January 11, 2002
  outside the line

Back when I was working at @Home and had just started dating the Guy, he took me out one night to an Indian restaurant down in Santa Clara called Pasand's. I don't think I've told this story before, have I? I went back to work and raved about the food there; my experience with Indian food was still pretty limited back then, but I was fairly sure that this place was quite good.

A peculiar expression crossed Indian Mom's face, but she didn't say anything.

A little while later, I went back to the restaurant and once more came back to work to talk about how good the place was. Once more that odd expression crossed her face. I paused.

"Wait," I said. With the idea that half a brain is better than no brain at all, I finally hooked up the pieces. "Is that the place that belongs to that guy with the girls from India. . . ?"

"I didn't want to say anything," Indian Mom said apologetically. "You sounded like you enjoyed it so much."

"Oh, crap," I sighed. "Guess I won't be going back there anymore."

Back in 2000, this case made headlines; a real estate tycoon named Lakireddy Bali Reddy who, with his sons, imported underage girls from India, imprisoned them, and used them for sex and cheap labor. One of them died after being exposed to carbon monoxide poisoning in the Reddy-owned apartment where she was living with two other underage women also brought over from India; the police were called in after a passerby saw Reddy dragging two bodies -- one girl dead, another unconscious -- into his truck and then try to force a screaming girl into the same truck.

He and his sons, all eventually indicted, were the owners of Pasands.

"He used some sort of defense that cultural tradition made the whole underage children for sex and slavery thing allowable," I observed to the gathered women of my group while I poked around sfgate.com to do some research on the case.

"He'd been living in the United States for forty years," one of them objected.

"I've never heard that it's part of our culture," said one of the Indians, dryly. "Maybe he means the American culture."

"Or the culture of men?" suggested someone else.

My stomach likes its satisfaction, but not at the cost of my conscience. As a consolation prize, Indian Mom gave me the name of an Indian restaurant right across from Pasands called Raparti; this proved an adequate substitute, and so the Guy and I went there last night.

That's all. Just wanted to share that.

One of the problems with being Unemployed -- still with the titular, capitalized first letter -- is that there's very little to talk about in conversation. When the Guy asks, "So how was your day?" I have to scrounge up something interesting out of a schedule that basically revolves around sleeping too much, eating too much, goofing off too much, and otherwise making a complete slug out of myself.

This is why I have substituted the radio for my real life. Not just any radio station, mind you. NPR. What happens on NPR is my life.

"I heard that Honda is coming out with a hybrid version of its Civic in a couple of months," I burbled last night. "And Ashcroft stepped out of any future investigation involving Enron because of conflict of interest; they were some of his biggest contributers during his senate run. And Israel knocked down some refugee camp buildings as retaliation for a boat full of arms that was coming into Palestine."

Suddenly, Unemployed, I've become a lot more interesting. I have. In a global scale, anyway. Oh, and educated. I've become a lot more educated, too.

More recently, the world has been conspiring to educate me about my racial and cultural heritage as a Japanese-American, something that I usually only think consciously about when presented with those racial profiling surveys put out by governments and sweepstakes. You know the one. "Would you consider yourself as: African-American, Pacific-Asian, etcetera etcetera."

At one point, I held a joint citizenship with Japan and America. Whether that's changed legally or not, I still have it emotionally set in my head that I'm still a joint citizen. I get as annoyed and rumpled about Japanese politics as I do about American, for different reasons; however, I'll be the first to admit that everything about me, from my attitude, my cultural worldview, is more American than Japanese. Would I ever want to live in Japan?

No. But.

Here's one for you. Go ahead and think of any mixed-race couple involving a Caucasian in the United States. If you know any, that is. Now, go ahead and describe them just as though you were going to talk about them to a friend. "I know this couple, he's __________ and she's ___________."

You know what I say, without thinking?

"I know this couple, he's American, and she's Japanese."

You know what I mean when I say American? I mean white. You know what I mean when I say Japanese? I mean Japanese-American.

Isn't that wicky?

Here's another one. According to NPR, children of mixed African and Caucasian heritage tend to think of themselves as "black." Children of mixed Asian and Caucasian heritage tend to think of themselves as "white."

Isn't that another curious thing?

The other day, I was called on by Mormon missionaries who tried very hard to engage me in conversation over a religion I really don't care much for. No offense to all you devout Mormons out there; I've read the Book of Mormon, I've talked to Mormons about their religion in the past, and I'm pretty sure that it's really not for me.

Coincidentally enough, this visit occurred right after I'd read an article on anti-polygamy protests that would be taking place during the Olympics in Salt Lake City, and the huge mass mailings that were taking place by the Church of Latter Day Saints to journalists who were registered to cover the Olympics.

I ended up having quite a long conversation with my roommate's boyfriend about Civil Rights and Mormons, which phased by natural conversational evolution towards the Japanese-American Citizen's League and its role during World War II.

And this is where I got really -- warning, bad word coming up -- fucking pissed off.

The JACL, for those who don't know, nominally represented the Japanese-Americans then and now, a membership league that claimed to look after the civil liberties and interests of Japanese-Americans in the United States. During the War, this involved working closely with the government, and pressuring interned Japanese-Americans to volunteer for service; no military historian would fail to know of the famous Purple Heart Brigade, the 442nd and 100th Infantry Battalion. Because of their close work with the government, leaders in the JACL were allowed early out of internship and given profitable jobs in the community; the brother-in-law of one is Norm Mineta, now the Transportation Secretary under Bush.

In 1990, faced with the Seattle Chapter's attempt to pass a resolution apologizing to victims of JACL wrongdoing during the War and accusations that the JACL had in fact not represented Japanese-American civil liberties during the War, but had rather furthered their own interests as well as commit heinous acts of fraud on Issei, first-generation Japanese, the board of the JACL hired an independent investigator named Lim to research their activities during the war and report on what she found.

Once the report was finished, the JACL reviewed the document and -- get this -- edited it. Severely. They removed entire pages and rewrote others, substituting wholesale paragraphs with passages taken from a book that Deborah Lim hadn't even used as a reference, cutting down a 154 page document to 28 pages.

Needless to say, the edits they made were in their favor.

This became the "official" release of the report. Over some controversy regarding an Internment Memorial in Washington DC, now built, my roommate's boyfriend and his friends managed to dig up the original version of the report by contacting Deborah Lim directly. This is now available online, after almost ten years of suppression by the JACL.

It's linked here. There's an interesting article here that sums up some of the key points of the report. You'll notice that the word "branding" shows up in there at one point, in the mouth of Mike Masaoka, the previously mentioned brother-in-law to Norm Mineta.

Then there's the draft, enforced on young Japanese-Americans -- you only needed to have one-sixteenth Japanese blood to be interned, incidentally; Hitler only demanded one-eighth Jewish -- when they refused to volunteer for service after being imprisoned in camps, and charges of sedition brought against draft resisters in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. More information about that can be found here.

And of course there's the story of James Omura, who defied both the JACL and the government in order to fight for the civil liberties of imprisoned Japanese-Americans during World War II, only to end up ostracized and punished by the selfsame people he'd tried to help.

The whole history of the Japanese-American experience in America is a complicated and convoluted thing; sometimes it seems like the worst damage done to Japanese-American interests is by Japanese-Americans. People are the same the world over, no matter how whitewashed the stereotypes are.

The Japanese-American experience during the War isn't something that really impacts me personally; I'm only second generation, and my parents came to the US after the war was over.

Still, I suppose being part of being Japanese-American is being part of the community, and with that comes all the history.

I kind of miss being able to believe the public myth of the Japanese-American community united, uniformly victims to a government that ignored constitutional rights, and the image of a Purple Heart Brigade that was completely voluntary and willing to die for their country.

Truth sucks.