Redress: Act of Atonement So They Can Face Their Gods
My mother was not an exceptional person. She stood barely 5 feet, was overweight, and I never knew her as a young woman. She caught the bus at 6 a.m. to go to work as a piecemeal seam-stress in a starched and pressed cotton housedress, nylons and solid-heel shoes. And she’d come home around 6 p.m. carrying brown-paper shopping bags full of goodies--ripe peaches, firm black cherries, thinly sliced ham, and fresh green peas that we shelled and she cooked in rice. She would set herself down at our eight-person dining-room table (our major luxury), and peel and slice the peaches on the edge of her knife into my mouth and the mouths of her grandchildren, and we all considered those slices the finest treat imaginable.
On a Sunday she would put on a “good” dress, a squash hat of netting covering her forehead, and a strand of pearls, along with matching-colored gloves, shoes and purse, and go to the Buddhist temple to see Japanese movies. She never joined a church or any groups because--as I found out--she no longer wanted to associate with any groups, Japanese included, because of the camps.
She didn’t believe in politics, even though she was happy when she got her citizenship papers, but she stood by her values, her experience. She stopped complaining to the landlord about the racket that the kids in the apartment above us made, because she remembered how it was with her many kids. When a black man and his Japanese wife moved into our mostly white neighborhood and were made to feel unwelcome, she visited them-- omiyage (goodies) in hand--because that was the thing to do; besides, she knew what it was like to be hated for no good reason. She tore down my Eugene McCarthy posters because she thought that I was campaigning for Joe McCarthy, who, in her understanding of history, was a bad man who took away peoples’ ice boxes and homes because they had some new ideas that they thoughtwere good for America. She hated collection agencies.
She even tried to talk to me (a Japanese-American dictionary passing between us) about values that she thought were being denied and disowned along with straight black hair, beautiful small single-lidded eyes, chopsticks, tsukemono (pickled vegetables), the language, rice and her. Because of the camps.
Values like on --doing (sometimes hard) for those you love, giri --the personal obligation to develop a social conscience, kimochi --the good feeling that comes from sharing with those who understand and accept you, and gaman --no self-pity but discipline in the face of disaster. Values that sustained my father, and so many Issei like them, as they were herded into concentration camps, and afterward in their 40s, 50s and 60s when they left those camps to rebuild their lives, along with their children and for their children’s children--in the process, holding a people together.
My mother died in 1968, so I’m not certain how she would or would not have participated in the movement that her grandchildren and their parents began for redress of wrongs committed and restitution of losses immeasurable--because of the camps--that finally led to the passage of the civil-liberties bill of 1987. But I do believe that our battle to reverse the judgment of previous generations was in deep measure an act of atonement. So that, perhaps, my mother and so many like her could at last face their gods with a calm heart and laugh with pleasure, reaffirmed at last--publicly and legally--that they were, after all, who they always thought they were, passing on a legacy that those who came after can appreciate even if we did not recognize its value while most of them were alive.