Hold fast to dreams
For if the dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when the dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

-- Langston Hughes

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Reading:

From the novel "When the Emperor was Divine" by Julie Otsuka, which tells the evacuation story of a Japanese family of four, told by the mother, son, daughter and father. From the final chapter, "Confession," by the father of the family:

Everything you have heard about me is true. I was wearing my bathrobe, my slippers, the night your men took me away. At the station they asked me questions. Talk to us, they said. The room was small and bare. It had no windows. The lights were bright. They left them on for days. What more can I tell you? My feet were cold. I was tired. I was thirsty. I was scared. So I did what I had to do. I talked.

All right, I said. I admit it. I lied. You were right. You were always right. It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide. I sent my peas and potatoes to market full of arsenic. I planted sticks of dynamite alongside your railroads. I set your oil wells on fire. I scattered mines across the entrance of your harbors. I spied on your airfields. I spied on your naval yards. I spied on your neighbors. I spied on you. ... I crept into your house while you were away and sullied your wife. ... I smothered your first born son -- he did not struggle. I stole your last bag of sugar. I took a swig from your best bottle of brandy. I pulled out the nails from your white picket fence and sold them to the enemy to melt down and make into bullets. ... I radioed to his submarines the location of your troop ships. I leaned out my second-story window and signaled to his aviators with my red paper lantern. Come on over! I left my lights on during the blackout. I went out in the yard and tossed a few flares just to make sure he knew where to find you. Drop the bomb right here, right here where I'm standing! I cut arrow shaped swaths through my tomato fields to guide him to the target ...

So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. Search my office. Ransack my house. Cancel my insurance. Auction off my business. Hand over my lease. Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. ... I'll sign on the dotted line.

And if they ask you someday what it was I most wanted to say, please tell them, if you would, it was this:
I'm Sorry.
There, that's it. I've said it. Now can I go?

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Sermon:

I'm sure many of you read in the New York Times last June that the Justice Department's inspector general had found the roundup of hundreds of illegal immigrants to be "plagued with significant problems." It was reported that 762 immigrants were arrested; held in jail for weeks or months; prevented from obtaining legal counsel; some physically abused; each restricted to one phone call per week; and when they left their cells, were put in "handcuffs, leg irons and heavy chains." The program was shrouded in a policy of secrecy. Most of the immigrants were deported.

One Nadim Hamoui, a Syrian-born woman, said she and her family were jailed for months "because the government was trying to deport them." "This is my home," she cried. "I've lived here 11 years and I will not be turned away because I am an Arab Muslim."

Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts likened the treatment of Arab detainees to the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. The act and its precedents remain a subject of controversy, according to law Professor Frank Wu, who has written on this subject in a recent journal of the American Bar Association.

The World War II action imprisoned 110,000 Japanese -- men, women and children -- in 10 concentration camps. About two-thirds were American citizens. There were no criminal charges, no trials, and no findings of guilt. Three men legally challenged several aspects of the evacuation. In each case, the courts supported the government.

The action itself was authorized by Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt. It authorized Secretary of War Henry Stimson to designate certain areas as "military areas" and to "exclude any and all persons" from them. Roosevelt is reported to have said to Stimson: "Be reasonable." Congress quickly followed with legislation ratifying the order, with little debate. There was no need for debate, for public opinion was nearly unanimous in urging removal of all Japanese from the three states along the West Coast. Every newspaper in California, and national columnists like Walter Lippman and Westbrook Pegler, kept up an almost daily drumbeat for removal.

Nearly everyone in public life supported removal for the safety of the country. Attorney General Earl Warren expressed his fears with these words: "To assume the enemy has not planned fifth column activities ... is simply to live in a fool's paradise ... because we have had no sabotage and no fifth column activities ... since the beginning of the war, (does not mean) none have been planned. I take the view that this is the most ominous sign. It convinces me that we are to get the fifth column activities ... timed just like Pearl Harbor." Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi called it a "race war" and said that "it is of vital importance to get rid of them now whether in Hawaii or the mainland." Members of a House committee who invited Mike Masaoka, a Nisei leader, to testify were surprised that Mike spoke English without accent, had never visited Japan, spoke no Japanese, was a Mormon, had never attended Japanese school and could not read or write Japanese. He asked Congress not to single out the Japanese community for removal. But it was a time when racism and segregation were openly the rule of the land.

Sen. Sheridan Downey and Rep. H. "Jerry" Voorhis from California and Rep. John M. Coffee of Washington were among the few who questioned the need for action. The Quakers were conspicuous in their support of the Japanese-Americans.

The process of evacuation began in February and March 1942. Each state was divided into areas, each estimated to contain about 1,000 Japanese. Notices were posted in public places like the post office. Each family was to register, be assigned a number and an approximate date of evacuation. Actually, we were given a week. On Terminal Island, about 300 families were given two days -- to leave with only what one could carry. In a few weeks, 110,000 people would be securely placed by the Army in 15 "assembly centers."

Here I will tell a little of my recollections of my own life as an immigrant.

My mother and I reached the port of San Pedro, Calif., in February 1932, after a long, rough sea journey on the Taiyo Maru, a ship built in Germany and given as reparations to Japan after World War I. The ship had a well-deserved reputation for being top-heavy. I spent most of the trip being seasick, flat on my back in the bunk bed. My mother sang songs and told me stories. I remember the relief I felt when we docked in San Francisco. The ship was not moving, and I knew we had only one more day on the sea.

We were interned in San Pedro for several days in what I remember as a large, sunny room, and a kindly woman who, I presumed, worked for the immigration office shopped for us and brought back rice crackers and wafers. What my mother and others wanted was sushi, but the best they could do was to describe it as "rice cakes." To this day, eating sugar wafers brings back memories of those first few days in America.

For the next six or seven years, our family lived on Terminal Island, a community of about 500 Japanese families across a shipping channel from San Pedro on Los Angeles Harbor. It was a company town. Its main industry was commercial fishing and canning. Everyone lived in connected row houses. Fishing trips kept fathers away for several days at a time, and mothers responded to the cannery whistles day or night to pack tuna, mackerel and sardines.

Occasionally, immigration officials who were searching for illegal immigrants visited families unannounced, and they came night or day. I can remember the fear that gripped the neighborhood until they left. Deportation was our greatest fear.

From time to time, our family dressed up and visited an uptown shop that sold gift items from the East. There my father would engage the owner in mysterious conversation in the back room. Then we would leave. Many years later, it became clear to me that my father was making payments for a partnership share in an import-export business -- making him a "treaty trader." Treaty traders were permitted to bring wives and children to live in this country. It was a legal end-run around the Immigration Act of 1924, which denied admission of any alien "ineligible for citizenship." Those words were another way of saying Japanese and Chinese, for a U.S. District Court in Hawaii in 1914 had denied a petition for naturalization to Takao Oyama on the grounds that the Federal Statutes of 1875 restricted naturalization only to "free white persons and ... African aliens and descendants."

"Ineligible for citizenship" became a towering landmark barrier of exclusion. Western states used the clause in many pieces of legislation to exclude Orientals from owning or leasing land, engaging in commercial fishing, and a host of other activities that required licenses, including engineering and architecture. It weakened and undermined efforts to improve our lives.

In the late '30s, our family moved to Los Angeles, my father becoming manager of a large Chinese catering restaurant owned by his cousin. A subscription to the daily Los Angeles Times brought news of increasing tension in the U.S.-Japan relationship and heightened my own personal concerns about our status as aliens. Indeed, in early 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, requiring all aliens 14 years and older to register annually and to be fingerprinted. In 1940, I had become 14.

For the Japanese community, Dec. 7, 1941, was a day of horror, fear, chaos, anger and confusion. The FBI began rounding up older men, mostly alien Isseis, that night and the following morning. The men were given little or no time to say goodbye. No reasons were given. Nor were they told where they were going. My uncle -- UC Berkeley Class of '32 and an extroverted, happy-go-lucky guy -- found a friend's family in tears because the father had been taken away the night before. He assured them it must be a mistake and promptly went to the FBI office, where he too was invited to stay. He spent the duration in camps for those high-suspect men, helping as an interpreter. On Dec. 8, a curfew was imposed on all Japanese, restricting movement to no more than 5 miles and none after 8 p.m.

Implementation of EO 9066 began in early March 1942. Notices were posted in public places. The first orders were to vacate certain specific areas. Later notices directed us to report for registration and be assigned a family number. Ours was 12899. We were given one week's notice to leave our homes and to report to certain locations, where buses would take us to assembly centers. I kept track of vacated areas on a map, watching the noose tighten. We were taken to our assembly center, where we were inspected for contraband articles and weapons. Our center was the Santa Anita racetrack, where more than 18,000 would be housed in barracks and stables. We were unlucky. Ours was a stable unit with asphalt floors, five cots and blankets, nothing else. Partitions separating stable units did not reach up to the roofs. There was no privacy. Conversations and eavesdropping could be carried on over several units, and mosquitoes outnumbered us by at least 10 to one.

Santa Anita turned out to be a temporary way station. We entered in May and left in September. We departed in one of the daily trains that left for new "relocation centers" being built in areas of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona, California and Arkansas. Our family was sent to Rohwer Relocation Center, Ark., located alongside the tracks of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in the Mississippi River floodplain.

I spent nearly two years in camp -- going to school, mainly -- and graduated from high school in January 1944. For the young, camp life was not filled with hardship. Parental discipline loosened. We had plenty of time to hang out, had meals together and had a fairly busy social life. All planned to attend college, but the one thing we didn't have was money. I was paid at the rate of $12 a month for being part of a tree logging crew. If camp life was sometimes "a ball" for the young, it was another matter for the parents. They had to provide for the future of their families.

In May 1944, my father and I left Rohwer. We were recruited to work in a sandwich shop-restaurant in Waterbury, Conn. The government gave us train tickets, $25 or $50 apiece and a hearty goodbye. They had no interest in turning relocation centers into permanent welfare centers. At the restaurant, which was owned by a Japanese, there were already eight or 10 other evacuees from camp, including three high school valedictorians. The pay of $100 a month with room and board enabled me to save enough for a full year at the University of Connecticut, to which I was directed by a Quaker agency organized to place Japanese students in colleges. For thousands of us, the Quaker agency was a life- altering service.

As I entered UConn in January 1945, all U.S.-Japan trade treaties having been abrogated, I was no longer a "treaty trader." I was an illegal immigrant subject to deportation. But little by little, Congress began to correct discriminatory wrongs: Wives and minor children of treaty traders were permitted to stay; California's alien land law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; the Oriental exclusion act was repealed by the 1952 immigration act; and President Lyndon Johnson signed a 1965 immigration act that raised quotas without regard to race, creed or nationality.

Finally, in 1987, Congress, by legislation, acknowledged the injustice of the Japanese evacuation; apologized for the act; and ordered payments of $20,000 for each surviving evacuee. The act was opposed by the Justice Department but was not vetoed by President Ronald Reagan. Instead, he included no payment amounts in his budget. President George H.W. Bush wrote the letter of apology to each of us, but he too failed to budget for the payments. Payments were finally made in 1991 off-line, as politicians say, thanks to the influence of members of Congress like Rep. Norman Mineta of California and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii.

Can such an event happen again in this country? Professor Wu points out that the courts never repudiated their actions in the three cases that challenged the evacuation. Upon re- examination, he has written that the courts "vacated on obscure legal grounds." The executive order was not declared unconstitutional. Today, as it was then, the courts defer to the executive branch on matters concerning national security. If my memory is correct, a poll taken in California a couple of years ago found that more than 40 percent accepted the idea of evacuation as policy.

Security and power trump civil liberties and reason, unless informed citizens stand up and speak out for the rights of others, especially those who look like the enemy.

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Closing Words:

Sorrow will one day turn to joy. All that breaks the heart and oppresses the soul will one day give place to peace and understanding and everyone will be free.
-- Paul Robeson

The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.

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