Fostering Understanding in Our Community
Asian-Pacific Islander Prejudice: Then & Now

Cornel Morton:

Good evening. My name is Cornel Morton and I'm honored to serve as president of the Diversity Coalition San Luis Obispo County. Let me welcome you to this program tonight. A continuation of a series that we have been doing over the past several weeks. This program is not a part of the four-part series, but rather an important and timely program, especially since we wanted to talk about issues that are important to our nation, issues that are important to our county. I want to also recognize our board of directors and thank you on their behalf for the participation tonight. We're looking forward to another informative and inspiring program where we have an opportunity to learn more about the diversity of experiences in our county and our nation. Many of you are already familiar with the history of the Diversity Coalition San Luis Obispo County.

            Very, very briefly, the coalition grew out of citizen reaction and citizen activism. Back in March of 2011, a cross burning occurred and a Black family was victimized by that cross burning in their front yard. A number of people came together to support them. The individuals responsible for that cross burning were actually charged. They were found guilty and actually imprisoned. It was characterized, rightfully so, as a hate crime.

            The number of people who are participating tonight is very impressive. We are so happy that all of you have joined us. The coalition by the way, is a collaborative in so many ways. We work in cooperation with local schools, we offer programs like the one tonight. And we are always interested in your feedback, always interested in looking for new opportunities to collaborate in the name of social justice, diversity and equity in our county. You might find more information on our website, diversityslo.org, and there you'll locate upcoming programs and information that will be helpful, I hope, as you move forward with us.

            I also want to thank my fellow board members. They are responsible for organizing and presenting tonight's program. Our panelists will be introduced very shortly. I want to close my very brief comments by again encouraging you to stay engaged, to stay involved and to stay, we hope, active in the community in the name of equity, social justice, et cetera. Kathy Minck is our education chair and Kathy's going to share some information with you about upcoming programs and a few other things that you might need to and want to know about. So I'll turn it over to Kathy. Kathy?

Kathy Minck:

Thank you, Cornel. I'm just going to take a few minutes to briefly update all of you on what the education committee has been working on. As you know, education has had to be completely re-imagined because of COVID. The teachers and the principals are facing many new challenges because of that. And the teachers are not able to do the same units as they have in past years when we've brought speakers to them to enhance their units. But the districts do have Zoom capability so we will be able to bring a few of our speakers to the schools still, using that format.

            What we've planned so far is in February, our Holocaust survivor, Rita Lurie, will be presented once again, and this time via Zoom, to the Lucia Mar eighth graders. Then in March, those same eighth graders will continue their Holocaust unit with a speaker that we brought last year, a [inaudible 00:04:32] who was a member of the Dutch resistance during World War II. She and her mother hid a Jewish girl in their home at great risk to themselves. So she'll be enhancing that unit as well.

            As for the San Louis coastal school district. We've gotten a request for tonight's Japanese internment speaker. So I'll be talking to Mr. Furuta about that from Morro Bay High school. Also, a request for Fanshen Cox to supplement a unit on racial equity. And I'll be setting that in play. As for the adults in our community and their education, we call it fostering understanding in our community, we have tonight's program, of course. We've planned for our upcoming two meetings. So please get your calendar out and Mark November 18th, we'll be bringing a Chumash, elder and storyteller to the community via Zoom. January 6th, the title of our program will be Promoting Diversity Through the Arts. We'll have a musician, an artist, and Fanshen Cox, representing the film industry speaking to us about that.

            So without further ado, I'd like to get on with our program tonight. Tonight's speakers are Lisa Kawamura and her uncle Ben Furuta. Lisa Kamakura, has a master's degree in speech and communication studies from San Francisco State University. She has been a lecture in the communication studies department here at Cal Poly for 23 years. She's an active member of the California faculty association, and co-chairs the CFA's Asian Pacific Islander caucus, and is the vice chair of Cal Poly's, Asian Pacific Islander Desi American Faculty and Staff Association. Last year, Lisa became involved with Tsuru for Solidarity, a racial justice group that advocates against the illegal imprisonment of immigrants, such important work. She facilitates healing circles for trauma survivors of the Japanese American incarceration.

            Ben Furuta, her uncle was born in Oakland, California. After Pearl Harbor he and his family were sent to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona in May of 1942, where they were held for about one and a half years. Later upon being released he graduated from the air force Academy in 1960. He was the first Japanese American to graduate from that Academy. He served as a pilot for four years, and then finally he returned to California where he was a high school science teacher for 34 years. He retired in 2000 and now he volunteers as a docent at the Japanese American National Museum in LA. Please join me in a warm welcome to Lisa and Ben. Thank you for being here.

Ben Furuta:

Thank you.

Lisa Kawamura:

Thank Kathy. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. We're going to start with a short video,

Video:

Walking to work, older man walking towards my direction yelled, "Chinese disease.", and suddenly stepped near me and spat at me, getting my coat, scarf, and face. A lot of disgusting saliva.

            I was walking in the park when some kids from my school started spitting on me, because they said it was the only way to clean me of COVID-19. They started shoving me and spit some more, and left.

            Some guys from my high school followed me home in their car. They honked very loudly and pulled up next to me. When I looked up, they threw things at me from their car, pretend to cough on me and said, "Ching Chong, you have Chinese virus." Then they drove away rolling up their windows.

            Colleague of four years was a bit of a bully yells at me, "Hey, this is your fault. It's your people that brought this over." Followed by demeaning laughter.

            My kids were at the park with their dad who's white, an older white man pushed my seven year old daughter off her bike and yelled at my husband to take your hybrid kids home because they're making everyone sick.

            A non-white girl and her grandmother were chanting, born in the USA while we were all leaving the store. As they're looking at us, the girl says she's "Afraid of the Chinese because they have a disease." To which her grandmother says that we, "Should all go back to China." When we parted ways to go to our own cars, the little girl was yelling, "Ching Chong, Chinaman." All the way to her car away.

            A white man assaulted me by throwing his drink in my face and shouting things like, "They should all be banned and they're all disgusting."

            I was shouted and harassed by the cashier, workers, as well as the customers at the store to get out of the store. "You Chinese bring the virus here and you are asking people to keep social distinct guidelines."

            A current graduate student posted "There's a special place in the hell for F'ing Chinese in Archaic culture. Trumps description of COVID-19 as the Chinese virus is most accurately thing he's ever said. I wish it had wiped the whole country off the planet."

            Group of people talking they saw me. I was wearing a mask. One told everybody to "Shut up. There's one." They all looked at me moved away made sure I didn't follow them.

            I posted from my dad, a 71 year old Korean adoptee. Yesterday he was chased out of a rural convenience store after asking to use the restroom while traveling along I-5 through California.

Lisa Kawamura:

Good evening, everybody. My name is Lisa Kawamura, and I want to thank the Diversity Coalition for inviting my uncle and I here this evening to speak to you about the prejudice that Asian Americans, specifically Japanese Americans have faced ever since they here back in the late 1800s. It is my pleasure to be speaking with my uncle. This is one of the first times we've ever had the opportunity to present together. Even though both of us have been studying this for a lot of years. I'm going to go ahead and screen share again.

            This is a little bit about who we are. So our presentation this evening is called Asian Pacific Islander Prejudice: Then and Now. We've already been introduced by Cathy. So I don't think I need to spend much more time on that and we'll just get right into it. Anti-discrimination in the United States has been around ever since Asians made it here in the mid 1800s. This year when we started to see all of the different hate crimes against Asian-Americans a colleague of mine over at San Francisco state university, Dr. Russell Jeung, started to study or catalog all the different types of hate crimes that were starting to occur with different folks of Asian descent.

            So as the co-chair of the Asian Pacific Islander caucus, we approached Dr. Jeung to make a video, which you saw the first opening of in the first couple minutes. It was entitled Combating Anti-Asian American Pacific Islander Hate in the Age of COVID-19. If you're an Andrea interested in watching it, here's the link here, www.calfac.org/pod/combating-aapi-hate-age-covid-19. I'll bring that up later too. So you can write it down again. Or if you just Google California Faculty Association, anti AAPI hate you'll find it.

            So we decided to take Dr. Jeung's information and put it into a video that could be used in schools and for different groups like this one to educate people about the types of discrimination that were happening in the AAPI community. I think that it's really interesting because as you listen to these, you may be surprised to know that these have been chronicled this year in 2020. These are not from 1940, these are not from the early 1900s. They were from March 19th until August, 2020. That's kind of amazing to me that in this day and age people are still so afraid of different races. So some of the information that Dr. Jeung found was that seven out of 10 incidents involve verbal harassment. 22% of the incidents were shunning. So people not allowing Asian's in places, or closing their doors, or not wanting to be around Asian folks.

            Physical assaults were 9% of the incidents. There were potential civil rights violations comprised of 8% of the incident. So those might've been things like the spitting and, and things like that. Some of the trends in discrimination were that 38% took place in businesses. 20% took place in public streets. So that's just like kids walking home, or like the woman who talked about her husband taking her kid to the park, right? 11% of those were done in public parks. We found that Chinese were the most targeted ethnic group, but 60% of the respondents were non-Chinese. So this tells us a little bit about the kind of discrimination that's happening and who it's happening to. That many, just look at us and think we're all the same and that we all must be infected. We all must be from China or have some connection there. Because even though the words were against Chinese folks, 60% of the respondents were non-Chinese. So 60% of the people experienced these kinds of hate crimes were not Chinese.

            We also found that 14% were young under 20 years old and 7.5% were elderly. Which is kind of interesting to me yelling at somebody who is really old or really young thinking that they are the reason why we're in the middle of a pandemic. Some Of the resources that I have for you, if you would like to see the video, the whole video, it's really short. It's only 23 minutes long, and you've already watched the first two minutes. But it is found at the second bullet here, calfact.org. The report of Asian anti-aging discrimination and more information. So if you want to see the updates on the kind of information that Dr. Jeung is acquiring. If you know of anybody or witness any kind of anti-Asian discrimination, we encourage you to go to the first bullet point here, asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/stop-aapi-hate.

            I also thought it would be interesting to share some things because it still amazes me that even today, many of our community members are unaware of what happened to the Japanese Americans like my family during World War II. Densho.org is a great resource. They have an encyclopedia that I've listed there for you and a lot of historical documents that could be really interesting for someone who doesn't have a lot of information and would like to know a little bit more.

            Finally, the organization that I put a lot of time in ever in this year is Tsuru for Solidarity. Tsuru for Solidarity is a community organization that was created by Japanese Americans who had experienced the incarceration during World War II. As the administration started to withhold families at the border, and separate families at the border, and put children in cages, a group of Japanese Americans headed by set Satsuki Ina, and several other folks got together and created Tsuru for Solidarity. Tsuru for Solidarity is a not-for-profit social justice organization.

            A Tsuru is a crane. For those of you who may not know crane's stand for peace in the Japanese American community. So it is our mascot of Tsuru for Solidarity. Japanese Americans who are in this group are committed to helping stop the illegal detention of immigrants at the border. Much like we were taking away from our communities during World War II.

            I know that for many people to think that this kind of discrimination is continuing today is hard to believe, but every day I turn on the television and whenever there's a discussion about COVID-19, we can see how the current administration still refers to COVID as the China disease. We heard that on the debates the other night. That just fuels the fire for more discrimination or for folks to think it's okay, or commonplace to put blame on Asians and specifically Chinese Americans in our community. Obviously, I don't think I have to do a hard sell to say that this is something that is important and that we should be concerned about because you probably wouldn't be here if you didn't agree with that. But I really want to encourage you to stand in solidarity as co-conspirators with those of us who are being targeted in this time and in these places to report these instances of violence and to educate folks about these kinds of things that are still definitely happening today.

            The other thing that California Faculty Association or the CFA has done is in addition to making the video, we've made a curriculum guide that if you are a teacher or a community later, like many of you are, if you wanted to hold a presentation on this, there are many materials that are available to you to do so. So we make those available free to the public. That was one of the things that was one of Dr. Jeung's requirements for us to publish his video. Was that he wanted everything to be open so that communities and all over could take advantage of this information. So, like I said, the last update was published in August and I'm expecting that we will get a new update soon, but we really haven't seen much of a change other than it continues to happen.

            So that really ends my part of the presentation. I wanted to make sure that my uncle had plenty of time to talk about his story and our family's experience. So thank you very much for your time. Again, thank you to the Diversity Coalition, and now alternate over to my uncle, Ben Furuta.

Ben Furuta:

Good afternoon, everyone, or I guess it's evening. I'm glad to be here to give a little bit of insight into the evacuation and incarceration of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. One thing, just a slight notion. Lisa mentioned the labeling of the current pandemic as the China flu. It's interesting to note that in 1918 with the Spanish flu, many, many people were killed and died and so on from that. But if you think about it, I know the history, it started in an army Fort in Kansas. So I'll just leave that as it is.

            As for myself, you saw the bio on the intro, and just a couple of small, not corrections, but additions. It says something about reporting or after the bombing of Pearl Harbor we went to Reedley California. Actually that was read immediately after the issuance of Executive Order 9066, which happened in late February, early or late March in of 1942. The reason for that is that the exclusion zone, actually the border of it went right down Highway 99 through Fresno and all those cities along Highway 99 and Reedley is on the Eastern side. There was a short time that the families of the Japanese Americans could actually exit, leave California, Washington, Oregon, so long as they went East. So that's small correction, just so you have the timeline.

            Now, a couple of things about my of my family so you have a kind of structure for this. My family consisted of obviously my mother and father, but also my brother who was a year and a half older than me, myself, and my sister who was born in November of 1941. Now this means that at the time that we were being removed from the Western coast of California, my sister was only six months old. I'd like to ask those of you who are parents and had small children, what would you do with your kids or kid if it's a plural that are small?

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Ben Furuta:

... if it's plural that are small, like we were, and you were told by the government you had to go to someplace that you didn't know where it was, you didn't know how long you were going to be there, you didn't know what you were going to do about housing and food and that sort of a thing. That's just a thought that I had as I reflected on all of this with regard to my own parents.

            How did they cope with that kind of thing? When you think about it, the resilience that they had to have in order to deal with that, I think is something that can pray on all of our minds.

            This means that, and it says I was born in 1938, which means actually I was four years old when we reported to the internment camp at Poston, Arizona, which is on the California/Arizona border, right along the Colorado railroads, on the Colorado River Indian Tribe Reservation.

            There's an interesting in political story behind that, that I won't get into. But just to say that the Indian Council actually voted to resist or make known to the government that they did not want us there. That is not a negative thing because the reason they stated for that was that they did not want to see another population of people become incarcerated like they were on the Indian reservation. Think about that as just part of the expression of ideas that were happening at that point.

            I must also clarify for you that we were only in the camp for about a year and a half, or maybe a little bit more than that, because the administration of the camps, called the War Relocation Authority, started issuing passes for leaves. In our case, my father got an indefinite leave, so long as he had a job promised and that we would not become wards of the state and that we would not return to California. Hence we ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Why they decided on that, I have no idea.

            But a couple of things about the experience in the camp itself. Again, remember this is a four year old boy trying to recall some things. I only recall specific little incidents. I'll just tell you a couple of those.

            One of them was I happened to, and you have to take this all with a grain of salt in a manner of speaking, because what is the memory after some 60, 70 years of a four year old boy? I'm sure that some of the details... Well, all I'll say is that these are the memories of a four year old, some 50, 60, 70 years later. The one thing that I remembered as an example was I saw a guard, a US Army soldier with a rifle, and being an inquisitive little kid, I asked him, "Sir, what is the rifle for?" And he said, "Well, I have to shoot rattlesnakes."

            Another one that is not quite so nice or is, I guess it could be rated PG or R, and that is that I can remember, because we had to eat in common mess halls, common dining halls, there were no facilities in the barracks that we were in to cook or to your own personal cleansing. But I remember going into the mess hall into the kitchen and I very distinctly remember some chickens running around, and please don't get too upset with me about this, but I remember seeing these chickens running around with their heads cut off, because that's the way the chickens were delivered to the camps. They were delivered live and had to be processed to be cooked and served to the incarcerees.

            A couple of other things just to give you a sense of what it was like. I can remember my father holding up his arms and both arms were wrapped in gauze from his wrists to his upper arms, in white gauze. When I asked him about that, he says, "Well, I can't work in the camouflage factory anymore because I am allergic to some of the chemicals."

            Just as a little bit of background to that. There were jobs available for people to work at. No one was required to work, but many people did. As an example, my uncles, they got specific leaves to go out and work in the fields in around the camp to help harvest the bounty there, the sugar beets primarily. My uncles really wanted just to get out of the camps, so they volunteered to do that back breaking work.

            Those are just a couple of small incidents that I remember. Again, remembering that I was just a four year old boy and I do have testimony from others of my generation and perhaps a little older that said that they remember those days, especially the younger ones, as fun.

            You might think, how could camp be fun? Well, get away from the notion that camp is a nice idyllic location in the mountains where you get in a boat and go canoeing and have a campfires at night, because this was not that type of camp. The Japanese and Japanese American community do refer to this as camp.

            But anyway, let's see, where was I? The young people, again, those that were a little older than myself, remember the camp as being fun because they had a lot of kids around them that were their same age and they could run around the camp and do all sorts of things. Some of it mischievous, then others of it maybe not.

            The youngsters or the people that were a little bit older into their teens, do not have good memories of camp because they remember the hardships.

            Those are some of the things that I remember about the camp. Just to give you a few statistics, the camp that I was in was actually divided into three reservations on the Indian reservation there. Three groupings. Camp one, two, and three, of course. Each one was, roughly speaking, 4,000 people, a little more, little less, depending.

            People were going in and out, some leaving, some coming in, just like my family. We came into the camp late and we departed early. The War Relocation Authority realized early on that they needed to be able to somehow move people out of the camps if they could, for several reasons. One of which was obviously the issue of crowding into the barracks. The barracks were something like 200 feet long and housed up to six or seven families each in one room.

            I don't really recall that, but I've seen many, many pictures of that in my docent work at the Japanese American Museum. There was no privacy. The showers were public showers. The bathrooms were public bathrooms. Of course we had to eat in a common mess hall.

            But the kids, and this created a small problem for parents because now gone was the notion of families living together and eating and having meals together, because the kids would rather eat with their friends. That became somewhat of a problem for many families. That's another part of this camp life.

            The camp was, just to give you another sense of that,. The organization of the camp and the running of the camp in terms of a daily lives was pretty much left to the incarcerees. They had to organize activities. Sports was a very, very big activity in those days in those camps. The camp newspaper and those sorts of things. They even had a fire brigade that actually was a job that they got paid for.

            There were the usual accoutrements of city life. There was a hospital in all of the camps, so medical care was [inaudible 00:33:54] quality. Obviously births took place. In fact, I have a number of friends who were born in camp and have no recollection of that at all, just like my little sister, she's not so little now, but my little sister, who is, by the way, Lisa's mother. She was only six, seven months old at the time. She was just about a year old when we left. You can appreciate what that meant.

            Those are some of the things about the camp itself that I can remember. I can give you other stories. Let me just tell you one story that's interesting. I have a little bit of time here, so I'll tell a couple of stories here.

            I became aware of this in terms of doing the docent work at the museum. There was a group of people called the Manzanar Fishing Club. If you don't know where the locations of the camps were, there were 10 of them. The major ones were here in California at Manzanar, which is on the Eastern Sierra. Another one at Tooley Lake, which is in the far North part of California.

            But the Manzanar fishing club was interesting because fishing in the Japanese and Japanese American community is a very, very popular pastime. As an example, my uncle was a very avid surf fisher when we had the opportunity to live on the West Coast.

            But anyway, the Manzanar Fishing Club, and if you know anything about California you know that the Eastern side of the Sierra is one of the prime fishing areas of California. They would go out the gate late in the evening, and somehow they had an agreement with the sentries, and they would go fishing down in the streams around the camp. That really is right near Lone Pine, in an area where there are very good fishing spots.

            They would come back, and part of the way that they got back in was of course they would give some of their fish to the guards. That's just one of those little incidences that go on. I must say that people made the best they could out of what they had because they had to organize the activities for themselves. They were very good about that.

            I hope that if you have any questions, you will bring those up during our later Q&A. A couple of other things I'd like to mention. In the time prior to camp, I refer to it as camp in its negative connotation, there was clearly areas where Japanese and Japanese Americans could live and could not live. Think about that in terms of what is happening in our communities today.

            It was very easy to find the populations of the Japanese people to round them up and move them into the camps. By the way, I must tell you that the roundup and the gathering and the transportation was basically incident free in the sense that nobody rioted, fought, protested.

            There are many studies about why that was so, but one thing that you should know is that before the war, there was something called the ABC list. It was an alien registration thing. Because of that list, the community leaders within the Japanese population, because we were all pretty much in the same areas or in clusters of places, the leaders, such as the Shinto priests, the Buddhist priests, and the community leaders of community groups, they were rounded up almost immediately by the FBI and taken away.

            Just a short story about that. I had a friend that I worked with whose father, at the time of the incarceration and just before, her father was taken away by the FBI. They didn't see him until after the war, some three or four or five years later. He was a very different man than they remembered him being. He never talked about where he was.

            In fact, many of the men that were taken away were put into what are called Department of Justice camps, rather than the War Relocation Camp. That shows you what can happen.

            After the war, just to give you a sense of that, there was a very difficult time for the families. Well, by the way, when we went to Minnesota, just a positive note on this, my mother actually remembers our time in Minnesota from 1944 to 1948, 43 to 48, as actually a fairly nice time for her. The reason why is that she was able to make friends with a number of people in a neighborhood. You can attribute this to whatever you want, but the people up there were very welcoming to people like us and she became very good friends with four or five families up there. She even kept track of them for a number of years after the war, after we had returned to California. So for her, it was, in one sense, a good time. Obviously it was war time and all of the problems with that.

            To continue on, however, with the settlement after the war, many people coming back to California did not find what they had left remaining. Some were lucky, many of them were not. By lucky, I mean I have a friend who came back to the farm that they had in the Stockton area of California and it was basically the way it was when they left. A little bit beaten up, but everything seemed to be there. Because their neighbors took care of their farm.

            But many people, like my folks and others around me, came back to nothing. They had to live in trailer camps. Live for a short time in places like the YMCA and churches that sponsored them. It took them quite a while to get re-acclimated to life after the war.

            In my case, I have to say that I was lucky in the sense that when we were returning from Minnesota to Denver, we were part of what you would call a small enclave of Japanese and Japanese Americans that hung around together. Our social life was oriented around that cluster of people, including our church, including holidays. I grew up until I graduated from high school, knowing basically Japanese and Japanese American folks. There was a small Japanese town where we could get Japanese food and that sort of a thing.

            Of course, I went after the war, in 1960, as it said in my bio, I went into the Air Force Academy, spent some time in the Air Force, then came back to California, settled down, and spent my time as a teacher. It doesn't mention it, but I was also a school administrator.

            I hope this gives you a little bit of insight in what the camps were like and what happened in the camps. I could go on for a whole hour about this, but I think that's enough to give you a sense of that and to give you a sense of where this lies within the spectrum of civil rights.

            I would just like to leave you with this. What are the parallels of what happened to us with what's happening today? Right before the war, with the obvious attack of the Japanese on the West Coast, the motivation and push to evacuate all of us from the West Coast. Number one, we were easily identifiable, so we couldn't just disappear. But the push was there. While not getting into the history of California and racial politics, there really was no option for us to go into the camps.

            But think about now. What happened right after 9/11 and the identification of the perpetrators of 9/11 being Muslim? I don't know if you remember, but there was a certain outcry that we must identify all the Muslims and put them into camps. Well, that would have been an impossible situation.

            But what's happening now down on our Southern border with the separation of families and things of that nature? Fortunately for us that were put into the Japanese internment camps, we did not have that issue of separating families. In fact, there was a good effort made to keep the families together.

            I just leave you with that. Think about what's going on today, events in our society and in the life we lead today in terms of these kinds of things. With that, I'll give it back, I guess, to Lisa or to Kathleen, I'm not sure who, and hope if you have any questions, I'll be able to answer them later on in the Q&A.

Lisa Kawamura:

I think it's probably Sarah that's going to lead the Q&A next. Is that right? [crosstalk 00:21:12].

Sarah Conn:

Yep, I'm here. Wow. I'm just blown away by both of you and your presentation tonight. I know I speak on behalf of everyone attending that we thank you so much. I think we all wish we could just sit down and have a cup of coffee with Ben, and with you, Lisa, for a weekend, it was just enlightening and informative for many reasons.

            But I guess we'll have a little bit of a Q&A, a virtual cup of coffee right now. I'll get to some of the questions. Hopefully we can actually get to all of them before we have to leave. We'll go until... You have until at least 7:30, so I think we should do pretty well here.

            The first one, let's start off then with Ben. You answered this already. John asks, what sort of discrimination did your family experience in Minnesota after you were able to leave Arizona. Sounds like your mom found friends there, which is great. But what sorts of discrimination did you and your family in Minnesota, and maybe even after that, experience?

Ben Furuta:

Well, to answer that question, I found that, and I visited Minnesota later on a number of years ago, long time after the war, but I think if you take a look at... I'm a little bit disturbed with what's happening in Minnesota right now, but our experience at Minnesota was very good in terms of discrimination. We were the only Japanese family that lived in the neighborhood that I was in, and we were just part of a whole bunch of group of kids that lived in that area.

            Like I said, the families became friendly with us. I did not, and I'm sure that my mother and father perhaps have other stories about that, but personally, I did not experience that, or I do not have any evidence of that.

            However, after the war... Just let me recount a couple of things. Number one, after the war, we were visiting California, where my relatives returned into the Bay area. My Father took me to visit his cousin. I don't know why it was just me and my father, but however it turned out. My father's cousin lived in San Francisco and father told me that my cousin has to live here posing...

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Ben Furuta:

No, my cousin has to live here posing as a renter of this property, even though it belongs to him. And the reason why is because of opposition to Japanese people owning property in San Francisco. I also remember as another example of that, a barber that I patronized in Berkeley, which is not too far from where you are, I was talking to the barber and he said, "When I was growing up...?" And he was a bit older than me, he said, " when I was growing up, we were all told that we'd better get a trade because we can't get any jobs in anything else, but the trades like being a barber, being a grocer being, whatever?" Those are the only overt things that I can respond to in terms of the kind of racism remembering that I was a young boy before the war and so on. So perhaps that gives a little reflection onto that. And there're any number of other incidents that I can quote, but they're not part of my personal life.

Lisa Kawamura:

I think also one of the things that we've talked a lot about in the healing circles is that the new, or the second generation who were folks that were my uncle and my mother's parents made a situation where their families could thrive. They really did their best to make sure that their kids had a good life as possible to make sure that they had fun. And they felt valued at the end of the day to not let on what kind of hardship being interned was for them and the moves across the country and things like that. So I think that was not something that I had really thought about for a really long time until Dr. Inna said, "Well, it's because parents made sure that you had as little as possible to damage you out of this experience." And I see that a lot in my mother, she was so young. She doesn't have any memories like my uncle does, but my mom really doesn't feel like there's been a whole lot of negative because of her being interned. But I think a lot of that was because she was just an infant. So...

Sarah Conn:

And so bringing that to today, some of our questions are about Asians in the area in the United States today, specifically Robert asks, you students at Cal Poly feel welcome, or is it lonely for them?

Lisa Kawamura:

You know, I think it's difficult and many Asians have really assimilated or learn to live within white communities. And some of my students come to Cal Poly, not feeling as an outsider at all because they've grown up in a predominantly white community. So for them it's no different. However, when we get students from like the Bay Area or Los Angeles or Denver or major areas where there are a lot of diversity, they really have a hard time trying to find their communities. And Cal Poly is what we call a PWI, Predominantly White Institution. And while there may be some things that our administration has done to help folks of color become more involved and feel more valued and to service those communities. One of the biggest things that I find that is hard is that our faculty and staff numbers in terms of folks of color, has really decreased over the last several years.

            And so you don't have as many folks who look like me, I'm there to serve as mentors for the students that are coming. And because, we're at a point where, if I'm going to have a lifelong career, I don't know that I want to spend the rest of my life in a community where there's not very many people who look like me or can identify with me. And so we find a lot of our folks leaving the community is not as hospitable at Cal Poly for some of us as faculty and staff of color. And so, students are like, well, okay, I'm going to be here for four years. I'll be out. But we're really trying to work hard. Those of us that are left to really reach out to students and work with them and make them feel more at home.

            And some of the student organizations that are ethnic based are really awesome, really awesome, but not all the Asian students find those organizations. So.

Sarah Conn:

And so what can, this might be a topic for a whole another night, but what can everybody do to help and provide support and make everyone feel more welcome?

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