35th Annual San Jose Day of Remembrance: Stories from the Past, Lessons for Today.

The 2015 San Jose Day of Remembrance that will take place on February 15, 2015, commemorates the signing of Executive Order 9066, which occurred on February 19, 1942. This executive order led to the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during WW II.The theme for the 35th San Jose Day of Remembrance event is “Stories from the Past,  Lessons for Today.” During the program, personal stories about  the Japanese American incarceration will be told by descendants of those whose lives were deeply affected by Executive Order 9066.  Kent Carson, a volunteer docent with the Japanese American Museum of San Jose (JAMsj), will be one of our  speakers. He will recount the story of his grandfather, Terry Terakawa, who is also an active volunteer and a former board member of JAMsj.Recently, Carson transcribed his grandfather's story about what happened to his family after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  After the attack, prominent members of the Japanese American community were immediately rounded up without due process and taken away.   This is Terakawa’s story as told to Carson:

After Pearl Harbor, some FBI agents knocked on my door. We answered it, and they started going through our house, looking for something. They didn't tell us why they were there or what they were looking for. I asked them what they were looking for, but they just ignored me because I was just a young kid. Of course, they were probably looking for weapons or some kind of evidence that showed any kind of collaboration with the Japanese.

They asked us where Dad was. He was a very high-ranking member of the Buddhist Church in Walnut Grove, California, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and they were obviously very suspicious of him and his connections to the Japanese American community.

He was in the hospital at that time. He had some kind of illness and had to be put into a big iron lung. I found out that they went to his hospital room, opened the iron lung machine, and tried to take him outside. The hospital administrators and doctors were so angry at these agents that they called up the agents' superiors and reported what was happening. They were ordered to put Dad back into his hospital room. They said that they would wait until he was healthy enough to come back home, and then they would come see him.

Once he was out of the hospital, they came over to our house and arrested my father, and then took him away to the police station in our town, without even asking him any questions. They allowed my family to come down to see him one last time before they took him away to jail. At the station, officers walked him outside towards the transport bus. As they were walking away, my Mom handed me a picture of our family and told me to give it to my father to keep while he was in jail. I ran up to my father, but before I could give him the picture,  I remember getting hit in the head by one of the officers and falling to the ground. Sadly, I wasn't able to give him our family picture.

That was the last time I saw him for a long time, probably up to nine months or almost a year. I didn't know where they took him, and I'm not sure they even told my Mom or anyone else in my family. We were living in Salt Lake City at the time, which even then had a very strong Mormon community. Fortunately for us, we were surrounded by many supportive people within that community who reached out  and helped us. When my father was finally released and came back home to us, many people and community leaders in the area continued to support our family, especially my father. They said that if we needed anything or had any problems, they would help us out.

Carson reflected on his conversation with his grandfather. “Hearing my grandfather’s stories has helped inspire me. It’s an important part of history. It was a time when a community was torn apart. We can take lessons from that now and apply them to building and nourishing our own communities today. "The San Jose Day of Remembrance will take place on Sunday, February 15, 2015, from 5:30 p.m. -7:30 p.m., at the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin,  located at 640 North Fifth Street in San Jose. Each year, attendees gather to remember the great civil liberties tragedy from over seventy years ago and each one of us reflects on what that event means to us today.For more information, visit www.sjnoc.org.

34th Annual San Jose Day of Remembrance: Joe Yasutake

The 2014 San Jose Day of Remembrance will be held on February 16, 2014. This year’s event features speakers: Dale Minami, the lead attorney on the legal team that overturned the conviction against Fred Korematsu, who defied the World War II Japanese American mass incarceration order which led to the controversial United States Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. United States; Congressman Mike Honda, and JAMsj former president and current board member, Joe Yasutake.34th Annual San Jose Day of Remembrance Featured Speaker: Joe YasutakeBy Will KakuJoe Yasutake has been one of the key contributors in shaping the vision of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose (JAMsj) and San Jose Japantown. Although Joe and his family were incarcerated in Japanese American internment camps during WWII, only relatively recently has Joe became involved in telling his story, as well as the stories of other Japanese Americans.“I don’t ever remember talking about the camps,” Joe recalled. “It never came up. When I left camp and returned to school, I didn’t interact with the other Japanese American students who tried to recruit me into their Nisei clubs. Now looking back on it, I think subconsciously I was in denial.”It wasn’t until Joe moved to San Jose did he revisit his past. Ken Iwagaki, a JAMsj founder, asked Joe if he could speak to a high school class about his internment experience. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Joe recalled. “I never thought about it so I had to do a quick study.  It was during that time I really got interested.”Joe has a special story to tell since his father, Jack Yasutake, was a first-generation Japanese immigrant (Issei) who served as an interpreter for the U.S. government’s immigration department at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jack was taken into custody immediately after the attack. “He must have been one of the first Issei men who were picked up,” Joe stated. “Through the Freedom of Information Act, we obtained a file that is about a foot thick. It was clear that the government had been tracking him since about 1936.” Joe was 9 years old when the FBI came to imprison his father, and he clearly remembers that day. “It was a Sunday, and we (the children) had just come back home from church while my mother had stayed back to do something. This could not have been more than a few hours after Pearl Harbor. Four large men came to our door, and we told the FBI men that my father was at a poetry reading event. Two men left to go there, and the other two searched our house. My mother then came home and was alarmed. She started to speak Japanese, and they kept yelling at her, ‘Speak English. Don’t speak Japanese!’”The visit by the FBI was a very frightening experience for young Joe. “It was very traumatic,” Joe remembered. “We used to have a great big console radio, and they took that away because it had a short-wave band on it. I remember that because all of a sudden I lost my communication with the Lone Ranger, Jack Armstrong, and all of those people.”Joe’s father was taken into custody at the poetry reading event. Ironically, he was detained in a cell in the same immigration building where he used to work. His coworkers tried to help him. “In fact, my name Joseph came from one of my dad’s colleagues. They really stuck up for him from the very beginning. They would let my mother know exactly what was going on almost on a daily basis. We saw the letters that they wrote on my father’s behalf to try to get him out.”Jack Yasutake was eventually incarcerated in various Department of Justice camps. Because of his English communication skills, he would become the spokesman for the other inmates at all of the camps. Ironically, he also wrote letters for the illiterate camp guards to their families.Joe, his mother, and his three older siblings were also incarcerated in the Puyallup Assembly Center in western Washington and in the Minidoka War Relocation Authority camp in Idaho. Since their father was imprisoned separately in higher-security camps, communication with him was difficult. Joe recalled, “We used to get letters that were about three paragraphs long, and everything was blacked out. You couldn’t see anything but the signature of the sender. There was definitely heavy censorship going on.”While Joe was in the Minidoka camp, his older siblings engaged in many serious discussions about their family’s future. Joe overheard some of their secretive discussions when they thought he was sleeping. Joe’s oldest brother and sister planned to leave the camp to attend school near Cincinnati, Ohio, while his other brother joined the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe. Young Joe heard that his older brother decided to join the U.S. Army, thinking that his action would help gain their father’s release. “Unfortunately and fortunately, he was wounded in battle,” Joe remarked. “He was wounded a week or two before the famous ‘Lost Battalion’ battle, but he was in the hospital. His replacement and most of his unit were killed.”Joe and his mother were finally able to reunite with their father when they transferred to the Crystal City Department of Justice camp in Texas. Towards the end of the war, Joe and his parents were released. They moved to Chicago, where Jack would eventually become the executive director of the Chicago Resettlers Committee, an agency that assisted former Japanese American internees to restart their lives.Although Joe didn’t feel the need to talk about his wartime experience in earlier years, now he feels compelled to tell his story. “We really need to keep aware of this because of the state of our country,” Joe said. “There are things that are going on today that are just as relevant as seventy years ago. It is very important that people do not forget what happened.”---------------------------------------------------------------Joe Yasutake has been a past president of JAMsj and is currently serving as a board member. Previously, he held several leadership positions within San Jose Japantown, including the first president of the Japantown Community Congress (JCCsj) and chair of the Council of Ministries at Wesley United Methodist Church. Additionally, he has spearheaded the development of many historical landmarks seen throughout Japantown. In his professional life, , Joe earned a Ph.D in Industrial Psychology from Ohio State University and spent most of his professional career as a psychologist and manager for the U.S. Air Force. Joe finished up his career working on a joint Japan-U.S. research program on reducing human errors in electric and nuclear power plant operations.The San Jose Day of Remembrance event will be held on Sunday, February 16, 2014 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin, located at 640 N. Fifth Street, San Jose, California 95112 . For more information about the San Jose Day of Remembrance, visit www.sjnoc.org