Great-grandfather and Great-Grandmother's
wedding photograph, prior to emigrating to U.S.

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Still, like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”

—from “The Site of Memory” by Toni Morrison

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Honolulu—7th December 2007

Public national mourning rituals in the United States have their own political force, even while serving the larger enterprise of reincorporating and remembering those lost souls and survivors from past wars. It is no surprise that each year in the State of Hawai‘i, Pearl Harbor Day is observed on December 7th, marking an intersection where mourning meets the contemporary reconciliation of U.S. progress and nation-building through the frame of nostalgic reflection. Although on a much grander scale, the 60th Anniversary in 2001 was no exception, since Pearl Harbor Day coincided with Buena Vista’s release of the film Pearl Harbor (2001), starring Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett. The film’s premiere, and a first ever in film history, took place on a U.S. aircraft carrier—the John C. Stennis—which was anchored in Pearl Harbor, equipped with an outdoor movie screen and carrying U.S. WWII veterans; it culminated in a fireworks display that ended the screening.

Local news stations’ reports of the gala framed anchorpersons standing in the forefront of wide-screen shots of the battleship while the Arizona Memorial and USS Missouri framed the background. If this reminiscence wasn’t enough, this year’s festivities included the unveiling of the $1.2 million memorial dedicated to the 429 sailors and marines of the USS Oklahoma who had died on this ship. A ceremony was held to honor the fallen just several feet from the spot where torpedoes dropped on the battleship. The Oklahoma had been berthed alongside Ford Island and suffered the second greatest loss of life during the attack in 1941. As a teary-eyed survivor remembered for a news reporter, “It took eleven and a half minutes for the ship to capsize, and sixty-six years to memorialize the 429 crew members who lost their lives that fateful day.… They didn’t give their lives. They were taken from them” (KITV).

Dominant national narratives of memorializing and remembering the dead from wartimes past and present are part and parcel of history in the (re)making—there is an official story that is told and retold so that future generations of Americans might not allow history to repeat itself—“a day that will live in infamy!” Yet, as Japanese Americans, how do we remember a history that is silenced or completely forgotten? How might we recover a story from those few remaining survivors of the Japanese American Internment who are still, in many respects, waiting to be memorialized?

I am not talking here about the recovery of a general collective history of relocation and internment, but an internal life experience based upon this collectivity. This is precisely what Toni Morrison attempts to reconcile in her article, “The Site of Memory.” Contemplating the differences and similarities between self-recollection (memoir) and fiction, Morrison explains how, in coming to terms with her relation to the slave narratives, she has had to learn that her “job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate,’” and how to recover an interior life from these narratives. Morrison goes on to explain how memory becomes the vehicle with which she begins to recover an internal history through the act of imagination. Excavating this type of imagination can be difficult since how does one remember when oftentimes there are few or no internal memories to dig up with respect to Japanese American relocation and internment?

For each year I have lived in Hawai‘i, December 7th has always conjured up completely different images, especially in relation to the ceremonies enacted without fail at the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. Trying to make sense out of my life experiences as a Sansei Japanese American, memorializing at Pearl Harbor each year excavates a different, competing counter-narrative. February 19, 1942, is a day that lives in infamy for Japanese Americans. On this day, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, making it a “military necessity” that all people of Japanese descent, whether citizens or not, should be evacuated from the western states and detained in internment camps. We were considered an unassimilable race, denied the right to own property in some states, and discriminated against because of our marked physical differences in appearance from other Americans. This experience is nothing new to me, as I have known what it feels like to be treated as “the other” while growing up in Southern California. I soon realized that my genealogical history remained embedded in my father’s memories as a young boy growing up along the Oregon coast—a story he had kept in silence for many years.

Grandmother and father on family farm, circa 1936.