Thread by @thornburgh

Feb 19 is the Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of FDR’s order that cleared the way for Japanese-American concentration camps later in the Spring of 1942. One of those families who lost everything they had, up to and including their freedom, was the Iwamasa family.

The oldest of the four boys in that picture is my father-in-law Yukio. The family had this portrait taken not long after their years of imprisonment in the makeshift camp at Manzanar, a stretch of desert between Mt Whitney and Death Valley. He was in elementary school.

One of the things I think about most is how the family dug a cellar under their barracks—essentially with their bare hands—in order to have a secret place to teach their kids Japanese language and culture. Those cellars are on display at Manzanar still.

Some Ansel Adams photos from Manzanar are circulating a bit today. But Toyo Miyatake, a photographer and detainee from LA who smuggled parts to build his own camera, captured harsher, deeper realities than Adams did, like guard towers or this barbed wire.
toyomiyatake.com/manzanar.html

Either way, it all feels vastly under-remembered. Internment was really a lab for a host of American evils, from war fever to redlining to racist case law to border separations. Credit to George Takei, the @Korematsu Foundation and others for drawing clear lines to the present.

@korematsu And yet: in high school I worked at the San Francisco Holocaust Library with a group that gave talks at SFUSD schools about Nazi war crimes. If we ever mentioned Japanese-American internment, it was only in passing. A shameful lapse, a missed opportunity to connect those dots.

@korematsu I’m trying to atone. I was lucky to get Yukio on the microphone a while back. It’s hard to think of this smart, artistic, iconoclastic guy that I love being stripped of everything but his criminalized ethnicity. As a kid. But it’s a true American story
open.spotify.com/episode/5Dyys6…

@korematsu If you feel like donating, try @HeartMountainWY camp in Cody, WY. They’re trying to save the only surviving structure that was made entirely by detainees. Reminds me of that Iwamasa cellar, handmade and yet somehow still here.
shopheartmountain.org/collections/gi…