As it is today in Hood River, Riverside Community Church was perched on the hillside above the Union Pacific depot on the morning of May 13, 1942.
It’s a five-minute walk to the train station. “570-some steps,” says Vicky Stifter, Riverside’s pastor. Close enough for any parishioner in church that day to bear witness when 431 neighbors – Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans, families with children – arrived at the station, tagged and numbered, pulled from their orchards and farms, and began the dark, lonely journey to the concentration camp at Tule Lake, Calif.
Eighty years later, Stifter and her congregation wonder what was happening in their church that morning.
Surely there were meetings, quiet times, morning prayers. Yet there’s no record that anyone at the church had enough strength or compassion to trek downhill.
To shelve their fears and support their neighbors.
To protest Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order, which forced more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent from their homes, many for the duration of the Second World War.
Or to decry the ludicrous claim by Lt. General John De Witt, commander of the Western Defense Command, that the fact that no sabotage had taken place on American soil in the six months since Pearl Harbor “is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”
As the United Church of Christ congregation now says, “We have searched for evidence of this church’s public voice during that period and found …”
Nothing but silence. Ambivalence. The emptiness between fear and loathing.
Corrosive, and all too-human, reactions that would lead to much worse in Hood River County as the war dragged on:
· Full-page newspaper ads in the Hood River News in early 1945, signed by scores of valley residents, that read, “So Sorry! Japs Are Not Wanted in Hood River.”
· “Japanese Hunting License” badges – Open Season! No Limit! – at various 5-And-Dimes downtown and along Highway 30.
· And the November 1944 decision by American Legion Post 22 to remove the names of 16 Japanese American soldiers from a Hood River Courthouse memorial listing the 1,600 county residents serving their country in the war.
Where was Hood River’s community of faith in all of this?
“There’s not much written about what happened here,” Stifter says. “We don’t write down the parts of our history we’re not proud of. And without acknowledging our history, we can’t move forward with healing and rebuilding.”
Thus, Riverside Community Church has drafted a long-overdue apology, declaring that its silence “80 years ago was wrong, and that by remaining silent, we too caused harm.”
And this coming Friday – May 13, 2022 – the congregation will memorialize that terrible day and those troubling times with a ceremony that begins at the church, then moves 570 steps downhill, and forward, to the train station.
This reckoning has sparked debate, Stifter admits. “Can we apologize for something we didn’t do? Are we throwing our ancestors in faith under the bus? Those are heated discussions we’ve had.”
But the introspection also inspired more than 100 people to attend Riverside on May 3 to hear Janet Hamada, the executive director of the community health organization The Next Door, and orchardist Kevin Asai.
Hamada is fourth-generation Japanese American: “Bad-ass Yonsei,” she says, “is a moniker I wear with pride.” While that generation is largely assimilated, she notes, she hasn’t forgotten what her grandparents endured, and the California farm they lost, while incarcerated during the war.
Because she believes the Muslim ban and border cagings wrought by Trump’s 2016 election are ugly reminders that racism and injustice persist in this country, she regularly speaks to high-school students about her family’s history.
“When they ask me what they can do, I tell them, ‘You can write letters. You can stand up in public. And if you are too scared to do that, you can stand up for those who are standing up.’”
That’s the challenge that brought Asai to the church Tuesday night. He was reticent – his sister, Tara, is the real family historian, he says – but he wanted to honor his parents. “My mother and father felt all their children are obligated to do certain things to be good community citizens. (This) was somewhere I needed to be.”
As Linda Tamura writes in “The Hood River Issei,” only 40% of the Japanese who lived in Hood River in 1941 returned to the valley after the war.
Taro Asai, Kevin’s father, was one of them, and he had reason to despair about his hometown. He spent the last three years of the war working military intelligence for the Army in the Pacific, and his name was one of the 16 removed from the Hood River memorial by American Legion Post 22.
But Asai rose above that. “My dad was on the front lines, and he came back alive,” Kevin Asai says. “He felt incredibly lucky. In his mind, everything else was gravy.” He came back to his 28-acre farm and his divided community. With his wife, Marie, he devoted himself to his children and the fertile valley in which they might thrive.
And when the Asai family received the $20,000 reparations in 1988 for Japanese Americans imprisoned during the war, they donated that money to Oak Grove School and the Hood River school district.
“Despite everything,” Kevin Asai says, “they felt they owed something back to our community.”
Our community.
“It’s all about relationship,” Riverside Pastor Stifter says. “That’s the way forward. Once we’re in relationship with one another, we stand with one another. Things don’t happen to ‘those people.’ They happen to the people we know. The people we love. The people we consider neighbors.”
-- Steve Duin
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