BlackCommentator.com May 17, 2018 - Issue 742: When Japanese-Americans’ Allegiance Was Questioned - Inclusion By The Reverend Irene Monroe, BC Editorial Board

May 17, 2018 - Issue 742

When Japanese-Americans’
Allegiance
Was Questioned

"Because topics of race in this country are
too often talked about in black and white terms,
the history of discrimination against other
minority groups gets overlooked. Case in point,
the Japanese-American internment is not talked
about and not often taught, if at all,
in American history books."

“Allegiance” will soon be coming to your neck of the woods, because it’s a tour de force. And, it’s another shameful time in American history.

“Allegiance” is both a play and a history lesson of the forcible incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 U.S. internment camps during World War II. “Allegiance” is a musical with music and lyrics by Jay Kuo and a book by Marc Acito, Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. It’s now appearing in my neck of the woods. It’s inspired by the true childhood experience of the brilliant and renown George Takei.

If you’re a Baby Boomer, you may know Takei as Hikaru Sulu, the chief helmsman of the Starship Enterprise. Today we know Takei as one of the country’s leading LGBTQ activists, especially in the fight for marriage equality. What many of us are now learning about Takei is his childhood memories of being incarcerated in two Japanese internment camps.

"I was 5 years old at the beginning of our internment in Arkansas. I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us,” Takei wrote in a New York Times op-ed “Internment, America’s Great Mistake.”

“Allegiance” is also about the love of family and country, and the deleterious effects racial profiling has on innocent Americans.

The play takes you into the harsh day-to-day life of the fictional Kimura family in the internment camps. It reveals some of the daily indignities many Japanese-American families endured, like no private bathrooms, being housed in horse stables, and if lucky, housed in barracks in uninhabitable swamplands like Rohwer, AR, and Tule Lake, CA.

As with all families, wars divide its members. Sam Kimura wants to prove his patriotism by fighting for his country, and his sister, Kei, is appalled by his decision.

Sadly, loyalty to the country for Japanese- American males rested solely on their responses to questions on the “Application for Leave Clearance” form that registered all male citizens of draft age. It was also used for volunteers to serve in an all Japanese- American combat team, which is an important plot in the play. Their responses-young and old- on the form would seal their family’s fate in the internment camps. And, these two highly divisive questions were designed to achieve this goal:

Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

A “no-no” response to the questions as Sam's father gave sent him to one of the harsher and high-security internment camps, which happened to Takei’s family, too.

Because topics of race in this country are too often talked about in black and white terms, the history of discrimination against other minority groups gets overlooked. Case in point, the Japanese-American internment is not talked about and not often taught, if at all, in American history books. "Allegiance" is both courageous and dangerous: it speaks truth to power in this xenophobic-stricken political times of building walls, closing borders and banning immigrants of color from “shithole” countries.

“I see “Allegiance’ as my legacy project. It’s my parents’ story and a tribute to them,” Takei told wicked local.com. “The whole “Allegiance’ experience has brought.”

Allegiance is a cautionary warning about today. It “challenges us to both understand what precipitated these events, and make sure these mistakes are not repeated,” stated Paul Daigneault, Producing Artistic Director in “Inside Speakeasy.”

Watching the play one can easily see how President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, titled "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, "which is referred as the “Muslim Ban” is eerily reminiscent of FDR’s 1942 Executive Order 9066. The Order 9006 authorized the immediate incarceration of Japanese- Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Allegiance pulls at not only at your heart-strings but it also questions your moral compass. Had there not been both music and humor throughtout the play I would have bawled all through it.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister, motivational speaker and she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Rev. Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), on Boston Public Radio and a weekly Friday segment “The Take” on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). She’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, and Canada. Also she writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows and Cambridge Chronicle. A native of Brooklyn, NY, Rev. Monroe graduated from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church in New Jersey before coming to Harvard Divinity School to do her doctorate. She has received the Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching several times while being the head teaching fellow of the Rev. Peter Gomes, the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard who is the author of the best seller, THE GOOD BOOK. She appears in the film For the Bible Tells Me So and was profiled in the Gay Pride episode of In the Life, an Emmy-nominated segment. Monroe’s coming out story is profiled in “CRISIS: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing up Gay in America" and in "Youth in Crisis." In 1997 Boston Magazine cited her as one of Boston's 50 Most Intriguing Women, and was profiled twice in the Boston Globe, In the Living Arts and The Spiritual Life sections for her LGBT activism. Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College's research library on the history of women in America. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Contact the Rev. Monroe and BC.