency is saying that the Army's claims that Japanese Americans are engaging in spying and espionage are, quote, intentional falsehoods.

[00:18:11] Peggy Nagae: They didn't know that the original military report from John, from DeWitt, the commander of the Western Defense Command, said that “a Jap is a Jap.” “The Japanese race is an enemy race. It doesn't matter how long you have and the time you have. You can't separate the goats from the sheep. So there's no way you could tell who was loyal and who was not because the race itself was an enemy race.” That's what he put in his original report. If the Supreme Court had had that in front of them, they would have realized that this was not a military decision.

It's a Writ of Error, Coram Nobis. It's nothing that I learned in law school as well. So if there is material evidence that would have changed the outcome of a case if the court had the evidence in front of them, then if you are in jail at the time, you bring a petition for Habeas Corpus, which is what many people know more about. After you've served your sentence and you feel that there's material evidence and the decision would have been different, then you bring a petition for writ of error, Coram Nobis, and that's what we brought.

[00:19:28] Dale Minami: Of course, we brought this case to retry history. We wanted to correct the history, the story that Japanese Americans had engaged in espionage or sabotage or were disloyal. We brought it to, you know, vindicate our own families because they were put into these prisons based on faulty evidence. We wanted to, you know, vindicate these three men who were so courageous to stand up to the United States government, the most powerful nation in the world, and say, you're wrong. We want our convictions overturned.

[00:20:04] Kathryn Bannai: When Judge Voorhees permitted Gordon to make a statement, Gordon stated, “This is not only my case. This is not only a Japanese American case. This is an American case.” He posed the question, “Can it happen again?” And he continued, “Since the answer is ‘yes,’ it is important during periods of relative calm to ensure that such governmental conduct that deprives people of civil liberties has less opportunity to occur again.”

[00:20:38] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi had their convictions vacated 40 years after they were found guilty and imprisoned with over 120,000 other Japanese Americans.

[00:20:51] Ricardo Garcia: In some ways, prison reform or the way we look at caging human beings is central to justice reform. The criminal legal system focuses more often than it should on the notion of retribution, punishment, and warehousing human beings without really thinking about what happens, really deeply thinking about what happens to this person while they're being placed in a cage for years on end, or even weeks or days, depending on what's going on.

[00:21:18] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Ricardo Garcia, Public Defender for Los Angeles County, helped us understand a little bit about our current carceral system and the challenges it faces.

[00:21:27] Ricardo Garcia: But when you focus on jail and warehousing as a solution without thinking about how are we going to make sure that when people come out, they're in the best possible place to move their life in a forward direction? That challenge, I think, means that reforming the way we look at the carceral system is essential if we're ever going to expect to see a change, long-term, lifelong change in the criminal legal system.

[00:22:00] Jon-Barrett Ingels: I wanted to explore the challenges to our carceral system. Prison and jail at its core is designed to be a deterrent and offer opportunity of rehabilitation. But as Ricardo mentioned, we're ultimately warehousing human beings. It brought me back to my conversation with Kern Kim about his experience in prison. Kern was just a teenager when he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

[00:22:22] Kirn Kim: California went through a prison building boom from 1980 to 2000. There were 24 prisons built and only one college built in California. Our prison population exploded. The state funding that went towards rehabilitation went away to pay for prison building. The public, because of mass incarceration, because of the Super Predator scare, the public was not open to funding programs to help with rehabilitation. We were just locking up more and more people to the point where California, we had built to our capacity.

The solution to fixing the recidivism problem was to spend more money, but yet, as we saw, the prison system exploded and the recidivism just kept growing because it was an endless loop of people coming in, not getting the help they needed, and yet coming out and then re-offending because programs weren't in place to help those who were returning from the system.

[00:23:27] Ricardo Garcia: In the 30 years I've been doing this work, in the 22 years that I directly represented people, my clients were not thinking about punishment when things were happening in their lives. Even those who intentionally committed acts, regardless of what that act is, those, let's assume those who were intentional about their behavior, they were not considering or concerned about deterrence. They weren't saying, “Golly, if I do this, I might go to jail and get punched.” In fact, it was very eye-opening early on in my career when I started representing some young men who were engaged in criminal behavior when they told me they expected to go to jail. That was part of, they assumed that was part of the lifestyle they were in. That's not a deterrent.

The other challenge with our incarceration process, which I think for me eliminates us even beginning to talk about it as an option for either deterrence or rehabilitation, is the systemic racism about which it was built. In Los Angeles itself, the Black community makes up 8% of our population, 8%. Yet they are 30% of our jail population. That's outrageous. That is offensive. When we talk about tearing down jails or rebuilding jails or reducing the jail population, we should be focused on how to reduce that jail population.

[00:24:46] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Racism and racial profiling are intrinsic to our criminal justice system, our carceral system, and to what happened to the American citizens of Japanese descent following Executive Order 9066. Once again, here is Dale Manami.

[00:25:03] Dale Minami: As I look back, these types of injustices were compartmentalized in my brain, just like watching the civil rights movement unfold on television because I'm that old, watching African-Americans being blown away by water cannons, being bitten by dogs. All of that formulated a sense of values, I think, in my mind about injustice, about race discrimination. So yes, I did think about those things, but I didn't put all the pieces together until much later. When I was at Berkeley, the Third World Strike happened. The discussion of the narrative that was being promoted was not about marginalized people, not about our history as Japanese-Americans or even African-Americans, hardly Latinx. As a result, I felt like I was missing something, and yet I had this emotional reservoir of... It was a perception that this is not a fair country and this is a racist country, that the legal system was ineffective and it was not built to support the rights of, in some cases, in many cases, of marginalized people of color. And I saw that because of the decisions of Korematsu Hirabayashi and Yasui, and I saw how Brown versus Board of Education made a monumental decision, but it didn't change the plight of African-Americans all that much. I felt that the legal system was ineffectual.

[00:26:48] Jon-Barrett Ingels: While we were putting together this series, our first two episodes were recorded in October of 2024, before the election of Donald Trump to a second term in office. After his inauguration, in January of 2025, and as the executive orders started to fly, and the fear in many parts of the American population started to rise, our conversations changed, our course of direction changed, and the interviews began to reflect what was happening in real time. Here is Donald Tamaki again, connecting the incarceration of Japanese-Americans to the present.

[00:27:26] Donald Tamaki: Now we're at a new juncture, and we're not just talking about closing down the borders. We're talking about arresting people and their families, separating families, sending U.S. military down to the border, and so on, and talk of the Alien Enemies Act that was invoked during the Japanese-American roundup, and then the incarceration of Japanese-Americans themselves, as if it was precedent and a legitimate exercise of government power. And so sadly, that's where we're at, and it's regrettable that this whole chapter continues to have resounding relevance today.

[00:28:00] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Here is Peggy Nagae.

[00:28:12] Peggy Nagae: All those executive orders came fluttering from the sky every which way, and part of it is to the shock and awe, as some people have said, but to very much discourage us from doing anything. Also, expending resources like Birthright Citizenship, they're putting that into question. And of course, people have to file lawsuits to defend that, even though hopefully in the end, it will be deemed unconstitutional. I mean, you can't, etc. But part of it is the level and the huge kind of mass blanketing every aspect of civil rights, human rights, social justice that we're seeing, and we need to not get discouraged.

[00:29:10] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Here is Dale Manami.

[00:29:12] Dale Minami: It has changed. It changed in 2016 when I saw the judiciary stand up to Trump, just like it's doing now. It's rejecting his arguments, it's rejecting his programs, it's rejecting his attempted takeover of the government. And so I'm proud of the judiciary now in that sense. I'm not proud of the Supreme Court, but we'll see what they do, whether they actually defend the Constitution or they allow it to be degraded to the point that we don't have a third branch of government anymore. That's my biggest fear.

[00:29:48] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Here is Kathryn Bannai.

[00:29:50] Kathryn Bannai: The right to due process is not based on citizenship. We see individuals who are suspected to be members of Venezuelan gang being deported without due process. They were denied a hearing and an opportunity to show whether they were members of the gang or have or haven't been engaged in any criminal conduct. Gordon's Coram Nobis case involved the wartime government's suspicion that all Japanese Americans were potential spies. Today, the government is targeting immigrant communities on group-based suspicion that these individuals threaten national security.

[00:30:31] Abdi Soltani: When you violate these due process protections, it's a red glaring sign for everyone. And there are reasons for this. First of all, any person, if they're not afforded due process, can be caught in this, because then how can you challenge it? How can you make a claim that it didn't apply to you? How can you make a claim under the rights, under the laws, or the Constitution for any person? But second, whatever precedent we set, however deep the hole we dig and allow a person to be thrown into, that's how far a citizen can also fall. That's how far any person can fall, because it reflects the culture and the attitude with respect to the dignity and humanity of people.

[00:31:16] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Abdi Soltani, Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California. Our plan was to interview Abdi to discuss criminal justice reform, but we quickly shifted gears after President Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship in January of 2025 and invoked the Alien Enemy Act in March of 2025 in order to deport Venezuelan immigrants.

During World War II, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemy Act in turning over 30,000 Japanese, German, and Italian nationals. Over 17,000, more than half of that total, were Japanese nationals. And as for birthright citizenship, the anti-Asian sentiment that soured the Western U.S. decades before the war led to the creation of the Japanese Exclusion League, formed by white farmers and labor unions to strip the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, of their Birthright Citizenship. They didn't want to compete with the Japanese American farmers and fishermen and shop owners, whom many might argue were more adept. There is a direct connection between the Japanese American incarceration and the racist, bigoted executive orders being drafted by our current president. So Abdi helped us understand the history of both Birthright Citizenship and Alien Enemies Act.

[00:32:45] Abdi Soltani: Every one of us who is born in the United States, within the territory of the United States, is born a citizen of the United States. That idea is enshrined in our constitution, in the 14th Amendment, Section 1, that says all persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.

Now, one of the things that has really been revealing to me is that the 14th Amendment did not create the idea of Birthright Citizenship. Birthright Citizenship is a really old concept. It has its first roots in English common law, under the idea that you're born a subject of the king. And going back centuries in England, almost a thousand years, that was the practice, that if you were born within the dominion of the king, including if you were born a child of an alien, as was the term in England, you were born a subject of the king. So that concept of being born a subject became part of American, before the American Revolution, that was part of our idea as well. If you're born in the American colonies, you were born into that same subject relationship with the king.

In 1866, two really important things happened. Congress passed a law, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, that in part said, if you're born here, you're a citizen of the United States. Those members of Congress knew that such a law could be challenged, and so they wanted to put it on even surer footing. So they drafted the 14th Amendment the same year, and then the 14th Amendment was ratified two years later in 1868. They didn't want another future Congress to just repeal that. They wanted to give it more protection than even an act of Congress from a future Congress. Second, they wanted to make sure that no single president could undo that principle. They knew what a single president could do to diminish the rights of persons and citizens. It's almost like they could predict into the future that we're living in now, and know that it wouldn't be enough to protect something like that from just a president.

The Alien Enemies Act has been there throughout American history. Its language is clear that it allows the government to remove people from the country during wartime, like during declared wars, and here's Donald Trump invoking this law that has only ever been used during wartime, during actual declared wars, to deport en masse Venezuelans, and then taking them to El Salvador and locking people up in another nation's prisons. You cannot short-circuit the Constitution's due process protections, and our immigration laws' due process protections, and just grab people under some banner of Alien Enemies Act, detain them, deport them, send them to a different country. We're in a red zone here. This is liberty. This is liberty we're talking about. These issues of liberty are ones that go back to the English revolutions, for example, that even preceded our revolution. These are expectations that existed even when you have a king. These are basic concepts of liberty. These are red lines that we will not allow to be crossed.

[00:36:30] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Another way our narrative shifted in response to the actions and executive orders from our current administration is looking at how we share history, and the importance of telling the stories of the suffering, of the challenges, of the mistakes, as well as the stories of growth, of accomplishment, and success. As the administration waged its war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, the president passed an executive order entitled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, calling for museums and public monuments to remove scholarship and activity involving gender and race, essentially erasing the plight of women, people of color, Native Americans, and the LGBTQ community from museums and historical landmarks.

[00:37:43] Ann Burroughs: I see it as being almost like a campaign to dismantle foundational principles of the First Amendment, diversity, democracy, suppressing historical narratives that challenge that kind of vision. And I think also it's a very, very deliberate attempt to erase the contributions of people of color, of women, of LGBTQIA plus individuals, and other marginalized groups. So there's this attempt to sort of homogenize American history, and also to homogenize American culture. I mean, we know that it's an ideological attempt. And it's also, it's really doubling down into that thing, that whole notion of American exceptionalism.

[00:38:07] Jon-Barrett Ingels: This is Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum.

[00:38:13] Tamiko Nimura: But I also know, you know, if we get back to that issue of that March executive order, and we think about, you know, what this nation is, and we think about, you know, what makes it so extraordinary is the warts and all history, because it's the warts and all history that has made the country so extraordinarily powerful. And it's the warts and all history that have created a set of values that we are, with the best intention, able to unite around. Because if you think about preserving history, or you think about preserving culture, or uplifting culture, you know, to a very large extent, you are talking about memory, you know, you are talking about preserving memory. So when you're pushing back against this attempt to erase history, I mean, essentially, memory almost then becomes in itself becomes an act of resilience and an act of resistance. And it shouldn't be, but that's kind of what it becomes, because if you are having to combat erasure, you have to uphold memory.

[00:39:18] Jon-Barrett Ingels: As memories fade, we rely on institutions like JANM, like the Smithsonian, institutions for higher education to keep that history, warts and all, alive, to help us evolve as a society and as human beings. As I mentioned in the beginning, the history of the Japanese American incarceration isn't widely taught, and there are only the children and grandchildren of those who lived through it left to keep those memories and stories alive.

[00:39:48] Tamiko Nimura: I was, you know, in a U.S. history class, like a big survey class. And I think there was just maybe a paragraph in the sort of long history textbook about the incarceration. And I knew that that was just such an inadequate way to talk about that history. And, you know, for a lot of folks, that's still all they know, right, and all that they remember.

[00:40:10] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Tamiko Nomura has been working on a book utilizing her father's manuscript from his time in Tule Lake. It is her connection to her father, who passed when she was a child, and her connection to his experience being incarcerated.

[00:40:27] Tamiko Nimura: As far as I know, he was writing this book in the 1960s or so. So a good, what, 20 years, maybe, after his incarceration, and was trying to get it published. And, but as far as I know, he was never able to really get it published. He, my mother says that people rejected it for not being angering enough, which is interesting. And it really, but it's really full of amazing amounts of detail. I, you know, I can't believe, even, I'll just keep returning to it going, I can't believe he remembers so much of this. You know, he remembered what they bought at the grocery store when, you know, he was growing up, these Japanese goods that he had. There's also a chapter on how my grandfather organized a whole community gathering, block gathering to make mochi, which is this pounded rice cake. But they had to, you know, buy and make all of that equipment. So they had to, like, find the right place for the rice, they had to get the right wood for the mallets and carve the mallets. And then they had to steam the rice, and they had no, you know, electric rice cookers. So they had to, like, create these wooden boxes that, and then build a fire and boil the water and, you know, steam it through these, through these wooden boxes. So just these amazing amounts of detail that he was able to remember.

[00:41:50] Jon-Barrett Ingels: She also was co-author of the graphic novel, We Hereby Refuse, exploring the resistance that happened in the camps, including her uncle, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, who refused to sign the loyalty oath in Tule Lake.

[00:42:04] Tamiko Nimura: Writing it really was, in some ways, a really productive thing to be doing. You know, it really felt like, wow, we are in this climate of resistance, and we are hopefully, you know, contributing to how people think about resistance and hopefully will think about it in the future. Lots of things to, like misconceptions, misunderstandings, to clear up about resistance for Japanese Americans. In some circles, it was a very stigmatized thing, resistance, and in others, it was valorized.

[00:42:37] Jon-Barrett Ingels: We spoke with Soji Kashiwagi, Tamiko's cousin and Hiroshi's son.

[00:42:45] Soji Kashiwagi: And my dad's position was fairly simple. It's like, well, okay, if you take me out of this camp, if you free myself and my family and my community, then I will happily serve in the army or in the armed services. If you don't do that, then I refuse to, you know, agree to this question and do what you want me to do. Your everyday American who knows and has studied the Constitution would do the same thing, you know, because that's who we are, right? Or who we're supposed to be. We're built on this idea of dissent and protest.

[00:43:23] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Dissent. Protest. Standing up for our rights. For what we believe in. These actions have been weaponized against us. National Guard and militarized police threaten and intimidate to silence the dissent. To quell the protest.

[00:43:42] Chessie Thacher: The idea that this administration could undercut protests so badly by passing restrictive laws, it's an anathema to our sort of DNA as a country. Like, we were founded on protest. The Boston Tea Party was a protest. It was our move to become a separate nation. The end of slavery was brought about because of abolitionists, very brave abolitionist protest movements. The end of segregation in the South and elsewhere was brought about because of a very coordinated and dedicated number of people who protested in the civil rights movement, which also ended or helped to end the draft of young men in this country. These things would not have happened without protest.

[00:44:32] Jon-Barrett Ingels: Chessie Thacher is senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California. She spoke with us at length about First Amendment rights and the power of protesting in the wake of universities being threatened financially in reaction to student protests.

[00:44:49] Chessie Thacher: It is good for students and young people to care about the world we live in and the community we live in and the neighbors that surround them. It is good for them to confront ideas that they may not agree with and stand up to those ideas and advocate for some change. Much of history looks back at student movements 20 years later and says, oh, obviously. It is important to think that in the moment, students may look radical, but over time, much of history has given the stamp of approval to the positions that they were advocating. I hope we can encourage the youth and students to organize and be active about what they believe in, because if we don't encourage that, then our civic society will really suffer.

[00:45:35] Jon-Barrett Ingels: The power of people, the power of art, of storytelling, of education, of community action. These are all the ways we can take the history of the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans and do everything we can to stand up to racist political action, to fear mongering, to tyranny, and prevent that from ever happening again.

[00:46:04] Donald Tamaki: I think the message to Americans is that, you know, you don't lose your democracy necessarily in a sudden coup d'etat. You can lose it incrementally, bit by bit, until it's hollowed out to a point where we no longer recognize it as a democracy.

[00:46:22] Chessie Thacher: I think that the best way to deal with that kind of autocratic, repressive move to get universities to kowtow, essentially, to the administration is for all universities to come together and say, we're not going to do that. Like, that's beyond the pale. If you bend the knee to have all these metaphors, to the administration and say, I apologize, and I'll do everything you say, then you're kind of enabling this administration to take such aggressive and, I think, unprecedented legal efforts to sort of shape the speech of schools, which should be places where lots of perspectives get expressed, where people feel safe to learn, that's important, and they feel supported in questioning orthodoxies.

[00:47:12] Abdi Soltani: Then, at the base of it all, is the people. And I think that in the way that this story is going to unfold over the next few years, the ultimate residual foundation that is going to protect this set of principles and the rights of the people who are in this country is our own response as the American people. The stronger our response as the American people, the clearer the voice with which we speak, the stronger our protests, then that also emboldens and strengthens the courts to hold their ground as well. But that said, the courts are critical, and it's essential that the Trump administration follow these judicial orders.

[00:48:00] Peggy Nagae: If anything, what Minoru Yasui taught us is that one person from Hood River, Oregon, who was a Boy Scout, who was an ROTC person, one person can make a difference.

[00:48:13] Ann Burroughs: Given the difficulty and just the extraordinary injustice and the broad signs that we've seen against First Amendment principles, which are so fundamental to museums, being able to tell the truth fully and wholly, whether you're a history museum, whether you're an art museum, or whether you're a science museum. But it's been extraordinarily difficult, you know, trying to find that balance. But we're always reminded, you know, when we sort of delve into the arts, the arts tell such an unbelievably poignant story, you know, the arts can communicate in ways that nothing else can, and it can communicate the pain and the grief and the injustice. But it also communicates the extraordinary joy, you know, and if we don't have that joy, we can't build the resilience that we need in order to be able to take on the erosion of civil rights.

[00:49:03] Jon-Barrett Ingels: I want to leave you with this thought. As the Japanese Americans were given a week and then rounded up under armed guard, very few defied this order. And no one came to their aid or protested, save for a few individuals and for Quaker organizations. The general public wasn't privy to what these Japanese American men, women, and children were forced to experience.

Famed photographer Dorothea Lange captured the experience of roundup, of being transported in mass to assembly centers, and finally to the prison camps under armed force and surveillance. Most of her photographs were confiscated by the government and the public was not able to see the barbed wire or the machine guns or the armed guard towers watching over the children. We have the technology today to allow anyone to capture what is happening while it is happening and share it with the world. It is up to us as the general public, as American citizens, to pay attention, to act accordingly, and to stand up for justice and civil liberties.

We will utilize our platform at Past Forward and the Chapters program to continue to document today while examining and sharing our history in order to protect our future. Let this episode serve as an introduction to the 14 episodes of this chapter's season and listen to all of our conversations to get a better understanding of how we got to this place as a country, as a society, as humanity.

We'd like to thank our guests for this series, Teresa Watanabe, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Kirn Kim, Donald Tamaki, Peggy Nagae, Dale Minami, Ricardo D. Garcia, Abdi Soltani, Chessie Thacher, Soji Kashiwagi, Tamiko Nimura, Kathryn Bannai, and Ann Burroughs. We'd also like to thank Stephanie Takaragawa, John Matthews, Densho, the Geffen Playhouse, the ACLU, the Grateful Crane Ensemble, and the Japanese American National Museum.

Chapter's podcast was produced by Past Forward and made possible with support from Chapman University and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program, a state-funded grant project of the California State Library. For more information, visit pastforward.org, chapman.edu, and library.ca.gov.