Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20221113-kanaye-nagasawa-the-samurai-who-forever-changed-california

by rntn • 4 years ago

154 79 4 years ago

usui• 4 years ago

In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered the forced removal of Japanese American "enemy aliens". The Nagasawa heirs, who were still fighting the estate's seizure in court, were incarcerated in internment camps. Like the approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned until after the end of World War Two, they lost any chance of reclaiming the property.

Absolutely disgusting that it took the United States 50 years from 1942 to acknowledge injustices like this had occurred as well as disburse the funds in an attempt to correct its mistakes. It was $20,000 in the 1990s, yay whoopee... I have friends whose families still, to this day, do not forgive the American government for what it did. A good majority of grandparents/parents were dead by then. Many returnees from the camps systematically tried to erase any cultural heritage they had by purposely hiding it and not passing it on to future generations, as a result of their treatment. Because of that, many Japanese perceive Japanese Americans from that time period as cultureless. Btw, the 442nd Regiment, comprised of Japanese Americans, received the most awards in U.S. history for military service in WW2.

Then you take into account the loss of capital from Nagasawa losing his vineyard, and it gets even worse.

femiagbabiaka• 4 years ago

Not surprising. The US has not paid reparations to most of the people it has wronged.

rgrieselhuber4• 4 years ago

Amazing what sort of atrocities people will commit when fear and emergencies are invoked.

rayiner3• 4 years ago

Has anybody ever paid reparations to anybody? Inter-Generational debt just isn’t a thing.

Cyberdog3• 4 years ago

To this day I am dumbfounded that Roosevelt is still as revered as he is. He had other problems like poor economic policy that probably prolonged the Great Depression, but you don't even need to look at any of that - the dude implemented an executive order which put American citizens into effective prisons with no due process, based only on their ethnicity. Trump, who I'm told is a racist and a fascist and so forth, never even tried to do anything close to that.

You want to start toppling statues and changing street names of dead white guys? Start with that one. What a creep.

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

Also, Korematsu v. United States, one of the all time worst Supreme Court decisions, maybe only second to Dred Scott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States

labster• 4 years ago

Instead of starting with FDR, why not first cancel the US Presidents who literally owned slaves or who literally engaged in genocide against the natives? Just a thought.

I mean, imprisoning people for just minding their own business, based mainly on skin color, is something that every president has done since the laws against marijuana were passed. Not sure why you’d single out FDR.

runjake• 4 years ago

  > Trump, who I'm told is a racist and a fascist and so forth, never even tried to do anything close to that.

Central Americans might disagree with you.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/immigration-kids-t...

retrac• 4 years ago

The war. He won the war, or is perceived to have. Simple as that. Churchill gets the same treatment in the UK despite, in my view, being far worse than FDR, both as a man, and in government policy. De Gaulle got it as well, practically apotheosized while still alive. Stalin too; in Russia he is still ranked as one of their greatest leaders. It would seem that being in power while prevailing in a total war translates automatically into sainthood.

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

The main architect of the Japanese internment camps (out in Owen Valley California) was John J McCloy:

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese...

"Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage. The 87-year-old retired diplomat testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which was charted by Congress last year to determine whether the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and relocated in camps in the East and Middle West in 1942 were entitled to compensation."

McCloy has an interestingly creepy history - head of the World Bank post WWII (1947-1949), High Commissioner of Occupied Germany (1949-1952) (where he released a lot of Nazi industrialists from prison, claiming they were just good anti-communists), Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations (1954-1969), member of the Warren Commission, which buried any real investigation into the Kennedy Assassination in 1963), Board Member of the Ford Foundation (which served in part as cover for CIA activities) then back to a Rockefeller-linked law firm for the rest of his career.

Most historical accounts show him pressing hard for internment, and FDR basically went along, not willing to fight about it. He defended the program up to his dying day:

"''I don't like the word 'incarcerated,' '' Mr. McCloy replied. ''Well, all right, behind barbed wire fences,'' Mr. Marutani snapped. Mr. McCloy cautioned the commission, which is to report the findings of its inquiry to Congress next year, not to advocate policies that might someday prevent the forcible relocation of other American citizens because of ethnic background."

ch4s33• 4 years ago

Yeah, FDR's government really liked taking land from people. The TVA basically tossed black farmers out on their asses[1]. The Housing Act of 1937 was used to clear out "slums"[2] and required new housing be provided, but it was largely used to suppress and disperse immigrants and African Americans. The New Deal was pretty terrible if you were black and owned anything, not to mention the intentional setting of minimum wages to a level that would ensure black unemployment[3].

[1]https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9ef5262e76846dfa1074cb...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1937

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-racist-history-of-minimu...

fakedang• 4 years ago

You also forgot the seizure of gold and the forced sale at below market rates. And the mandate that prevented Americans from owning bullion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

photochemsyn2• 4 years ago

From your sources:

"While the Housing Act of 1937 looked to solve American housing issues, it became marred by inequalities and problems. The main problem that rose from the legislation was the power given to the local governments. The Federal government let the local governments and voters decided on where and how to use the federal funding. This lead to local governments maintaining segregationist housing policies as well as allowing many public housing locations to become neglected."

badrabbit3• 4 years ago

At the risk of being overly controversial, what would have been a better option given the times. Lynching black people was not uncommon back then for context of how minorities were treated. Of course taking away someomes property when they have done no wrong is wrong. Or the internment camps. They did bad things because it was war.

Do you remember how muslim americans were treated and attacked after 9\11? The animosity of the majority of americans towards them? The point I am making is even now this is how people react but back then modern concepts of human rights and justice were not prevalent.

The war effort then was not like any war effort afterwards. It requires mobilizing the civilian society "lose lips sink ships" for example was a big motto because a lot of people see stuff and if they repeat it, it can make it to the enemy. Combine that with the fact that the japanese emperror was regarded as a god by the japanese, you can see how much paranoia war time president and generals would have about anyone japanese related.

I am not saying what they did was in any way justified but rather if I was in their shoes I would also be susceptible to committing such atrocities. Really, what I am trying to say is how easy it is to do what america did to the Japanese americans then and how we should not be so quick to pass judgement. Their motivation was fear and paranoia in the time of war not hatred like with Germany's camps.

Judging people of the past is easy but learning from history is hard. The lesson I learned from this is you have to be strong (whatever that means) and resist attempts by the government to do these things in the future as well as educate people on history like this.

It may not happen to japanese people but it can happen again. If there is war with China and they start sabotaging, extorting and bombing americans are you sure chinese americans won't be mistreated again? All it takes is 51% of people to agree in a time of war (fear of death and cruelty).

giraffe_lady• 4 years ago

I have to point out that these actions were condemned contemporaneously as well. Even in their own time, by others living through those times, this was considered an atrocity. Standards of socially acceptable harm to minorities may have been different then, but we also know that this was easily recognized as unjust at the time, by the fact that so many people at the time did condemn it as unjust.

pempem• 4 years ago

'Back then' is a tricky thing. In fact, ways of acting in war, treating prisoners, and even treating citizens have been around since before Hammurabi. The rule of law (everyone equal in the eyes of the law) has been footballed around a variety of early civilizations and rulers.

WWI and II were unique in the number of countries involved and the cascading effects. The goal is to not do this anymore and we keep restating the goal as a species but keep failing.

1letterunixname• 4 years ago

All along the hills following Blossom Hill Road in San Jose used to be wineries. Very few remnants of these wineries exist because they were replaced with single family homes when the value of the land increased in the 1980's onward. Some of the larger homes on the hills of San Jose / Los Gatos have a few scions.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Wonder if there's any connection in the name of Sakamoto Elementary.

shagie• 4 years ago

I suspect its named for Paul Sakamoto, though I haven't found anything to say one way or the other yet - https://www.jamsj.org/manabu/paul-sakamoto

zackmorris2• 4 years ago

Mentioned by the article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

This notion of freedom resonates with me the most. I want to live in a society where basic needs are met through automation, so that people can spend the majority of their time following their calling and finding meaning. Less than 2 hours per day should be spent working towards survival, or else our tech offers little benefit over living in a hunter-gatherer society.

Concretely, that would look like:

* Robots pay taxes - not people, to be used for UBI

* No taxes on necessary commodities like food, high taxes on luxuries

* Taxes on unearned income would always be higher than on earned income

* Labor performed on process not application, so maintaining the things that make the things

* Profit on another's labor would either be considered inappropriate or taxed highly: at or near 100%

* Unsustainability would be suspect, as it runs counter to the cultural goal of providing for all people forever

* Injustices which impose burdens on people doing the most spiritually significant work would be targeted first: no penalty for being a parent, teacher, nurse or other caregiver

There's probably a lot more to be said about this. I feel that the powers that be seem to be doing everything they can to prevent progress in this direction. Specifically, the wealthy and powerful seem to be doing nothing to help makers and inventors, they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.

So we all work longer and longer hours to build bigger houses and buy more expensive vehicles to create profit for billionaires. We don't invest in trusts that would pay the living expenses of self-sufficient communities of tiny homes with hydroponic gardens and solar panels and such.

Cyberdog3• 4 years ago

Not sure what this has to do with the article. Did you post this comment on the wrong page or something?

dmacedo• 4 years ago

The article mentions "Transcendentalism", the above comment's author seems to have researched, and offered their opinion on the matter. Seems like an appropriate comment, and a worthwhile discussion of what the transcendental ethos imply, coupled with what drives the behaviours that are antithetical to those goals, which leads to the historical moments the article refers to.

donclark• 4 years ago

Maybe he is additionally commenting on where our government is lacking today, and what he envisions us to be experiencing currently - if our GOV really were trying to improve things.

I am glad that he did comment - and have copied it to dive further into those thoughts.

asdff4• 4 years ago

I think an issue with this expectation is the assumption that our current set of technology was made for its utility alone. The reality is that most of the innovations of the 20th and 21st century only came about if they had a strong profit angle or lopsided military advantage to go along with them. As such, it's hard to actually do what you propose when everything we have is only stuff that was good enough to make a profit at one time. It's not like a bow and arrow or the wheel, fundamental tools that were built for their own merit, not because the bowstring company had a patent and legally set the standard for what sort of arrow is to be sold in stores or anything like that.

So then we have to take a step back and ask what is actually innovative about our global culture's technology today? Is the 4k TV really that innovative? IMO not really, you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago. It's not like the bow and arrow, imparting a novel function that didn't exist before. Its just an iteration on existing ideas, just slightly different enough to market on that difference and convince people to sell thing x that does y for thing z that does y. Even when we do work hard to further the capabilities of these innovations, e.g. computers being so much more powerful than they were 15 years ago, are we really reaping that fruit? Or is everyone still using microsoft word, email, and light web browsing like they were doing 25 years ago with hardware that's at least an order of magnitude less powerful?

Real innovation is scarce imo, since we don't invest in innovation, we invest in profit and innovation comes as a side effect, if it comes at all.

WalterBright4• 4 years ago

LED TVs use far, far less power than the old CRT TVs. The old TVs would warm up a room, LEDs, not.

Dalewyn• 4 years ago

A lot of people might not want to admit or accept it, but the primary source of human advancements has been conflicts with wars being the penultimate example.

Don't believe it? Look no further than humans landing on the Moon, a feat that was literally just another front of the Cold War. We literally landed men on the Moon in the name of winning wars. Still don't believe it? Consider the internet, originally devised as a communications network to fucking survive nuclear wars.

Let's be clear: Conflicts are bad, wars are unacceptable. But peace has always led to stagnation. Innovations require competition, and there is no better than competition than literally killing your fellow man.

WalterBright4• 4 years ago

Nobody makes you live in a bigger house or buy an expensive vehicle.

I bought my truck used 30 years ago, and used it daily up until last year when it finally expired. It cost me very little money.

they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.

Your sentence contradicts itself.

BTW, some years ago a luxury tax was placed on yacht building, based on the notion that millionaires were jerks for spending their money on yachts. Then the local economy of one of the yacht building companies collapsed, because the millionaires went elsewhere to spend money building their yachts.

So the tax was rescinded.

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

I don't gel with all of GP's views. Human-to-human competition is the driver of woe.

But when it comes to: > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.

Not a contradiction. Billionaires have wealth that easily makes both sides of this statement true.

mandmandam6• 4 years ago

Your just-so story is fine when thinking on a local and small-scale level.

On a holistic level, "but the millionaires will move if we offend them by asking for taxes" is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners. It's long term utterly and unfathomably destructive.

Also, yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries on the planet. If the industry crashed to 1% of its current level it would be a net boon to the Earth and humanity.

Your insistence that hoarding money and spending egotistically are mutually exclusive is kinda weird. Can you explain why it's not possible to do both? Are you just being unreasonably pedantic? ...

ericmcer• 4 years ago

"If" we were able to pull this off, which right now is a total pipe-dream, what do you picture the average person doing in this world? Would you implement harsh restrictions around what you can do if you are dependent on the system?

Can someone have 20 kids and not raise them because it isn't part of their calling? Would people from other societies be allowed to immigrate in or would it be closed to all migrants?

I don't think it is some orchestrated scam from a power mad global elite that is fighting against your utopian worldview. I don't think it is feasible, barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us.

coldacid3• 4 years ago

barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us

At which point we'd need a Butlerian Jihad.

bergenty• 4 years ago

If we have robots raise the kids it’s possible. I don’t see why we can’t have migrants if it’s basically a utopia of excess.

zackmorris2• 4 years ago

The other comments are good too and have been mostly answered by others, but I think that yours is the most core reaction to the points I touched on.

No: no restrictions or anything like that. I read somewhere that socialism typically requires roughly a daily 6 hour commitment from workers to keep things running. Communism might be spiritually closer to my points, but also suffers from gamification of work where bosses are still produced which maintain authority but don't actually participate in the making of things, so the result is yet another class system dividing rich and poor. Those heavy-handed systems result in the same rat race we have under capitalism.

What I'm suggesting is more like a trust for all citizens. So how wealthy people in the US get mailbox money and enjoy the benefits of large corporations generating steady dividends. The bottom 50-90% of the US is denied that since it wasn't born with generational wealth to invest. We have to work entire lifetimes to barely afford a home.

Short of coming up with $10,000-100,000 of investment capital per person (although that money already exists in the hands of the very wealthy), I'm saying that we could automate basic needs to make them free or nearly free. For example, there's no reason why we couldn't have made something like the Aptera solar electric car 20 years ago, just after lithium iron phosphate batteries were invented (or 40 years ago when solar panels became viable). We could all be driving for free for life right now, but the market prefers to build giant $60,000 trucks that get replaced every 10 years. We could be building $10,000 tiny homes and using 3D printing methods to grow produce robotically in our own neighborhoods.

My experience the last 20 years has been only work. It takes so much effort to make rent that I never got to invest in basic tools that would have made my life a lot easier and more pleasant. The opportunity cost of work is so high that it eclipses all else.

Had it not been for work, I would have done what my ancestors did: build a house in about 2 months from materials on the land, and work the land seasonally for food. My time beyond that would be mine to use for inventing and building things. I actually got to experience a time like that, it was called the 1980s and 90s, but now leisure time is a distant memory. I'm kind of joking, but what we have today is anathema to what I thought the future would bring. More like a libertarian's paradise than a futurist's utopia. And I live in one of the more rural places in the country. I can't imagine being locked into a big city where every second of every day goes towards mere survival.

As far as 20 kids and immigration and all that: the way of this trust system is to provide for basic needs. Meaning that it's self-sufficient and scalable. It would strike at the basic causes of immigration like hunger and wealth inequality so that people could stay where they live. Having 20 kids would certainly put a burden on the system, but I think that people are driven to do that either due to the scarcity mindset of not being able to afford birth control, or from religious indoctrination that tells them to go forth and procreate in the face of environmental devastation, or both. There's also the patriarchy which overrides whatever the mother has to say about all that.

To answer your original question: with basic needs met and a 10 hour workweek, the other 6 days would go towards "real work" that pays dividends beyond survival. For example, I made a shareware game before 9/11 that took me a whole year (about 200-365 days) while living with my dad. Today with Saturdays free only, that would take me 7 years (it ain't gonna happen). I have at least 100 ideas that would generate residual income that ain't gonna happen either. My life is a daily withering of expectation, suppressing the callings I feel in my heart to instead go satisfy whatever obligations are demanded of me. I have no children, so there's a futility to it of sacrificing to a next generation that isn't mine. And even if I had kids, by induction I would question the sacrifice of every generation to the one that follows. Surely we can do better than that.

Since I've never seen any real movement on these things, I think they might require a cultural revolution and grassroots effort to implement an opt-in trust system with UBI in a distributed fashion. I think maybe software co-ops like the Humble Indie Bundle that distribute a win to the losers and funds open source could do it. 3D printing and home automation will help. Better tax policy (keeping capital gains taxes higher than self-employment taxes) could do it. Rather than complaining to the critics like I've been doing, it would be better to create viable alternatives that are compelling enough that the arguments against them become moot.

thweroui239423• 4 years ago

Meta-note: you're assuming that all this 'survival' is meaningless, that it teaches you nothing, and that is better to be rid of, that this 'meaning' jazz is outside this. I doubt, deep down, if anyone outside the occident really thinks this way.

solidsnack9000• 4 years ago

What about profit off another person's capital? What rate should that be taxed at?

balr0g• 4 years ago

Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California

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