Letters - May 20, 2010

Parking lot

The parking lot at Schmuck Park needs attention. It is so dirty that it is hard to tell that it is asphalt. This is the second year that the lot has been ignored. Anybody driving there causes a dust storm.

Schmuck Park is the city’s premiere park and is used by residents and travelers alike. The city should show more pride in it. It is embarrassing the way it is.

Oops

An article in the Gazette of May 6, 2010 (Japanese TV crews giving Palouse WWII makeover) would seem to be attempting a makeover of our nation’s history as well, though I think it more likely that the otherwise well-written piece simply contains an error.

I would certainly prefer to believe that our beloved country unfailingly extends equal rights and protection to all its citizens, even during the panic and hysteria of war.

No provision appears in my copy of the Constitution for arresting, without charge or trial a large selected group of citizens and concentrating them in camps.

But ugly mistakes happen, and they should be remembered, not repeated.

The passage in question reads as follows:

“He asks the American farmer if he’ll consider renting his land while the Japanese farmer is held in an interment (sic) camp.” Yes, the main character is played by a Japanese actor, but unless circumstances in the story were extremely exceptional, both farmers were American.

Compassionate neighbors

I was very interested in the documentary being filmed in this area about how Japanese-Americans were treated at the outset of WWII. The blanket incarceration of that “group of people” was understandable, but still despicable. There is another “unheralded” story about acts of kindness back then that influences me to this day.

I was raised around Lodi, Calif., which is a fantastic farming area for fruit, vegetables and especially grapes. Many “legal” Japanese set up their farming operations and melded into the mostly German community. All was well. Then came December 7, 1941. FDR panicked and rounded-up all those of Japanese descent and put them in camps.

What happened to the farms the Japanese families had tended so lovingly? In a few cases, neighbors took care of their farms: planting, irrigating, harvesting, even paying taxes and mortgages. Profits were put in special accounts. The result at the end of the war was, when those Japanese-Americans were freed from the internment camps, they came home to their land, just as they had left it, along with a nice bank account. It took guts to be a compassionate neighbor, because they were threatened and called “Jap-lovers” by most citizens, as you can imagine, following Pearl Harbor. That’s why it was so rare for this to happen, and makes it all the more special.

Would that happen today? I have met a couple of Palouse farm families that I believe would be compassionate neighbors like those in the early ‘40’s. There are still Japanese-Americans around Lodi, who with teary eyes, recall those extremely “unpopular” acts of kindness, and how hard it must have been for their “white” friends to stand up against “our” government’s actions.