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Internment Camp List Now Available to View at Japanese American National Museum

#japanese#nationalmuseum#internment#camps#american
the transcript auto-captions · entered into evidence

0:00 thank you [Music] all right so um there's something going on right now at the Japanese um American National Museum there's a new exhibit that's open right tell us about it I love Tokyo I didn't know it's going on until September and it's something super super important uh is it the 30 underwear exhibit he's gonna like this one you're gonna feel so weird once the rest of this is finished I gotta joke about my peoples I'm sitting here by association so that's good 1942 what happened in America you know in America yeah it's like a Pearl Harbor well yeah Europe his uncle was there a year ago yeah in 19 in the plane though yeah 1942 is where they they took a 120 000

0:50 of Japanese American citizens put them in internment so come from their homes yep they spread them out across the country to different camps yeah and then it wasn't until 1988 where your mama tried to escape yeah America offered twenty thousand dollars in reparations to each they got money though yeah to each member who survived the camps yeah but 40 years later yeah but the catch is that there never was an official list of who was even in the camps so that was their way of like oh well here's money but I mean we don't know who to give it to so it was hard to get what was due to you because that's crazy they never kept that record so it's not until now that uh there's a guy named Duncan Williams and he's a director of USC shinso Edo Center for Japanese culture spent three years with a dozen researchers and a

1:41 hundred volunteers to make the final official actual list wow of every single person that was in an internment camp wow how come white guys are so into our ████ he's Japanese he sounded white he started Asian American ████ he's got a white last name yeah but yeah Japanese I'll do it yeah like that I think he's like half yeah he's half he's half Japanese okay his name's Duncan ryuken all right [Laughter] all I'm saying is white people are the Pres preservers of cultures all over the world dude they be stunning that ████ so hardcore it's the guilt they're just into ████ they're like the

2:33 most hardcore like yeah they're more Japanese than Japanese people and ████ if you go to Japan and then you'll hear like the best Koto players like a ████ like red-headed girl or some ████ I don't know because she been studying that ████ you know yeah she was probably more obsessed with it everyone gets bored of their own ████ because Japanese people they think like man Japanese ████ is lame oh you know what it is though too hell yeah dude white people are studying Asian ████ they probably have a chip on their shoulder so they like I gotta know this better than like the actual people I gotta go harder okay that's true yeah I just think the grass is greener right like you got a white kid here that's like I don't want to do cowboy stuff you know I would do some Samurai stuff and then they study out there and then some kid over there is like that's just lame bro I'm Gonna Learn hip-hop you know

3:23 how did they come to America and then goes bee boy Takashi all right so that book they they made it into a big book it's a thousand pages long and it weighs 25 pounds you can go to the museum now until September and you can see the actual book and I guess like people who are related to the uh families that are named in the book are they can like stamp the names to like show that oh like a certification thing yeah it's all like their family crest yeah yeah yeah yeah my uh so my friend's Grandpa he was a kid during the time he grew up he has nothing but positive ████ to say about the internment camp yeah well because he was a child wait so he wasn't so for him it was like he was like um every day I get to play with my friends we're together we live together

4:15 we get to eat together and then he goes but after like we all live in different houses I don't see them every day but he goes like when you're a kid your experience you're not worried about oh what am I gonna do about work you don't think about that ████ you're just like I'm with all my friends and we're camping every day but that's cool because that's credit to the families that were in there for allowing their children to roam like that yeah they're not put passing on the stress like they're trying to give them as good of a life as they can yeah am I um so so people that had uh family or or just relatives or just friends that let them let Japanese folks stay yeah you didn't have to go to Camp uh if you were far enough from the West Coast there was some kind of rule you had to be away from like these zones right and then so my aunt she went to

5:06 the Midwest where she had some relatives or something like that she just waited out the war with their family there but in the midwest whether it was Missouri or Kansas or some ████ like that they didn't leave the house they just stayed on the Farm property because they said you don't ████ leave because once you know you walk the streets they're like What's this ████ Jack doing over here you know yeah all right he's ████ Jam so yeah it's anybody who isn't unfamiliar so um 1941 when Pearl Harbor happened America declared all Japanese anime even if you were a Japanese American fighting in the war against Japan you got pulled out and you were taken put into camp and and so when they took people and put them in camps what happened to their homes they just lost them so they had to sell ████ they had a very short period of time to just sell or what some people did is they had white

5:57 friends that were like honorable and then they just put them under their name or they took care of the property so then they're like I'll give it back to you when you when you move back and they got their Farm back yeah so some people were just like I gotta sell everything in the store so people were coming in and they're getting dirty prices one of the conspiracies is um there were a lot of so you know how like Vietnamese people do the nail stuff right and like cambodians do the donuts Japanese got into the farms and then to do the Farms they bought a lot of water rights so one of the conspiracies about taking Japanese out of that is they own too many of the aqua Ducks up and down California that's crazy so uh that like one of the richest people in California like next to when Elon was here is a family that owns all a lot of the water rights so they're saying like our uh r

6:49 as in Japanese Community they were robbed of their wealth and a lot of the future dollars because they own so much of the water in California damn we only came over and ████ did Nails ████ oh sorry dude sorry yeah I mean it's better than picking grapes you can do a ton of amount of time we had the great game on lock you know what I mean great game but that makes a lot of sense because I mean throughout history there's so many references to controlling water and that being like the main that's yeah that's one of the conspiracies of like why they did the camps because it was like not just a racist or thing but it was like yeah also like let's take that ████ out because we need to control the water yeah stuff like that but I don't know

7:40 you know but I mean imagine how that looks to get your water control taken away and then in the 80s oh here's 20K yeah um what yeah there are there are people who owned like Prime real estate all over Southern California Japanese families that just had to like figure out a situation and so imagine like you own like four homes or whatever and all of a sudden they're like you got to get rid of that ████ because if you can't pay the thing and and handle all your stuff you can't pay by your phone back then you know so it's just like boom it's all gone you just lose it yeah I heard a lot of interesting ████ from um like what they discussed about in the caps and like what like because I was always asking um like how come there's hella Japanese people in America that can't speak any Japanese because I grew up in the sgv all my Vietnamese Chinese

8:31 friends like they were deep like connected to their culture yeah right so like in all of my Japanese friends in the sgv they're like wife well even in like Hacienda Japanese Church yeah the service is in English right yeah it's there's some Japanese but my parents they grew up there so I'm second generation or what's called a nisse right and all of my um friends grandparents are in the sgv their grandparents barely spoke Japanese like they're educated in the states they sound like old school you know white folks all that stuff yeah and I asked them why and they said um well during the camp there was like a committee and everyone got together and they said why did they stick Us in here and they're like we don't I think they don't think we're American enough because they didn't stick the Italians they didn't stick the Germans they only

9:23 stuck Us in here so we're seen as a foreign threat that's why they think we're spies that's why they think or we can't be trusted and then there's guys that fought for the US there's Japanese dudes that fall for the U.S in World War one and they all wore their uniforms like their decorations and metal their caps no they when they're getting picked up by the bus they they stood there like yeah I'm ████ American but then they took them threw them in the bus they sent them all over there and then so uh at least from like my aunt and what she's told me their generation had this kind of had this agreement of like what we need to do is just speak English stop speaking Japanese yeah you have to you have to send your children to become uh to join the military you have to send your children

10:13 to become High members of society like go into politics all this stuff and go so deep into America that they could not this will never happen they could never happen again and that's why you see so many Japanese politicians and like the first Asian American politicians are like uh Japanese-American judges judges there was a general a U.S general that was super high ranking because like um it was just it was just a reaction to being rounded up and like kind of treated not American so they're like all right how do we become more yeah so crazy when I was growing up I was like how come all my Chinese friends are like they got that Pride or like that they they do the Chinese things yeah you know what I mean like all we do is like festivals but nobody speaks it no one knows it like I was like so confused but that was the reason why I'm like

11:04 damn that's pretty crazy to hear so yeah the the the um heavy thing about all the people that are going to see this book is uh there are still people that survived the internment campsite can look at in that book today and they're just like like they collapse when they see it because it's like this is the first time that there's proof wow otherwise it's just like you can say it and then they're like well where's the records yeah and there's never been any and so to see it for the first time to look at your own name like and you've lived that it's the very first time so everybody's going there like it's like a big thing to um to go see this so if you guys want to check it out Japanese American National Museum it's over in Little Tokyo and uh by downtown L.A uh until September and across the street there's the Gopher Broke Memorial uh you guys could check it out it's the 442nd group um across the street from the national

11:54 uh Museum yeah yeah it's pretty their stories are pretty nuts everybody thought he was gonna say something dumb like must be just boba time they got really good matcha happy birthday [Music]

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