Wednesday Jul 13, 2022

We’re at Manzanar. America is Out There.

In this episode we talk with Brenda Beza, host of the podcast Your Healing Nature, and we hear her excellent interview with John Tateishi, former National Executive Director of the Japanese American Citizens League and author of the book Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations.

At two and a half years old, John was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans who, at the outbreak of WWII, were forced from their homes in the western states and imprisoned in America’s concentration camps. With his family, he was sent to the so-called Manzanar Relocation Center in the Eastern Sierras, one of ten American concentration camps in which Japanese Americans spent the war as civilian prisoners of their own government without ever having been charged with any crimes.

In this episode, we discuss John’s root story, spending his formative childhood years as a prisoner at Manzanar, how traditional Japanese cultural values impacted the healing of the Japanese American community, his role in leading the fight for Japanese American reparations and so much more.

More from Plug Tone Audio at https://www.plugtoneaudio.com/

You can find the song Kenji from Fort Minor at https://open.spotify.com/album/5v4Vx9loqMQCS3J7OmP9pa?highlight=spotify:track:6H503HrJOogVycvQkq2SuG

Learn more about Brenda Beza and Your Healing Nature at https://www.plugtoneaudio.com/your-healing-nature

You can learn more about John Tateishi here:

https://www.johntateishi.com/

You can purchase Redress here through Heyday Books:

https://www.heydaybooks.com/catalog/redress-the-inside-story-of-the-successful-campaign-for-japanese-american-reparations/

Manzanar National Historic Site:

https://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm

About the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

(National Archives)

https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/hearings