Today There Are None

In 1941, two-thirds of the agricultural stalls at Pike Place Market were run by Japanese Americans. Today there are none. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is quietly erasing race from the internet.

Fish flying through the air at Pike Place Market by John Henderson, 2012.

I am wandering around Pike Place Market with a food tour.

My friend Courtney is visiting from back East. She wants to try some of the local fare, so we end up following around a perky young woman named Sheryl, with short pink hair and matching a pink umbrella, through the alleyways and cobblestone streets of downtown Seattle. We taste donuts, teriyaki, clam chowder, and lentil soup as tourists and locals weave in and out of the covered marketplace, buying flowers, produce, nuts, Rainer cherries, and lavender-smelling soaps. 

Courtney is really excited about the fish throwing. 

“That’s what I’m here for,” she says. “I want to see a man catch a fish.”

Near the entrance of the market, there is a seafood vendor where fishmongers have been throwing fish to the delight of passersby for decades.

“This stall began in the thirties. The fish throwing was popularized in the 1980s by former owner John Yokoyama,” Sheryl tells us, the pink of her umbrella casting a fuchsia hue across her youthful, animated face. “He was a Japanese American who worked right across from the stall at his father’s produce stand. He purchased the fish stall when he was 25 years old.”

We turn to the fishmonger, a middle-aged white man with a scraggly beard and kind eyes. He projects his voice over the buzzing of the market and asks us if we want to see him throw a fish. 

Of course, we say yes.

“What is your catch rate?” I ask the monger, genuinely curious. 

“100% of the time,” he says confidently. I secretly doubt the statistical probability of this, but who am I to say? The performance monger yells out to a fellow monger behind the fish counter, calling for the throwing fish, which comes in fast, jettisoned out of the gate, over the glass, and towards our monger standing in front of the crowd. The monger isn’t quite in position for receipt and the fish nearly slips out of his grasp. It’s not graceful; he fumbles to recover. I side-eye Courtney. She sighs a little. I can tell she’s underwhelmed.

We clap politely for the performer, even though he didn’t really catch the fish. Then Sheryl wheels us around to look at the awning above the entrance of the marketplace. There is a horizontal metal beam with a mural on it. 

“This part of the tour is kind of a downer,” she says, pointing to the mural, her face suddenly sullen. “But we have to acknowledge the past.” 

The illustrated mural depicts people farming the land with the following words below it:

“In 1941, two-thirds of the agriculture stalls at Pike Place were owned by Japanese Americans. Today, there are none.”

Today there are none. 

Suddenly, I feel hit with the knowledge of erasure. They’re not here. And I didn’t know they were supposed to be or that they had ever been. There is no indication of the history of the place, except this small sign at the base of the entrance awning of the market — which, Sheryl goes on to tell us, is the oldest consecutively running market in the United States. Pike Place Market has never shut down, not for any reason, since August of 1907. Somehow this little factoid makes me feel so much worse and I’m secretly reeling. Despite myself, tears well up in my eyes and there is a lump in my throat. At the back of the tour group, out of the line of sight, I quietly cry. 

I am uncovering loss wherever I go these days. Loss of something that I didn't know that I had lost, that I didn’t know America had lost, that I didn't know Japanese Americans had lost. 

I didn’t know that Japanese Americans had immigrated to the West Coast in the 1880s to escape extreme poverty in Japan. I didn’t know that one-third of Hawaii was Japanese because sugar cane companies brought over Japanese people as indentured servants. I didn’t know that the over 100,000 Japanese people interned during WWII were not welcome back on the West Coast, that the Issei were unable to buy land due to alien land laws extending from the Naturalization Act of 1870, that white people took their leases during the war, that their farms were burned to the ground, their families terrorized, their children killed in combat while they were turned away at cafes and barbershops in Oregon. Living on the East Coast for all of my childhood, I only knew very vague bits and pieces of my own family narrative.

My family had been under house arrest. My great-grandfather’s shop in Brooklyn was burned to the ground. My grandfather was investigated by the FBI. After the war, my grandfather changed his name and passed as a white man. 

I didn’t know about Gordon Haribayashi’s civil disobedience in Seattle.

In the same city where I stood with our perky tour guide Sheryl, Gordon was arrested by the FBI in 1942 for refusing to report to an internment camp and violating curfews set for Japanese Americans. Gordon, an American citizen, asserted the U.S. government violated his constitutional rights.

His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he lost on the violation of the curfew order. The court refused to rule at all on the exclusion of Japanese American citizens. Later, Gordon was sent to federal prison for refusing to respond “yes” to questions 27 and 28 of the Loyalty Questionnaire, which insisted he pledge allegiance to the country and willfully serve in the military if called.

In the same city I’m standing in now, Gordon married his wife, a white Quaker woman like my grandmother.

Up until recently, I had no idea Quakers supported Japanese American rights during WWII. Or that Bainbridge Island in Washington State was the second community targeted for internment on March 30, 1942, after Terminal Island in California, because it was easy to test rounding up people on an island. Islands, it turns out, are excellent testing sites for mass arrest. It’s easy to cut off the exits. There’s nowhere to run.

My ignorance is embarrassing. And yet I know I am not alone. I have known for almost all of my life that I was part Japanese, and yet, I don’t remember reading a single line in my high school history textbook about Gordon’s Supreme Court case. I am sure there was a line or two about Japanese internment. But none about the strawberry and oyster farms people lost while imprisoned or the Japanese people’s return to the coast. Their lives were left in shambles by the American government, given absolutely no aid to recover what they had lost: property, dignity, family, identity, safety, and community. 

And yet, my ancestors have not forgotten me.

The first time I heard the word was on a Zoom call with Julie Ann Oiye, a retired Seattle librarian and third-generation Japanese American like my father, who studies the Japanese diaspora.

“Yonsei,” she tells me. “That’s you.”

I roll the word around in my mouth, luxuriate in it, without asking permission because it’s mine. Yonsei — pronounced “yuhn-say” — but in my American accent, I pronounce it like ‘yonce, which is what I imagine Beyonce’s friends affectionately call her when they’re feeling really close. Yonsei, meaning fourth generation Japanese person of the Japanese diaspora, child of Sansei (my father), who is a child of Nesei (my grandfather), child of Issei, my great grandfather Toshimoro Imai, the firstborn son of a Samurai family from Tokyo.

Julie hands me this word, wrapped in the finest silk. I am a child of diaspora, she tells me. The knowledge sinks in slowly and deeply. I hold this knowledge in its delicate package; it feels fragile. Before this moment, I didn't know that there was a name for people like me. Among (many) other things, I am a fourth-generation Japanese American in the Japanese diaspora, a migration of people known by sociologists as Nikkei. I cannot believe that there is space for me, a silly little white girl, in Japanese culture, that I had been thought about by anyone. Not only did I have a role in the story of Japanese migration, but I had been given a name.

Walking around this world as a white woman, I feel like the physical embodiment of erasure. There is no evidence of my Japanese ancestors visible to the naked eye. And because of life factors, most notably my father’s adoption and my grandfather’s choice to change his identity (and hide it from everyone, including his wife and children), I have no cultural association with my ancestors either, no name to identify me, no history written down for me. I feel like a ghost. Maybe this is why that sign above the Pike Place Market hurt and felt so personal. My existence feels like a direct result of America’s harm to the Japanese people — and the slow dilution and extermination of historical facts associated with the trauma inflicted by whiteness.

I once spoke with a Japanese Bolivian writer who grew up in Japan about my preoccupation with this facet of my family history.

“Why does this matter so much to you?” she asked me on a phone call, genuinely curious. “After all, it’s such a small part of your makeup.”

Genetically speaking, she’s right. I am twice as Irish or Austrian. At the time, I didn’t know how to answer. But after some reflection, I think it is because, above all, I am American — and my family’s entire trajectory was knocked out of orbit by blatant, systematic discrimination by the U.S. government. If I had been alive and living on the West Coast during the Second World War, I would have been declared an Enemy Alien of the State based on my ancestry and sent to a camp. According to the directive of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, tasked to “evacuate all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast under Federal supervision,” any amount of Japanese was Japanese enough to justify exclusion.

As I reflect on this deep ancestral wound, I can’t help but think of all of the families who have been and are currently being ripped apart by the U.S. government.

In January this year, President Trump signed a memo directing the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to expand the Guantánamo Migrant Operations Center at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, signaling in a speech an intent to detain up to 30,000 people there. A few weeks ago, parents of local schoolchildren where I live were picked up by ICE at a laundromat. Last week, the Trump administration invoked the Enemy Alien Act of 1798 — the same justification used to intern Japanese Americans — to deport 200 Venezualian immigrants without due process to jail in El Salvador, directly defying the presiding U.S. judge’s order to hold the planes until a decision had been reached by the courts.

Meanwhile, the United States Army quietly removed and republished the page on the “Go For Broke” 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the only all-Japanese American unit to serve in World War II, removing all mention of their race or the extenuating circumstances of their service. These 4,500 men served at war for the United States while their families sat in prison in internment camps under direct order from the United States. With over 18,000 individual decorations including 9,486 Purple Hearts, and 5,200 Bronze Stars, they are the most decorated military unit in U.S. history.

Our government just quietly erased their race from the internet.

Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, the Executive Director of the Densho archives, points out that the digital erasure of 442nd’s racial framing is not an isolated incident, but part of a disturbing pattern.

“Just last month, the National Park Service scrubbed its webpage for the Stonewall National Monument, downplaying its significance to LGBTQ+ civil rights and removing references to the critical role transgender individuals played. Earlier this month, Arlington National Cemetery removed webpages documenting the histories of Black and female service members, including Medal of Honor recipients and members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the country’s first Black military airmen. These revisions are not neutral acts, they are politically motivated erasures designed to reshape public memory of U.S. military history.”

Will we allow the same erasure to happen to our ancestors, friends, family, and current neighbors? Or will we be the ones to hold onto their memories, their stories, and their homes until they return? The community of Bainbridge Island, where some of the very first Japanese Americans were shipped off to camps, is also known for how the community rallied around their neighbors. They kept neighbors’ farms going, kept their belongings for them, and welcomed them back after the war.

The Bainbridge Island Review, a small, local paper run by Milly and Walt Woodward, was the sole newspaper in the United States that openly opposed mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. The Review reported the conditions of the internment camps and the daily lives of the inmates, from the inside, by hiring camp correspondences from within the Manzanar and Minidoka internment camps.

The current administration is trying to rewrite our history right in front of our eyes. Now is the time to hold on to your artifacts, collect memories, create personal archives, and share stories with your community. Create an undeniable paper trail and speak your family lore, and the lore of those you love, into the canon.

Don’t let them take your stories. Don’t let them take our history. Public memory belongs to us.

The day after our food tour with Sheryl, Courtney and I venture to the market one last time. Before we leave the city, I want to buy a bouquet of dahlias from one of the flower stalls to bring home to Whidbey Island with me. As we pass the famous seafood stall, a new fishmonger stands out in front of the fish case, a young Japanese woman in blue waders and a bib.

Over the volume of the crowd, she yells, “Hey, hey, we’ve got a salmon!”

A fish comes flying from over the glass, and she catches it with ease, cradling the salmon in her arms. A perfect catch.

Today there is one, I think to myself.

Two if you count me.

Pike Place Market, 1939. Seattle Municipal Archives.

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Resources

Densho Archives, in Seattle, documents the Japanese American experience from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s, with a strong focus on World War II incarceration.

Facing The Mountain by Daniel James Brown, is “a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and courage: the special Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights, even if it meant imprisonment.”

The last Japanese American farmer on Bainbridge Island was Akio Suyematsu. He died in 2012.