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Poem: Dual Mortality

Petting my cat Booya
I count the cats I've had
And wonder how many more

I get to have?
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More Memories Of Kent, Washington: The Internment Of The Japanese Families

The first wave of immigrants to the Kent, Washington area happened shortly before 1900. The immigrants were mostly European. There were, even as I was growing up, several Italian families still farming the valley. The 1900 census count shows 13 Japanese families in and around Kent.

The number of Japanese immigrants rose steeply over the next few years until 1907, when the US Government put the brakes on the number of Japanese allowed to immigrate. Eventually, in the 1920's, they were banned altogether. The Anti-Alien Land Law in 1923 barred these immigrants from owning land, and even from becoming citizens. Those with a child born in America could put land in the child's name. Some of the Japanese worked for established farmers and some cleared land and began their own farms in Kent, Auburn, and the nearby villages O'Brien, Orillia, and Thomas.

Many Japanese farmers had dairy farms until the price of milk plummeted after the Great War. Those farmers jumped into vegetable and berry farming, and their truck farms were profitable. They sold produce in Seattle, at farm stands, and shipped lettuce and cabbage to the east coast.

In 1930 there were about 200 Japanese families farming in the White/Green River valley. In 1942 during WW II all Japanese people in the White/Green River Valley were ordered evacuated from this area and were detained at the War Relocation Camp at Tule Lake, California. They lost their businesses, farms and personal belongings. They lost everything in the war hysteria.

.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them jailed with Executive Order 9066, a law designating certain "military areas" as zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Thus, in one of our more shameful national acts of jingoistic racism, all people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the entire Pacific coast--all of California, Oregon and Washington (except for those already in internment camps). In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law, saying it is permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity." I don't know if that decision still stands or not. Perhaps this is the precedent we use for locking up various Muslims and people of middle-eastern extraction.

The forced removal encompassed about 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans--3/5 of them U.S. citizens. They were sent to quickly and shoddily constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" in remote portions of the nation's interior. . .far away from where they might have, say, used a flashlight to guide a fleet of Japanese bombers toward the Boeing warplane plant.

My mother, Betty Brummet, remembers Japanese American kids being marched from Ballard High School one day. Some of the students lined up and booed.

The phrase "shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") summarized the interned families' resignation to their helplessness. This was even noticed by the children, as mentioned in Farewell to Manzanar. The Japanese people tended not to make waves, and complied with the government to prove themselves "loyal citizens."

Dust storm at an internment camp a/k/a relocation center

In our war hysteria, we didn't want any Japanese Americans near the west coast. They would form cells and assist soldiers and pilots from the motherland in attacking The Pacific Coast. The number of Germans and Italians placed in the camps is only a fraction of their total population compared with the Japanese, virtually all of whom were locked up.

After the war only about thirty families returned to the valley area. I remember the Miyoshis, Yamadas, Nakaharas, Koyamatsus, Hiranakas, and Okimotos. Some of them got back into farming (not on their old farms, which had been confiscated and sold). I worked on the Yamada's farm a couple of springs, cutting and boxing rhubarb, and I worked for a couple of weeks on Kart Funai's farm one summer, bunching radishes and scallions.

In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation awarding formal payments of $20,000 each to the surviving internees—60,000 in all. This same year, formal apologies were also issued by the government of Canada to Japanese Canadian survivors, who were each repaid the sum of $21,000 Canadian dollars. President Ronald Reagan even apologized on behalf of the United States. $21,000 would buy a fraction of the hundreds of acres of stolen land. Sure, it's better than the reparations paid to the families of slaves (zero, to date), but a pittance compared to losing everything you owned, and the farms you nurtured. If they held on until now, they'd all be rich.

Through the 1950's the Green River continued to flood the valley floor in late spring. This is what made the valley floor some of the richest soil in the world. . .but, alas, flooding prevented big business from locating there. In 1963 the Army Corps of Engineers built the Howard Hansen Dam (an earthen dam, still protecting the valley from floods) to regulate the river waters. The danger of uncontrolled flooding ended. The flat, treeless land on the valley floor now was an attractive area for business. And build they did.

Boeing built an aerospace lab, and the floodgates were opened. Farming was over, and dwindled rapidly, although there are a few pockets left. One of my old high school mates, Danny Carpinito has in fact become a wealthy vegetable farmer. Of the Japanese kids I knew in school, virtually none remained in Kent after high school. Of course, neither did I nor most of my friends, although some of our familes still live there.

Sources:

The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

The History of Kent, Washington: http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/curriculum/vtours/kent/

Japanese Relocation Centers: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/internment1.html

The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American

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Collage: The State Of The Union

click the collage to enlarge

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Ex-Canadian Minister of Defense Hellyer Says We Should Not Let The U.S. Start A War With The Greys

From exopolitics.org, I learned that Paul Hellyer in a speech at the Exopolitics Toronto Symposium in which he spoke out about "extraterrestrial visitors & government secrecy."

In the hundred articles that have appeared here on Alien Lore, government secrecy has been a central issue. And now the Honorable Hellyer adds his voice to the chorus. It's good to have one of our brothers from the Great White North air his thoughts on this topic:

Hellyer claimed that evidence concerning UFOs is the "greatest and most successful cover up in the history of the world."

"The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning ... The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

Go here to read the entire article on http://exopolitics.org.

A recent posting on All This Is That concerning exopolitics: http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/2007/01/alien-lore-no-94-exopolitics.html

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Collage: Condoleezza Rice and George Bush's Appetite For Manflesh Grows Stronger Every Day

Click Secretary Rice and President Bush To Enlarge
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A sick site: Coloringbookland.com

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Barack Omama Gives Veep Cheney A Verbal Bitch-slap

Barack Hussein Obama, speaking at a huge rally in Austin, talked about England's decision to withdraw thousands of troops from Iraq. "Now if Tony Blair can understand that, then why can't George Bush and Dick Cheney understand that?" Obama asked the crowd of rain-soaked supporters. "In fact, Dick Cheney said this is all part of the plan (and) it was a good thing that Tony Blair was withdrawing, even as the administration is preparing to put 20,000 more of our young men and women in."

"Now, keep in mind, this is the same guy that said we'd be greeted as liberators, the same guy that said that we're in the last throes. I'm sure he forecast sun today," Obama said to supporters holding signs over their heads to keep dry. "When Dick Cheney says it's a good thing, you know that you've probably got some big problems.

Poem: Changes 37/ The Family

The influence that goes out
From the family
Is like the wind

Created by fire
Heat creates energy
The wind is stirred by fire

And issues from the flames
Travelling out
Into the world

Made affective and effective
As others adapt and conform to it
Gathering winds

Blow through the world
Roiling the sand and trees and water
Across the land and hills and seas.
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Britneyspears.com

click image to enlarge. (Recent Britney Spears photographs added by All This Is That)
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My Elementary School Teachers, Part 1: As The Twig Is Bent

"As the twig is bent the tree inclines," Virgil wrote. Schoolteachers do just about more twig-bending than anyone. Mine were no exception. In elementary school, the teachers were mostly benign; I didn't get into the real sadist, misfit, misanthropic, lecherous, dried-up, bitter, shell-shocked, racist and jingoistic types until I hit junior- and senior-high school.

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Crowley, was a warm and kindly woman. She wore plaid. She had a reassuring smile, auburn hair, full lips, and a light dusting of freckles. My memories of her circle around reading, singing, drawing, and graham crackers and milk. I remember no traumas or anything untoward—a few tantrums by my fellow pupils, and an angry father bursting in once, fuming over some imagined injury to Sally or Billy's chrysalis psyche.

Mrs. Crowley had the joy, humor, patience and understanding that should be a job requirement for teachers. I was called on the carpet once, in an incident I wrote about earlier, for returning from a camping trip, and peppering my "Show And Tell" speech with a few f**ks, c********rs, and s**ts, capped off with the interesting hand gesture I'd learned to perform on the trip. My father got in more hot water than I did over that weekend.

The nine months I florished in Mrs. Crowley's warm benevolence was the calm before the storm. Those happy days would soon fade away—when I was savagely flung into the charge of Miss Echo, the very terrestrial personification of Sycorax. Her classroom was my Bastille or Tower of London.


click to enlarge Jack, and John, Sr. at the Bumping River

Miss Echo, my first grade teacher, was a hirsute, cranky, unsettling, misanthropic, foul smelling battleaxe a few months from retirement. As she ground out the last few months before her pension kicked in, she was determined to ricochet every slight and indignity she had suffered in her forty-year career back at the miscreants she fingered as the authors of her miserable life.




illustration from http://www.fearofflyingdoctor.com/

Even with a brother and father dying, a plunge into poverty, the many hazards and heartbreaks of adolescence, and a life at odds with the police, I was more traumatized by my first grade teacher than by anyone or everything else during my elementary years, and maybe everything and anyone since. At the very least Mrs. Echo instilled in me a life-long "issue" *cough cough* with authority figures [1] ranging from policemen to teachers,bank clerks, meter maids, foremen, shop stewards, union reps, counselors, principals, bosses, government clerks, principals, border guards, benefit screeners, poetry and art juries, insurance adjusters, Priests, televangelists, politicians, pontiffs, Judges, and maybe even pilots.

I just did a G.I.S. for "authority figures" and it brought me to The Fear of Flying Doctor website where I learned that my fear of flying, a/k/a aviophobia, may stem from a problem with authority figures! Can I blame that on Mrs. Echo too?



Miss Echo's voice could curdle milk, and perhaps even gasoline. Fingernails raked across a slate blackboard were mellifluous compared to the brittle, quavering rasp of her voice. She was a last vestige of the school of thought that punished southpaws to "cure" them. I was a rightie, but she never failed to belittle my handwriting, nor my parents for their genes, and for tolerating my slovenly hand.

The words "poor coordination" were etched into my brain until I came to believe it. I received no credit for being able to read at the fifth grade level, nor for the actual content of my writing. She treated me as borderline retarded due to my difficulties in executing cursive script via the long since discredited Palmer Method. This entire year of school was unique for me—it was the only time in my 16 year education that I didn't actually enjoy going to school. I can only guess at how many other young souls she twisted and even destroyed in her forty miserable years of teaching? How many serial killers, petty criminals and wife-beaters had she unleashed on society in her four decades at the helm? In the end, my handwriting didn't matter at all, and in the end, perhaps she was the one who taught me 1) how to not worry; 2) how to amble through life as if it were made for me; and 3) that maybe a healthy disdain of authority figures was not such a bad thing at all.

[1] Perhaps a problem with authority figures is not the deviant behavior we've been lead to believe. After all, the Milgram experiment showed that over 60% of a sample of Americans demonstrated willingness to severely torture another person when given orders from an "appropriate" authority figure.
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Now, let's have an Amazon moment. If you liked this story, you might like these other stories appearing in All This Is That about Jack Brummet growing up, and having grown:

Fishing With The Old Man Uncle Romey Uncle Guy, more hillbilly cred, and living a good life My Grandma's tavern in Carnation, Wash. My Dog Slugger Hucking Eggs in Kent, Washington
Square Dance At Valley Elementary
Foot Washing Baptists & The Catholic Devils
Hillbilly Cred
Growing Up In Kent, Washington: Tarheels, Hayseeds, Hillbillies, and Crackers
Cruising the Renton loop with a keg of nails
The Time I Got Drunk With Roy Rogers
My Worst Jobs: 50 Tons of Sand
My Worst Jobs: McGoo
My Pathetic Political Career
The Month They Tried To Kill Me
My Worst Jobs - Brewburger
Stopping By Richard Nixon's
Defensive Daydreaming
My Worst Jobs - Design Insanity - Hype, Shuck, and Jive In The Dot-Com Years
My Worst Jobs - SALSA
Jerry Melin, still missing, still missed
18,906 Days On Turtle Island
The Day I went Bald My Jobs (List Number 9)
My Favorite Rock and Jazz Shows
More Shows I've seen over the years
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Poem: Changes 36/How to keep moving in the darkening of the light

1
The sun sinks
Beneath the earth
The sky darkens

2
You keep the inner light aflame
While outwardly yielding
Hide the light under a bushel no

You're going to let it shine
And not be shaken or swept
By circumstance

Play dumb play slow play luckless
Power is like fastening
A target to your back

When difficulty surrounds
You like a moat
You persevere

Spoof lie omit mislead spin
Don't awaken enmity
Be the stealthy smiler

With the knife beneath your cloak
Let things pass
Because all things must pass

3
With grandiose resolve
A man endeavors
To soar above all obstacles

The Lord of Light is subordinate to
And wounded by the Lord of Darkness
The injury is not fatal

But a hindrance
Help is on the way
The wounded man ignores himself

And thinks only of saving the others
Their great leader is captured
There is no longer hope

And you are able
To leave the scene of disaster
before the storm breaks

4
First he climbed up to heaven,
Then plunged into the depths of the earth.
Here the climax of the darkening is reached

The dark power
held so high a place
it could wound all on the side of the light.

5
In the end evil perishes in its own darkness
Like a squid simmered in its own ink
Because evil must fall at the moment

It has overcome the good,
And consumed the energy
To which it owed its duration.
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