Never Again Is Now
Jan Yoshiwara, International Liberation Reference
Person for Japanese-Heritage People
We are recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Like all immigrants, our people have been brave and adventurous. They have chosen not to go along with the system they were living in and have had a high tolerance for not knowing exactly how things were going to turn out.
During World War II, because of racism, Japanese families in the United States, Canada, and South America were incarcerated in prison camps for four years, just for being Japanese.
I’m proud of the Japanese community and Japanese RCers. We were among the first to speak out against fearmongering and the rounding up of Muslims. We are openly protesting the incarceration of migrant families seeking asylum in the United States. For example, there was a big Japanese American protest at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma (USA), this past weekend, and a Japanese-heritage RCer who helped to organize it spoke on Democracy Now [a progressive U.S. radio program].
We used to say, “Never again,” about our wartime incarceration. Now we say, “Never again is now.”
For the past ten years we have had successful United to End Racism projects at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage [a biennial pilgrimage that commemorates the over eighteen thousand people of Japanese ancestry who were imprisoned at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II]. There we teach RC to Japanese American activists and concentration camp survivors and their families.
We discharge on our significance, on closeness to our people, on challenging the invisibility of Japanese-heritage people, and on insisting that our people matter. We are good at fighting for others. We need to work on fighting for ourselves—and that’s where you can give us a hand [some help].
Olympia, Washington, USA