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The Cats of Mirikitani: A Survivor's Tale
Japanese Internment
I love to watch documentaries, but I am rarely moved to tears. The Academy Award winning documentary of 2000, "Into the Arms of Strangers" did it, and this latest one, "The Cats of Mirikitani" is another one.
I was a baby boomer, born several years after WWII. The 1950's were a time of recovery, so I was really spared the stresses of a world wide war. My brother was born in 1943. As a baby in Baltimore, when my father worked in the shipyards, he experienced the rationing of food and other essentials that we take for granted. Your parents, and certainly your grandparents, can tell you those stories, if you take the time to listen. WWII veterans are dying, and those stories may die with them.
It wasn't just the brave young men and women who went off to fight in Europe or the Pacific, the families that sacrificed at home, or the women who replaced men in traditional male jobs, like welding - there were countless other victims (and heroes), too.
Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, resulting in the forced "relocation" of over 11,000 people of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. Nearly 3/4 of those people were American citizens, some for many generations. It didn't really matter. If you looked Japanese, had a Japanese surname, or admitted to being Japanese, you were off to those prison-like camps. This was a prime example of racial fear and of course, profiling. A very large portion of our population is German. If the government had decided that people of German heritage should be interned, too, my family would have gone.
Japanese submarines were frequently seen off of the California coast. Pearl Harbor had been bombed just a few months before. What if these Japanese-Americans were spies preparing for a mainland invasion, or saboteurs? Our government's paranoia sent thousands of innocent men, women, and children to horrible camps in the middle of nowhere. Hopes, dreams, and lives were forever disrupted.
This happened to my good friend's grandmother. She was forced to leave her family farm near Bakersfield, taking only a suitcase. Like many Japanese people, my friend's grandmother was forced to sell valuable property to unscrupulous land speculators for a few dollars. There is a large shopping mall on this land now. My friend remembers that his grandmother made dried persimmons called hoshigaki, in their attic space. A few years ago, I sat in a persimmon orchard with my Japanese-American friend as we made our own hoshigaki (we took a class!).
In the heartening documentary, "The Cats of Mirikitani", filmmaker Linda Hattendorf tells how she discovered and helped save internment camp survivor and talented artist, Jimmy Mirikitani, from the streets of New York City. She tells how she found his long-lost relatives, including a sister living in Seattle and a cousin who is the poet laureate of San Francisco. She shows how a caring individual can make a difference in the remaining years of one man's life - a man damaged by the effects of war, injustice, and incarceration. The Mirikitani family was originally from Hiroshima. Jimmy Mirikitani was born in Sacramento. He was sent to Tule Lake Internment camp in Northern California. He was not a terrorist or a saboteur. He was an artist and a man with a heart of gold. He still lives and works in New York and will be 89 years old this June.
Last year, my wife and I toured Manzanar, one of the largest internment camps in California. We picked up a stone, probably not something you should do in this historic area, but we placed this stone under a Japanese maple tree planted by our Japanese exchange student's family. I can look out my window now and see it.
We were fortunate to visit the Peace Park in Hiroshima many years ago, escorted by our Japanese exchange student's family. One of our dear friends is a Hiroshima survivor. We helped her through many illnesses and she never forgets her annual gift to us of the best oranges we have ever tasted, except when we visited Hiroshima. She refused to tell us where she locally buys them, but did say they were from trees brought from Hiroshima before the war. They are growing (somewhere) in the Sierra Foothills, tended by the caring hands of a Japanese family. In return, we gave her some of our homemade hoshigaki.
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I love to watch documentaries, but I am rarely moved to tears. The Academy Award winning documentary of 2000, "Into the Arms of Strangers" did it, and this latest one, "The Cats of Mirikitani" is another one.
I was a baby boomer, born several years after WWII. The 1950's were a time of recovery, so I was really spared the stresses of a world wide war. My brother was born in 1943. As a baby in Baltimore, when my father worked in the shipyards, he experienced the rationing of food and other essentials that we take for granted. Your parents, and certainly your grandparents, can tell you those stories, if you take the time to listen. WWII veterans are dying, and those stories may die with them.
It wasn't just the brave young men and women who went off to fight in Europe or the Pacific, the families that sacrificed at home, or the women who replaced men in traditional male jobs, like welding - there were countless other victims (and heroes), too.
Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, resulting in the forced "relocation" of over 11,000 people of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. Nearly 3/4 of those people were American citizens, some for many generations. It didn't really matter. If you looked Japanese, had a Japanese surname, or admitted to being Japanese, you were off to those prison-like camps. This was a prime example of racial fear and of course, profiling. A very large portion of our population is German. If the government had decided that people of German heritage should be interned, too, my family would have gone.
Japanese submarines were frequently seen off of the California coast. Pearl Harbor had been bombed just a few months before. What if these Japanese-Americans were spies preparing for a mainland invasion, or saboteurs? Our government's paranoia sent thousands of innocent men, women, and children to horrible camps in the middle of nowhere. Hopes, dreams, and lives were forever disrupted.
This happened to my good friend's grandmother. She was forced to leave her family farm near Bakersfield, taking only a suitcase. Like many Japanese people, my friend's grandmother was forced to sell valuable property to unscrupulous land speculators for a few dollars. There is a large shopping mall on this land now. My friend remembers that his grandmother made dried persimmons called hoshigaki, in their attic space. A few years ago, I sat in a persimmon orchard with my Japanese-American friend as we made our own hoshigaki (we took a class!).
In the heartening documentary, "The Cats of Mirikitani", filmmaker Linda Hattendorf tells how she discovered and helped save internment camp survivor and talented artist, Jimmy Mirikitani, from the streets of New York City. She tells how she found his long-lost relatives, including a sister living in Seattle and a cousin who is the poet laureate of San Francisco. She shows how a caring individual can make a difference in the remaining years of one man's life - a man damaged by the effects of war, injustice, and incarceration. The Mirikitani family was originally from Hiroshima. Jimmy Mirikitani was born in Sacramento. He was sent to Tule Lake Internment camp in Northern California. He was not a terrorist or a saboteur. He was an artist and a man with a heart of gold. He still lives and works in New York and will be 89 years old this June.
Last year, my wife and I toured Manzanar, one of the largest internment camps in California. We picked up a stone, probably not something you should do in this historic area, but we placed this stone under a Japanese maple tree planted by our Japanese exchange student's family. I can look out my window now and see it.
We were fortunate to visit the Peace Park in Hiroshima many years ago, escorted by our Japanese exchange student's family. One of our dear friends is a Hiroshima survivor. We helped her through many illnesses and she never forgets her annual gift to us of the best oranges we have ever tasted, except when we visited Hiroshima. She refused to tell us where she locally buys them, but did say they were from trees brought from Hiroshima before the war. They are growing (somewhere) in the Sierra Foothills, tended by the caring hands of a Japanese family. In return, we gave her some of our homemade hoshigaki.
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Labels: art, Japanese Internment, Jimmy Mirikitani, war
1 Comments:
Thank you for sharing "The Cats of Mirikitani." It is particularly appropriate today, Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
May I recommend another film? "The Last Days," is the Academy Award-winning documentary produced by Steven Spielberg about 5 Hungarian Holocaust survivors and features the artist Alice Lok Cahana.
A survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Alice Cahana's abstract representations of her experiences are in major museums and collections around the world, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Israel and the Holocaust Museum Houston. In 2006, Alice Cahana presented a significant piece of artwork to his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. The painting, "No Names" hangs today in the Vatican museum as the only piece of Holocaust artwork in the Vatican's vast collection. Its powerful imagery of a field of numbers representing the stolen names and identities of the Nazi's victims stands at the entrance to the Sistine Chapel, perhaps the most iconic location of the Catholic Church.
Last night I had the privilege of attending a ceremony honoring local Holocaust Survivors. Several of Mrs. Cahana's paintings were on display. The evening included a very powerful piece "Through My Mother's Eyes," poetry and remembrances by Alice Lok Cahana, presented by her son Rabbi Michael Z. Cahana and daughter-in-law Cantor Ida Rae Cahana, with Yiddish art songs, accompanied by acclaimed pianist, Janet Guggenheim. Alice Lok Cahana was there and joined her family on stage to read the final poem. It was extremely moving.
That she and Jimmy Mirikitani can create paintings and write poetry shows the human spirit's ability to climb above the horrors that we inflict on each other. We should all bless the artists for sharing their vision and making us remember. If we forget, it can all happen again; and the very least we can do is to make sure it never happens again.
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