Professor Yamashita: Bringing Tsuru for Solidarity to Ithaca by Katelyn Monaco

“TSURU means crane in Japanese, and symbolizes peace, compassion, hope and healing. In the traditional Japanese folk art of paper folding (origami), it is a popular, easy-to-learn figure that children and adults of all abilities can create. The cranes we fold today are expressions of SOLIDARITY with children, families and communities that are under attack.” -- Tsuru for Solidarity

The US has a history of separating families and incarcerating marginalized groups. From the violent separation of families during slavery, forced assimilation in Native American boarding schools, mass deportation of Mexican and Mexican Americans in Operation “Wetback”, Japanese American World War II incarceration, and the current incarceration camps at the Southern border, the racialized criminalization of communities is not new.

Tsuru for Solidarity is “a nonviolent, direct action project of Japanese American social justice advocates working to end detention sites and support front-line immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies.” Their goals are to:

• educate, advocate, and protest to close all U.S. concentration camps• build solidarity with other communities that have experienced forced removal, detention, deportation and separation of

families• coordinate intergenerational, cross-community healing circles addressing the trauma of our shared histories.

On June 22nd, 2019, Tsuru for Solidarity members travelled across the country to protest the detention of asylum- seeking children at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. This site was a previous jail site for Native Americans during the 1860s and 70s, and was also a concentration camp for 700 Japanese Americans during World War II. There were members from Black Lives Matter, Indigenous and migrant communities, and Japanese Americans sharing their stories of resistance and speaking out against the incarceration of immigrants. Lines of cranes were strung together as members of Tsuru for Solidarity shared their stories. Although military personnel attempted to interrupt their ceremonies and events, Japanese American incarceration survivors continued to speak about their mission. Dr. Satsuki Ina said, “We’ve been removed too many times.”

Professor Wendi Yamashita grew up in California and came to IC in the fall of 2018. She received her PhD in Gender Studies and her MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA. Her research examines Japanese American memories of World War II incarceration in relation to settler colonialism and the prison industrial complex. By analyzing how racial and gendered punishments are played out through the US incarceration system, she interrogates how the racialization of Asian Americans is formed in relation to other groups of color as a means of striving for meaningful cross-racial coalition building.

Wendi also works with the Manzanar Committee, which is a grassroots organization in Los Angeles. She became involved with the organization during her PhD research, when she called to ask for an interview and says that being part of the Manzanar Committee has been one of the “biggest and greatest things.” She serves as Co-Director of their program Katari: Keeping Japanese American Stories Alive, which provides college-age youth with the opportunity to learn about Japanese American history and its preservation at the Manzanar National Historic Site. She has said that “teaching and having conversations about what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II is important to understanding, not only how the current political climate came to be, but also how we can resist and support one another. Stories and storytelling are a form of resistance.”

Her involvement with Tsuru for Solidarity began after the co-chair of the Manzanar Committee suggested that the Manzanar Committee attend a tsuru workshop. This summer she attended one of those workshops hosted by Nikkei Progressives. Although “distance separates [Wendi] from community organizing since [my] community is so far away from me, folding cranes helps [her] feel like [she] can still help in a small way.” She will be attending their Washington D.C. protest in the spring of 2020

Her interest in Asian American advocacy stems from her own personal history and her own family being incarcerated during World War II. “Family is always something that sustains my work,” she explained. She says that her connection to teaching and education also pushes her to continue learning about the movement. Her family would talk about their experiences in the incarceration camps, but it was always briefly, suddenly, and never more than a few sentences. Her grandparents have very different histories because one was incarcerated in San Anita but left incarceration to farm sugar beets in Colorado while her other grandfather answered “No/No” to the War Relocation Authority’s loyalty questionnaire. [The Densho Encyclopedia states that the loyalty questionnaire was a “bureaucratic means of assessing the loyalty of Nikkei in the WRA concentration camps. Responses to this questionnaire were meant to aid the War Department in recruiting Nisei into an all- Nisei combat unit and to assist the War Relocation Authority in authorizing others for relocation outside of the camps.]

She had to piece together what happened over many years on her own, so when she started her MA project on her family’s experience it wasn’t until she did formal interviews that there was a shift in her relationship with her family. “My grandma talks about it a lot more, about our family history because she knows that I really value it in a way that she didn’t know I did before,” Wendi said. During a trip to Tule Lake, where her grandparents were incarcerated, they talked about a lot of stories. Her grandfather has dementia and although a lot of his stories are often repetitive, “he remembered the landscape and he knew what the mountains were called. It was so interesting to see how someone whose memory was failing at times could recognize and name this landscape.”

Even now, while Wendi is creating curriculum for her classes at IC, she is finding out parts of her family history that she didn’t know about. She is very close to her Nisei relatives [second-generation Japanese Americans], and when she questioned her mother on why she had never met her grandfather's brother, she assumed that he was a Kibei Nisei (someone who was born in America and educated in Japan). “It was many years later when I was doing personal research on my family that I realized he renunciated [his American citizenship because of the loyalty questionnaire] and went to Japan.” She found his story looking at a lesson plan created by the California State University Japanese American History Digitization Project. Her dream is to pull the documents that relate to her family from the WRA records and find the written evidence of her family’s experiences.

By: Katelyn Monaco