Remembrances : Race Hatred Pains Ex-Mayor

James Kanno, 66, of Santa Ana is a real estate broker. He was interned at a camp in Poston, Ariz.

When Kanno was elected the first mayor of Fountain Valley in 1957, Voice of America trumpeted his victory. It was the first time a Japanese-American had held the office of mayor in the country and was an example of democracy in action. Just 12 years earlier, Kanno and his family had been interned at a camp in Poston, Ariz.

Now semiretired, Kanno serves on a variety of charitable boards, including the South Coast Repertory, the Japan America Society and the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County. Despite his good fortune, he doesn’t really like being singled out as evidence of how much progress Japanese-Americans have made since the war.

“The education still isn’t there,” he said. “We are still treated as Japanese today, not as Americans. Events like the Pearl Harbor anniversary are unfavorable to us. It gets so you wish the publicity would be toned down.”

“People have come to the point where they hate Japanese again, vis-a-vis the Vincent Chin case,” he said, referring to the 1982 murder of a Chinese-American by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who mistook him for Japanese.

Kanno said he is concerned that society is becoming too color conscious, not colorblind.

“We’re segregating ourselves into different groups, rather than thinking of ourselves as Americans,” he said. “I think we’re going backward.”