Jim Nelson
A Taste Of Triple A

I was sent a copy of your email, which documented your trip to Manzanar. I was touched by the direct and honest style in which you convey your thoughts, and more so by the fact that this visit had such an impact on an unintended visitor.

My wife and I will be going there, for our first visit, as part of a volunteer group to clean-up the ground, such as they are(?). I’m looking forward to seeing what you had the opportunity to see, but I feel that the lack of other people at the site probably compounded the sense of isolation and contributed to the experience.

A friend, Cory Shiozaki is completing work on a documentary, "From Barbed Wire To Barbed hooks", about the people that risked punishment by sneaking out of camp to go fishing in the local mountain streams.

I’m very happy that you are such a prolific writer and that you shared the experience with your network of friends and readers, many of whom I’m sure had no idea of this episode of our U.S. history.

Thank you very much,
Robert Horsting
Producer/Co-Director- CITIZEN TANOUYE
http://www.citizentanouye.com

A friend kindly sent me your article on Manzanar. April 22 is my wife’s birthday, but she was born after camp (in 1947). We’re both serious snow skiers who have skied the slush and ice and the cold winds of June at Monmouth.

I’m a retired high school social studies teacher who was interned in Poston. My best and dearest friends are Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston ("Farewell to Manzanar"). I continue to teach about the Japanese American experience to students around the Monterey Bay area whenever invited.

I would like your permission to reprint the article. I edit a small local Watsonville-Santa Cruz Japanese American Citizens League chapter monthly newsletter .

You can check our website http://www.watsonvillesantacruzjacl.org for this past year’s newsletters. The newsletters are amateurish but we try.

Onward!
Mas Hashimoto

A friend, Jim Nelson, shared your recent article on Manzanar. I was an internee in Manzanar during WWII. My mother and father were second generation citizens of Japanese ancestry who were interned in Manzanar along with 10,000 other Japanese Americans…….Manzanar was one of 10 "relocation centers" in the United States with a total population of !00,000 internees.

Our friends and family lost everything during this dark period in U.S. history which many Americans are unaware. I appreciated reading your article and am sharing it with friends who were also uprooted and lost several years from their lives.

Thank you for your article.

Kiku Arima

Ken Burns in his highly acclaimed WWII documentary is quoted that on interviewing those in Middle America, 90% had no clue that these camps existed.
Ironically, the ten camps were located in some of the most desolate corners of Mid-America. I plead with you not only to continue to inform Americans but to urge them to visit this country’s shame. Some of the sites have been funded for the Dept. of Parks and Rec. to develop them into public museums like Manzanar.

I testified before the Congressional Committee on the Judiciary in Washington D.C. in 1984 for redress and reparations. In the Congressional Record, there is an entry by a Congressman Kindness (!) who in his eight line statement directed at me mentions the phrase "for your "protection" four times to justify our forced removal . Then, Congressman, why not the removal of German and Italian Americans?

I add to your observation of the indignity of the men’s latrine, that the women’s latrine was constructed in a spacious area with three rows of toilets with no partitions, two rows facing each other. If I might be so indelicate, I was constipated for the whole duration of the incarceration.

May I recommend two books, one "Years of Infamy" by Michi Weglyn, meticulously documented, the Bible for anyone researching this unconscionable
injustice. The second, if I may, "Our Side of the Fence", now in its third printing, an anthology of the experiences and insights as told by eleven former detainees, myself included. We were all U.S. citizens, who were children and adolescents growing up within barbed wire enclosed compounds. We now are all in our late 70’s and 80’s. We are an endangered species. The stories are told as we lived the experience, not by historians and academia.

Try Amazon or order directly to Natl. Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco: njahs@njahs.org

Warm wishes,

Kiku Funabiki