[Mike Collins]

Satsuki Ina was born to Japanese parents while they were imprisoned at the Tule Lake concentration camp during WW2. She has written a richly documented book entitled The Poet and the Silk Girl that offers a description for that landscape of injustice. She is speaking on May 11 at the downtown Seattle public library. The entry requires a reservation but there is no fee for what promises to be an informative event. Read more here. https://www.spl.org/event-calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D174012892

[mike]

Visited the Tule Lake concentration camp a couple times while visiting Lava Beds. Saw this graffiti at Peninsula/Petroglyph Pt. just across the road. If anyone reads Japanese maybe they could translate for us.

[Mike Collins]

I asked a Japanese friend for assistance with the translation. The words are written in Kanji which is older Japanese script using Chinese characters. There are some 2,000 different characters and I will need to obtain a Kanji dictionary to look for similar characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#:~:text=They%20were%20made%20a%20major,based%20on%20the%20Chinese%20sound.

[mike]

Not positive that it is all kanji but will appreciate an expert opinion.

[Mike Collins]

Borrowed a kanji dictionary from the library. This character matches well with the last one carved. It looks like the character for “country”.

[reststep]

[Mike Collins]

The second kanji is similar to this kanji for”right”.

[Mike Collins]

The third kanji could be love. The dictionary explains that combining the character for love and country=patriotism.

[Maarten]

If you're interested in the history of Japanese internment in the Northwest, here's another related book reading event: Mitzi Asai Loftus and David Loftus — 'From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace' Friday May 17, 2024 7pm Third Place Books in Ravenna (note not the LFP store!) https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/mitzi-asai-loftus-david-loftus I believe she's doing a reading on Bainbridge the next day (Saturday May 18). > Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. > (...) > In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language.

[Malachai Constant]

I was raised in Port Orchard across Rich Passage from Bainbridge Island my mother told me about the Internment, of people who had done nothing wrong but the PI said were traitors. I did not believe it at first as I was brought up on WWII stories of how all Japanese people were inhuman cruel animals. At the UW in the 60's I met 3rd generation immigrants who had been interned with their parents. In Washington much of their land was bought up by locals for cents on the dollar. There is an excellent museum at Manzanar near Whitney portal where you can see what the camps were like. It changed my view of the US as much or more than the Vietnam war.

[mike]

A couple years ago we visited New Denver, BC