Museum to Explore the Story of Japanese-American Pioneers

In the dimly lit expanse of an old sugar packing house, diminutive Akemi Kikumura hunkers over great heaps of would-be junk, dusting off stories of a pioneer group of Americans.

Perched on a display table are turn-of-the-century tabi , or socklike footwear, different from their overseas counterparts because they were cut from blue jeans. Nearby is a yellowed Montgomery Ward mail-order catalogue circa 1912 and a Boy Scouts of America scrapbook of the same era. There is protective kendo headgear next to a 1920s baseball catcher’s mask.

There is also a sample of what graced well-appointed migrant farm workers’ sleeping quarters: a travel pillow made of tin.

In a corner of the warehouse just east of Little Tokyo is a portrait of Keisaburo Koda, California’s Rice King, who cultivated an agricultural empire in the Central Valley and sold it for a pittance during the West Coast evacuation of Japanese-Americans in 1942. Released from a wartime internment camp, Koda returned to fields he once owned and began digging back into the rice industry. His farms and his unflinching image have endured.

Obscured for more than a century by prejudice and shame, these fragments of a life long passed soon will tell a story of Japanese-Americans. The objects, some dating to the 1860s, will illustrate a rich, sometimes humorous, often heroic narrative at the new Japanese American National Museum, opening in the spring of 1992.

The organizers--second-, third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans--work with a sense of urgency to complete the first phase of the 10-year, $24-million museum project. Most of the earliest immigrants from Japan have died and taken with them the firsthand accounts that might have illuminated the tangle of items heaped in the museum’s temporary headquarters east of Alameda Street. Given the scarcity of first-generation survivors, collecting their stories is the museum’s highest priority.

“If all the old-timers die off without telling their stories, how will we know what kind of lives they’ve led?” asked Kikumura, a curator at the museum. “We want to find as many of these artifacts as we can, and capture the experiences of the owners before they’re gone.”

Many view the museum as a long-awaited opportunity to educate the public about citizens of Japanese descent who, because of physical features, often are looked upon as foreigners, even those whose families have been in this country for five generations, said Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA.

Nakanishi said that much of what the American public knows about the Japanese has been gleaned through the educational system and filtered by its biases, its revisionist tendencies and its lack of understanding of the experiences of ethnic minorities in this country. The museum is an attempt to broaden the public’s view of Japanese-Americans.

“People of my generation had scant few experiences we could call Japanese-American,” said Nakanishi, who also is a museum board member. “Certainly it wasn’t something taught to us in public school.”

Chris Komai, 39, a third-generation Japanese-American, said: “To grow up in America, you get exposed to a lot of heroes--none of whom look Japanese.”

Public awareness of the Japanese-American experience has grown in recent years and has generated support for the museum, said Komai, director of publicity for the museum. Funding for the project first came from Japanese-American private sponsors who felt a stake in salvaging and defining their heritage. The museum later received $1.75 million in grants from the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and the state.

Foremost among the issues that have brought Japanese-Americans to public attention is the 1988 Redress and Reparations Act. After a decade of lobbying by Japanese-American war veterans and activists, Congress formally apologized to Americans of Japanese descent whose civil rights were violated when they were incarcerated during World War II.

“What came out of the reparations movement was this realization that it was OK to talk about the injustice of the internment,” said museum staff member Nancy Araki. “Before that, so many people still carried a sense of shame about the whole thing. Many people went to their graves feeling that guilt.”

The silence brought about by that shame has posed some hurdles for museum organizers. Japanese-Americans continued to experience discrimination after being released from the camps, and many abandoned the ethnic items that connected them to their ancestry, Kikumura said.

“Most of our families took the stuff that was Japanese and hid it in the closet,” Kikumura said. “Later, they just threw things out because they thought it would bring attention.”

For the first exhibit, which concentrates on the Issei pioneers, museum historians traveled the country soliciting items and the stories behind the artifacts.

At the museum warehouse, staff members pore over objects and photographs, piecing together traces left by early immigrants. The complex patchwork of memorabilia--including hundreds of reels of home movies--offers a penetrating look at Japanese-Americans.

Some items require explanation, such as the tin pillow--a spinoff from the summertime headrests made of flexible wood and used during sultry nights in Japan. In America, galvanized metal proved to be cooler, more durable and more available.

Mixed with the cultural oddities is a familiar immigrant story: people who left their homeland for the promise of a better life. Like the groups before them, some prospered, some did not.

Given the status “aliens ineligible to citizenship”--a racial distinction applied to Asians--Japanese-Americans’ civil rights were regularly violated, Kikumura said. The U.S. government had already passed several Asian exclusion laws, and little was done to protect immigrant laborers’ rights. Many met the naked anger of workers whom they were brought from overseas to supplant, Kikumura said.

Wearing white cotton gloves, Kikumura unsheafs parchment contracts stipulating how much cane workers earned 90 years ago--78 cents a day for men, 55 cents for women. In letters written by farm workers, she finds reflections on life in a new country: “No matter how hard we try, we are outsiders.” On a plantation owner’s purchase order is an example of degradation: “Send me fertilizer, bone meal and some Japs.”

The Japanese were brought to this country, as were Chinese, to lower the pay scale for undesirable agricultural jobs. Coming on the heels of a long history of anti-Asian sentiment, the immigrants were perceived to be stealing jobs from “American” workers. The pattern has been since repeated with laborers brought from many different lands, Kikumura said.

“The Japanese-American experience fits into the continuum of immigrants in this country,” Kikumura said.

Established museums and other institutions have begun embracing the history of ethnic groups long ignored.

“The Japanese-American story is of importance to all Americans,” said Roger Kennedy, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. “At the Smithsonian, we are starting to talk in terms of ‘us,’ rather than ‘them,’ when we discuss the histories of different ethnic groups. The tone we would like to take is, ‘Hey! Did you ever think of your neighbor’s story this way?’ ”

For Japanese-Americans, the museum is significant in that it represents people taking the initiative to tell their own story, said Kinshasha Holman Conwill, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which houses African-American art and artifacts.

“The dialogue on our country’s cultural diversity has too often been defensive,” Conwill said. “White people ask, ‘What’s so wrong with Western civilization?’ Well, the question should be: ‘Why don’t we have a more complete history of this country?’ or ‘Why is it that Western history serves to submerge your identity when you are a person of color?’

“It is significant when a group of people take the step to tell their own story. In the end, it enriches everyone.”