9/10/2023 0 Comments Mitsuye endo with sisters![]() Only then did I learn about Endo’s participation in a lawsuit with 63 other wrongfully fired Japanese American state of California employees. That same year, I found a law journal article by Elissa Ouchida. There he made his own discoveries about Endo’s personality, including the confirmation of his hunch that Endo, like many Nisei, went by an “American” nickname, “Mitzi.” Eventually Abe flew to the Midwest to meet them. Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which had produced a short posthumous documentary honoring Endo, connected me with her children. Abe, who has been working on camp history for over 40 years, was concerned that we wouldn’t find what we needed to tell her story. As historian Greg Robinson notes, “(Endo) represents an unusual case of heroism - a hero both self-effacing and effaced by others.”Įleven years after Endo’s death, in 2017, I began working with my co-author, Frank Abe, to tell her story. She did not participate in the testimonies of the 1970s and 1980s redress movement for reparations. She gave only two painfully short interviews, one in 1976 and the other for John Tateishi’s 1984 oral history collection, “And Justice for All.” Her 2019 New York Times obituary says that she spoke about her experiences with her children when asked, but they did not know about her case or its significance for years. Without question, Endo wrapped a layer of silence around herself and her case. It can also mean refusal to speak on someone else’s terms. As a scholar of Japanese American women’s literature, I know that silence has multiple meanings. Layers of silence have veiled Endo for years. Why, I wondered, didn’t everyone know more about the case that helped lead to the closing of the concentration camps for all Japanese Americans? ![]() But while Endo’s case is familiar to those in legal circles and Japanese American studies, her story is largely unknown by the general public. As a daughter, granddaughter and niece of Japanese American camp survivors, I have been reading about my community’s wartime incarceration for most of my life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |