Tom Brokaw (24 page)

He did so well at Temple, getting his BS in business in the spring of 1945, that he was accepted for graduate work in business at the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “I didn't even know what a famous school this was until later,” he says. “I studied business and accounting and once I got my master's degree I pounded the streets of Philadelphia, applying to all the top accounting firms.” They all said the same thing. “You have excellent credentials but we can't take a chance hiring you because of the war situation.” Japan had surrendered the year before, but America remained deeply suspicious of anything Asian.

By then the families in the internment camps had been released and Nao's parents were back in Oxnard, where they had resumed operating their market. They needed Nao's help. “Being the only son,” he said, “I had no choice.” Besides, once back in California, he was relieved to discover that his old neighbors had no animosity left over from the war.

Their family friend, Ignacio Carmona, had operated the store as the Los Amigos Market, substituting
chorizo, pan dulce,
and
menudo
for the Asian products of the Takasugi reign. Carmona didn't disturb the locked storerooms, explaining to the
Los Angeles
Times
later, “We knew that was their private property. . . . We knew eventually they would take back the store.”

When that time came, Carmona simply said to the Takasugi family, “Welcome back. Thank you for letting us run the store.” And he handed back the keys.

Takasugi was involved in every aspect of the market. “One day,” he says, “one of my Wharton classmates came to visit and found me behind the meat counter. He said, ‘You've got a degree from Wharton!' I said to him, ‘MBA—master of butchering arts.' ” Under Nao's stewardship, the market was flourishing. He wanted to expand, and he thought a new sign would help.

The city, however, denied the request. When Takasugi complained to his city councilman he was told there was an opening on the city planning commission. Would he like to serve? Takasugi says, “I thought they needed a businessman's perspective. That was the beginning of my civic career.”

He had found his calling. He ran for the city council and was elected to two terms. Halfway through the second, the mayor's job opened and Nao had three good offers for the family market. He decided to sell and go for the top job at city hall. “I was a little sad,” he says, “because the market had been in the family since 1907. But selling the store freed me up to do a good job as full-time mayor.” Nao Takasugi was Mr. Mayor in Oxnard for ten years.

He had an important ally in the Mexican American neighborhood called La Colonia. His old friend Ignacio Carmona was a community leader who stayed in close touch with the mayor's office. Carmona said of Takasugi, “He always made it a point to represent the Mexican community. And he speaks good Spanish.”

Takasugi kept his end of the bargain. He improved lighting, the roads, and police protection in La Colonia. In the rest of Oxnard, which had been called the doormat of Ventura County, he was successful in encouraging additional businesses, including a shopping center and an auto mall.

By 1992 Takasugi was ready to move up the political ladder. He ran for the powerful California Assembly, the state legislature, as a Republican from a district where there were few Asian Americans, and he won easily. He was the first Asian American in the California Assembly in a dozen years.

Takasugi was seventy when he arrived in Sacramento, an age when most men are retired, but he quickly established a reputation as an energetic and pragmatic lawmaker. One of his first acts was to challenge the established way of doing business by proposing that the legislators lose part of their salary,
and
pay a fine, if they didn't get the budget prepared on time.

His party boss, Governor Pete Wilson, did not have Takasugi's support when he sponsored the controversial statewide initiative to restrict the rights of immigrants. As Takasugi put it, “I am just one generation away from the immigrants coming to California, so I have to be very, very sensitive.”

In 1988 Congress passed an act calling for an official apology and reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each of the survivors of the internment camps. The congressional action came after a commission held twenty days of hearings with testimony from more than seven hundred witnesses who had lived through the ordeal of Executive Order 9066. It was a deeply troubling reminder of a time when, as the commission concluded, “The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race, prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In signing the congressional action, President Reagan admitted that the United States had committed a “grave wrong.”

T
HERE WERE
other wrongs to be corrected. While most Japanese Americans were sent to camps, many young Japanese American citizens were relocated to Japan against their will. Didn't they also deserve an apology and reparations? In 1996 the California Assembly was debating whether to pass a resolution encouraging Janet Reno to pay the extra reparations. Republicans were largely against the idea. Then, on their side of the aisle, Takasugi took the floor and all were quiet as he said he would support the resolution.

He told his fellow legislators the memories of his own internment would never be erased. “They may fade, but they will never go away. We lost . . . liberties you can never repay with twenty thousand dollars.” He called the proposed payment “a small bit of redress, of fair play . . . for these kids.” He concluded, “I urge your aye vote.”

The resolution passed 62 to 0.

I
N HIS SPEECH
at the Presidio, Takasugi said, “One of the phrases that saw my family through the internment . . . is
shikata ganai—
it cannot be helped. Unlike yesterday, the phrase
shikata ganai
must not be the answer to the question of whether tomorrow's children have . . . a full understanding of the Japanese American experience.”

Continuing, Takasugi reminded his audience, “America must never again fall prey to the temptation to count its citizens by color.” It is a lesson, he said, that can be passed on to future generations.

Takasugi has had serious heart problems in the past year and for the first time he's talking about retiring. He's proud of what he's accomplished. He offers another Japanese phrase as his motto:
gambate.
Work hard, never give up.

He refuses to be bitter, telling audiences, “I find that I am compelled to remember the best—not the worst—of that time. To focus not on the grave deprivation of rights which beset us all, but rather on the countless shining moments of virtue that emerged from the shadows of that dark hour.”

That bitter experience was the beginning of a new place for the Nissei, the second-generation Japanese, in American life. When they returned to their homes following the war they knew they had to reach out beyond their own communities and develop political muscle.

N
ORMAN MINETA
was one of the leaders of the congressional action on reparations—that San Jose youngster who had been forced to give up his bat in 1942 because it might be a weapon. He was now California Congressman Norman Mineta; earlier he had served as mayor of San Jose. During the war his family had been relocated in a camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, a long way from the temperate climate of the Bay area. While in the camp Mineta had struck up a lasting friendship with a visiting Wyoming youngster who shared his interest in Cub Scouts. The boy's name was Alan Simpson, and when he grew up he became a powerful senator from Wyoming. Mineta was a Democrat and Simpson a Republican, but on the issue of internment they had a common point of view. The United States government had made a terrible mistake and it owed everyone involved an official apology.

M
INETA RETURNED
to San Jose after his odyssey through the camp in Wyoming and, later in the war, a more normal childhood in Evanston, Illinois, where the family moved when his father was recruited to teach Japanese to Army personnel at the University of Chicago. Back in San Jose, Mineta quickly became active in student politics, getting elected president of the San Jose High School student council seven years after he had been sent out of town on a train with the shades drawn and armed guards.

He went on to the University of California at Berkeley and stayed active in student politics while majoring in business administration. After a stint in the U.S. Army he returned to California to join his father in the family insurance business, which had recovered from the forced interruption of the internment.

The Mineta family had long been active in civic affairs but always within the Japanese community. Norman decided to expand their horizons. When he ran for the San Jose city council his father warned him, “You're going to be like a nail sticking out of a board. You know what happens to that nail? It gets hammered. Are you ready to get hammered?”

Apparently he was, for within four years he was elected mayor of San Jose, the first Japanese American to head a major city on the mainland. He was an instant success, a rising star in the Democratic party and a leading advocate of new approaches to old urban problems. In California's polyglot population he knew the feelings of an outsider, so he reached across invisible lines and brought in those who had not been represented in the seats of power, including Mexican Americans.

He was also the beneficiary of the local Japanese American community's determination to get a piece of the political power base. First, they had to get the attention of established political leaders, and the most expeditious route went through fund-raising dinners. Mineta said a patriarch in his community figured out a system. He knew that most Japanese American families were rebuilding their lives and couldn't afford the fifty- or hundred-dollar-a-plate cost of a dinner, and so, Mineta says, “he collected a dollar here and there until he had the price of two tickets and then he'd designate who would attend the dinner.” Mineta was often one of those to represent the community.

It was the beginning of a political network for the ambitious young businessman, and after he'd worked his way up to mayor he decided to run for Congress in the election following Richard Nixon's resignation over Watergate. It was a banner year for Democrats, and Mineta was one of the beneficiaries.

He quickly became one of the stars of what was called the Watergate class in Congress. He also knew he wanted to do something about what had happened to his family and thousands more during the war. Executive Order 9066, that awful stain on a society of laws, had been allowed to fade away. By the 1970s internment had become a footnote to the war years; younger Americans had only a vague awareness of its implications. Older Americans, through discomfort or an eagerness to remember only the glories of those years, had pushed it to the far corners of their memories.

Mineta and three other Asian Americans in Congress, Senators Dan Inouye and Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii and Congressman Robert Matsui, also of California, decided they had to begin by sharing with their colleagues their personal stories. They also proposed a commission to prepare an independent study of the policies.

When the commission finished its research it concluded the internment was the result of race, prejudice, hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. The commission's work also generated a number of newspaper and magazine articles, television news reports, and documentaries. When the American public was forced to confront the truth of what had happened, Mineta and his friends were able to get through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which called for the apology and reparations for every family of twenty thousand dollars, an amount that was more symbolic than financially fair.

Mineta remembers the day it passed: September 17, 1987, the two hundredth anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. “House Speaker Jim Wright designated me as the speaker pro tem for the day so I could sign the bill for the House,” he said. “I still have a copy of the legislation hanging in my office.”

That legislation may have helped heal old wounds and it was certainly an uncomfortable reminder to the rest of society of how hysteria can overrun the basic laws and decency of a nation, but it didn't eradicate stereotyping. Mineta recalls speaking at a ceremony for Toyota and General Motors. When he finished, one of the GM executives congratulated him on how well he spoke English and wanted to know how long he'd lived in America!

It has been a long American journey for the ten-year-old in the Cub Scout uniform who once got on a train for an unknown destination. Before they got on the train that day in May 1942, Mineta's father called them all together—three girls and two boys—to say, “I want you to remember 545 Fifth Street. This is your home. You are all Americans.”

A great deal has changed in the life of Norman Mineta, who is now a vice president of Lockheed Martin Corporation after serving twenty years in the House of Representatives. One part of his life remains the same. The Mineta family still owns that house at 545 Fifth Street in San Jose, California.

LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND COMMITMENT

The World War II generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility, and the marriage vow: “For better or for worse . . .” It was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option. I can't remember one of my parents' friends who was divorced. In the communities where we lived it was treated as a minor scandal. My age group, which preceded the Baby Boomers, retained that attitude, but it did begin to unravel. At my fortieth high school reunion, second marriages were not unusual and there were a number of third marriages.

There were divorces before and immediately after the war, of course, but the laws governing the dissolution of a marriage were much tougher, and society was not as tolerant as in later years. Of all the new marriages in 1940, one in six ended in divorce. By the late 1990s, that number was one in two.

Although divorce has been a common fact of life in America since the sixties, World War II couples have not fully adjusted; they're still unsettled by its popularity, especially when it occurs in their own families. Many of the couples I talked to would recite matter-of-factly, even cheerfully, the travails of their lives during the Depression and the war. But when I asked about the divorce of one of their children, their voices dropped and they struggled for words, saying something to the effect of “We still can't get used to it.”

At reunions of various World War II outfits, almost all the veterans show up with their first wives; if they're with a new mate, it's because the first one died. Those marriages, I believe, are more than a reflection of the expectations of society at the time the vows were exchanged. These relationships were forged when the world was a dangerous place and life was uncertain. Couples were forced to confront the profound emotions—and passions—that come with the reality of separation and the prospect of death. If their relationships could withstand the turmoil and strain of the war years, it should only get better after that.

They were also part of a generation accustomed to sharing and working together toward a common good. So many of these couples came from homes or conditions where life was a team effort. In the face of severe economic deprivation, illness, or unexpected death, the preservation and common welfare of the family was the collective goal. It was a conditioning they carried over to their marriages.

It is a legacy of this generation seldom mentioned with the same sense of awe as winning the war or building the mighty postwar economy, but the enduring qualities of love, marriage, and commitment are, I believe, equal to any of the other achievements.