tencamps.org

Internees built this auditorium in 1944. The building now houses the Manzanar National Historic Site Interpretive Center.

Accounts of camp life at Manzanar describe how strong winds would kick up torrents of dust and sand from the desert floor.

Once we left the protection of a line of trees — trees that had been planted sixty years before by interned Japanese Americans — we got a small taste of Manzanar wind and dust.

One of the most striking differences between Tule Lake and Manzanar was the presence of signs. At Tule Lake, we had to use old maps, make our way through sagebrush, and stare at a can, or a bit of concrete, or a piece of barbed wire, and then wonder if we were at the “right” place. In Manzanar, wooden signs marked the former locations of everything. In some cases, signs marked sites where it was difficult, if not impossible, to see any trace of what had been there before.

Before arriving at Manzanar proper, we stopped at the Eastern California Museum.  Although the National Park Service museum in Manzanar is much larger, the Eastern California Museum has been around for much longer, and thanks to donations from former internees, it has a much more extensive collection of camp artifacts.

The museum has several exhibits dedicated to regional history as well.  The third picture above is of John looking at the “Barbed Wire” exhibit. I assumed that the exhibit was about the barbed wire at Manzanar, but the exhibit is really about how the development of various kinds of wire was crucial to cattle ranching and non-native settlement in Eastern California.

One wonders which kinds of wire were used at Manzanar.

The exhibits on internment are in the adjoining room. The pictures below show only a small sample of the material in the exhibits.

After descending into the Owens Valley, we stopped in the town of Bishop for some lunch. Hot. Dry. There was also a large county fair going on, so there were a lot of RVs and trucks with trailers parked in the streets. We didn’t have time to stick around and check out the fair, but we did see lots of people walking around the street with impressive hats.

It’s been a few months since my last post. I don’t want to continue neglecting work on a blog that takes as its topic sites that should not be neglected.

Classes, teaching, research, travel — these are all things that I enjoy but they take a lot of time and energy. There have to be ways to live and work in the present but still have time to reflect on the past.

“Multiple processing.”

Up until now, I have been resizing images one at a time. This has made the technical aspect of posting take much more time than it should have.

A friend of mine recently reminded me that I can resize large quantities of images using the “process multiple files” function in my photo editing software. Now, instead of waiting for each photo to resize and compress, I can just let the program run on its own and do other things: get a snack, read a book chapter, check on the laundry, write a blog entry, etc.

Thanks Juan!

The Committee to Save East Asian Languages and Korean Studies at Berkeley now has a donor appeal letter and form. Check it out, and if you can, please donate to save language classes and lecturer positions at Berkeley.

Last week I was in a funk about the state of East Asian languages at UC Berkeley, but over the last few days I now feel a sense of guarded optimism. Students at Berkeley are really turning out in force to demand access to their language classes. Even though we’re in the middle of finals, hundreds of students, staff, and faculty showed up at a rally to “Save East Asian Languages and Korean Studies.” There’s been a huge e-mail and letter-writing campaign (one dean reportedly received 750+ e-mails in one morning!) . Petition drives have collected upwards of 3,000 signatures. Students are now setting up a grassroots fundraising campaign. Twelve local media outlets have published or broadcast stories on these student efforts. The level of passion and commitment shown by UC Berkeley undergraduates — wonderful, awesome, inspiring… I’m really glad I’m a part of the UC Berkeley community and I hope that undergraduates get back the level of state funding (investment!) that they deserve at a public university.

Here are some great sites with info about the movement to fight language education cuts at UC Berkeley:

http://savekoreanstudies.blogspot.com

http://supportealang.blogspot.com/

And here’s a website with a petition that you can sign in support of East Asian language education at Berkeley

http://petition.berkeley.edu

And Facebook Groups:

Support East Asian Language Education

Save Korean Studies at UC Berkeley

Object to EALC Budget Cuts!

dare ga tsukau no

This morning, I learned the following:

As a result of budget cuts at UC Berkeley — sad how that phrase seems so “normal” — 40% of Japanese language classes, 54% of Chinese language classes, and 66% of Korean language classes will be eliminated. 1560 students currently taking these East Asian languages will not be allowed to continue. These students will join the hundreds of other Berkeley undergraduates who can’t get into these high-demand language classes.

dare ga tsukau no

For the last few weeks, I had heard rumors about big cuts - after lectures, in the hallway, outside my morning class, at department gatherings, at a bar with other grad students. And honestly, without even thinking, I accepted the cuts as just something that would just happen, an inevitability. Even after reading about the numbers of students and lecturers that would be affected, I thought, well - this is unfortunate, perhaps even shocking.

dare ga tsukau no

I met with an adviser of mine in the hallway. He told me about the outrage and hurt of many students and their parents. Our conversation turned to how outraged Korean students and parents were, and how comparatively quiet Japanese students and parents were. “Well, there just aren’t that many of us anymore.” I said.

No.

Maybe I said, “Well, there just aren’t many of them anymore.”

dare ga tsukau no

I had until three o’clock to read the texts for seminar. A guest was going to talk to us about melodrama, Shikitei Sanba (1776-1822), and Sanba’s guide to the world of kabuki. I did the best I could reading through the texts. Edo texts are hard, and these were filled with references to Chinese folk tales I had never heard of and names of Chinese playwrights and poets I didn’t even know how to pronounce. Thankfully we had a version printed in modern characters. If I had to read the original kuzushiji, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it through a page. As it was, I only had time to skim. I ran my right finger up and down the page, desperately trying to extract some basic idea of what was going on.

dare ga tsukau no

I walked into the East Asian library at 3, tugging along the battered orange suitcase that held the video projector for our guest. I ran into a librarian who I had been meaning to talk to — we talked for a little while about Tani Jouji - not many people have heard of Tani Jouji - and the state of microfilm of Japanese-language Japanese-American newspapers from the early twentieth century, and how some of them were available, but just not cataloged yet. I went downstairs and picked up a 1967 edition of Tani Jouji’s Meriken Jappu, went back upstairs and checked it out. The library clerk had to paste in a circulation slip — no one had checked it out in the last few decades. This happens a lot in the East Asian Library and I sometimes get a little thrill out of looking at something no one else has checked out yet.

dare ga tsukau no

The seminar was great. Our guest arranged for us to look at dozens of 19th century texts from our library’s special collections. These books had maps of the theater, detailed explanations of kabuki costumes and hairstyles, annotations explaining the significance of actor’s crests, patterns on kimono, the symbolic meaning of various kinds of makeup, and on, and on. We read through the preface, and looked at all the online databases and reference materials that could help us piece together the world of references and allusions that made up the world of 19th century kabuki. We talked about high and low culture, the ambivalence of selling high culture to the masses, the popular diffusion of playbills, manuals, guides, and so on, to groups of people who wouldn’t have been able to afford the high prices to actually see a live performance.

dare ga tsukau no

As we cleaned up, taking the books off the protective foam stands, replacing them into their protective navy-blue box-covers, I thought about how wonderful this collection of books was. How lucky I was to be able to touch them - and haltingly, to try to read them!

dare ga tsukau no

I had just spent hours in a beautiful new library — the largest free-standing library in North America dedicated exclusively to East Asian language texts. It is an impressive building, with a broad grey facade, covered with elegant bronze grillwork. The interior of the building is finished with richly-colored wood, and there are wonderful windows that look out onto a grassy, oak-covered slope. Many students use the carrels and open spaces to study. A 46.4 million dollar building - through and through.

dare ga tsukau no

As I walked outside the shiny new building, I began to find a name for the sense of unease I had felt throughout the day, perhaps even for the past few weeks. What is the use of this beautiful library, if one year from now, 1560 students who should have been able to use it, actually use it, can’t. What if this loss happens year after year? How many thousands of students who could have, should have, might have, won’t?

There were only four of us in that seminar room, conjuring visions of the 19th century world of kabuki. I was the first person in decades to check out that copy of Tani Jouji’s stories about Japanese-American life in the early 20th century. These, at first, might seem like irrelevant curiosities suitable for elite connoisseurs. But studying 19th century kabuki allows us to look at how Japanese crowds, masses, and urban-dwellers might have looked at the world, a way of life and seeing radically disrupted by the “opening” of Japan. The comic Meriken Jappu stories of Tani Jouji are an invaluable, and tragically forgotten, cultural heritage not just for tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, but for all Americans. (What would happen if tomorrow we forgot about Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sadakichi Hartmann?)

dare ga tsukau no

The library began to seem like a tomb to me. An elegant museum, or worse, a mausoleum. One could walk among its corridors, and find a quiet space to study. And the books, like the richly-colored wood, and the viewing windows, and the bronze grill-work, and the elegant facades, would be just another architectural element. Inert, unopened.
dare ga tsukau no

Without three years of intensive Japanese language training at Berkeley, without the instruction of excellent lecturers like Komatsu-sensei, Omoto-sensei, Kosaka-sensei, Yahata-sensei, Urayama-sensei, Shibahara-sensei, Tomizuka-sensei …– so much of who I am now, what I know, what I’ve learned, would never have been.

I might never have crossed the country and visited ten camps. I would still have talked to my grandmother in baby-speak about how oishii her food was, instead of learning about my great-grandfather’s involvement in integration movements for burakumin, or about the firebombing of Hamamatsu, or what it was like to eat barley and yams instead of rice in the days before irrigation reached her family’s land. I would never have been able to read (or translate) forgotten novels about Japanese immigrants in 1920s Los Angeles. I wouldn’t be able to read poems written by Taiwanese living under Japanese rule. I would probably be unable to sustain a Japanese conversation with a hotel manager in Little Tokyo, and I wouldn’t get the jokes of the manzai group Rahmens. I would never have been able to meet all the brilliant friends and colleagues I’ve met through the study of Japanese.

And I’m starting Chinese too…

dare ga tsukau no

The paragraph above is a little self-congratulatory in tone. I’m only 26 - mada wakai... I haven’t accomplished that much — but through learning Japanese, I can see whole new worlds, and return to old ones that might be lost. It gets to one’s head.

dare ga tsukau no

This beautiful library is a gift and a box and a mausoleum and a gateway to myriad worlds. Look at how many backs of heads are arrayed in front of it. Expectation. What will come out of it?
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/publications/egrad/images/ph_starr.jpg

dare ga tsukau no

Who uses… who will use this… who wants to use this? Such a basic question…before today it seemed distant, latent. But tonight — it’s 1AM now, I can’t do anything but think about it over and over. The question - the way of asking it - is not a cry of desperation, or of accusation. The question is an invitation. It sounds like pushing open a gate, lifting a lid, opening a cover, passing on an heirloom, letting a friend take a turn.

dare ga tsukau no

dare ga tsukau no