[HN Gopher] Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California
___________________________________________________________________
Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California
Author : rntn
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-11-14 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| All along the hills following Blossom Hill Road in San Jose used
| to be wineries. Very few remnants of these wineries exist because
| they were replaced with single family homes when the value of the
| land increased in the 1980's onward. Some of the larger homes on
| the hills of San Jose / Los Gatos have a few scions.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Wonder if there's any connection in the name of Sakamoto
| Elementary.
| shagie wrote:
| I suspect its named for Paul Sakamoto, though I haven't found
| anything to say one way or the other yet -
| https://www.jamsj.org/manabu/paul-sakamoto
| usui wrote:
| > In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which
| ordered the forced removal of Japanese American "enemy aliens".
| The Nagasawa heirs, who were still fighting the estate's seizure
| in court, were incarcerated in internment camps. Like the
| approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned until after
| the end of World War Two, they lost any chance of reclaiming the
| property.
|
| Absolutely disgusting that it took the United States 50 years
| from 1942 to acknowledge injustices like this had occurred as
| well as disburse the funds in an attempt to correct its mistakes.
| It was $20,000 in the 1990s, yay whoopee... I have friends whose
| families still, to this day, do not forgive the American
| government for what it did. A good majority of
| grandparents/parents were dead by then. Many returnees from the
| camps systematically tried to erase any cultural heritage they
| had by purposely hiding it and not passing it on to future
| generations, as a result of their treatment. Because of that,
| many Japanese perceive Japanese Americans from that time period
| as cultureless. Btw, the 442nd Regiment, comprised of Japanese
| Americans, received the most awards in U.S. history for military
| service in WW2.
|
| Then you take into account the loss of capital from Nagasawa
| losing his vineyard, and it gets even worse.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Not surprising. The US has not paid reparations to most of the
| people it has wronged.
| rayiner wrote:
| Has anybody ever paid reparations to anybody? Inter-
| Generational debt just isn't a thing.
| sorokod wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between
| _...
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Assuming your reparations claim was correct, injustice
| becomes ok if it happens often enough.
| rayiner wrote:
| Who said that? Stuff can be "not okay" but also "not the
| problem of anyone currently alive." We have a concept of
| a statute of limitations in law, for example.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation on,
| say, homicide.
|
| Whether or not there is a statute of limitations is
| generally dependent on the severity of the offense.
|
| But again, just a nit-pick. To my mind, the mistake is in
| paying any sort of reparations to anyone, ever. As a
| nation state, unfortunately, some things you have to go
| all in on. Not paying reparations is one of those things.
|
| I am OK with forcing state and local governments to pay
| out for egregious acts taken in explicit contravention of
| Constitutional rights. But that's because as a nation
| state we should _also_ go all in on defending the
| constitutional rights of our citizens. I know that 's
| talking out of both sides of my mouth, but the reality is
| that nation states can incur far larger obligations than
| state and local governments can. A nation state could end
| up with an obligation that realistically simply can't be
| paid.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation
| on, say, homicide.
|
| There is though ... the lifetime of perpetrator.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation on,
| say, homicide.
|
| Right, but sons aren't held responsible for their
| father's crimes. And while the Father's estate can be
| liable for wrongful death, that is generally limited in
| time. Certainly, you can't just go after all descendants
| decades later.
|
| It's not just a slippery slope, but fair compensation is
| essentially impossible to determine. The average Japanese
| America is far richer than the average American--
| significantly so. Should you discount for that? Doesn't
| seem fair to penalize them for being successful. But the
| other hand, maybe that shows that the lasting harm wasn't
| that bad.
|
| A lot easier to just let the past be the past and to
| police our actions going forward.
| skyyler wrote:
| This kind of stuff can easily be searched for. Here's a
| low-mid quality article:
|
| https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5741352/six-times-victims-
| have...
| akavi wrote:
| All but the last of those examples only paid out to the
| living survivors of the atrocity, and the last only
| earmarked 5% for descendants.
|
| So it does seem that _inter-generational_ reparations are
| indeed very rare.
| skyyler wrote:
| >$10 million out of court settlement with the victims and
| their families
|
| >$2.4 million today would be set aside to compensate the
| 11 or so remaining survivors of the incident, $800,000 to
| compensate those who were forced to flee the town, and
| $160,000 would go to college scholarships primarily aimed
| at descendants.
|
| Inter-generational reparations exist explicitly in two of
| the six examples in that article.
|
| Japanese interns that didn't collect their payment from
| the US left it up to their heirs to collect it, so I'll
| even add that as a technicality of inter-generational
| reparations.
|
| Also I'm rather sure Israel is still getting payments for
| what happened in the 1940s... But I could be wrong there.
|
| Inter-generational reparations are indeed rare if you
| don't look very hard for examples of it happening.
| rayiner wrote:
| Now compare that to all the instances where people
| committed atrocities against other people. It seems like
| you're talking about something vanishingly rare.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| War reparations from the conquered/losing side appear in
| history now and then.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Amazing what sort of atrocities people will commit when fear
| and emergencies are invoked.
| asdff wrote:
| You don't have to invoke all of that to commit atrocities,
| just appeals to convenience work well enough to convince
| someone to forsake the rights of another person. Settlement
| of this country should have never happened, this is all
| stolen indigenous land whose conquest was legally justified
| by the handwaving of a patriarch of a religion hundreds of
| years ago. White settlers at the time saw native peoples as
| a pest much like a coyote is a pest to livestock, and much
| like coyotes they were allowed to kill off these people
| pretty matter of factly without recourse. There was no fear
| or emergency justifying that action, only that the white
| person would like to make profit grazing their cattle in
| the buffalo country on land that was offered to them by
| their government for next to nothing.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| That's true. We did see that in recent years with people
| even such as Noam Chomsky arguing for ostracizing
| undesirables and withholding food from them.
| badrabbit wrote:
| At the risk of being overly controversial, what would have been
| a better option given the times. Lynching black people was not
| uncommon back then for context of how minorities were treated.
| Of course taking away someomes property when they have done no
| wrong is wrong. Or the internment camps. They did bad things
| because it was war.
|
| Do you remember how muslim americans were treated and attacked
| after 9\11? The animosity of the majority of americans towards
| them? The point I am making is even now this is how people
| react but back then modern concepts of human rights and justice
| were not prevalent.
|
| The war effort then was not like any war effort afterwards. It
| requires mobilizing the civilian society "lose lips sink ships"
| for example was a big motto because a lot of people see stuff
| and if they repeat it, it can make it to the enemy. Combine
| that with the fact that the japanese emperror was regarded as a
| god by the japanese, you can see how much paranoia war time
| president and generals would have about anyone japanese
| related.
|
| I am not saying what they did was in any way justified but
| rather if I was in their shoes I would also be susceptible to
| committing such atrocities. Really, what I am trying to say is
| how easy it is to do what america did to the Japanese americans
| then and how we should not be so quick to pass judgement. Their
| motivation was fear and paranoia in the time of war not hatred
| like with Germany's camps.
|
| Judging people of the past is easy but learning from history is
| hard. The lesson I learned from this is you have to be strong
| (whatever that means) and resist attempts by the government to
| do these things in the future as well as educate people on
| history like this.
|
| It may not happen to japanese people but it can happen again.
| If there is war with China and they start sabotaging, extorting
| and bombing americans are you sure chinese americans won't be
| mistreated again? All it takes is 51% of people to agree in a
| time of war (fear of death and cruelty).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I have to point out that these actions were condemned
| contemporaneously as well. Even in their own time, by others
| living through those times, this was considered an atrocity.
| Standards of socially acceptable harm to minorities may have
| been different then, but we also know that this was easily
| recognized as unjust at the time, by the fact that so many
| people at the time _did_ condemn it as unjust.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| To this day I am dumbfounded that Roosevelt is still as revered
| as he is. He had other problems like poor economic policy that
| probably prolonged the Great Depression, but you don't even
| need to look at any of that - the dude implemented an executive
| order which put American citizens into effective prisons with
| no due process, based only on their ethnicity. Trump, who I'm
| told is a racist and a fascist and so forth, never even tried
| to do anything close to that.
|
| You want to start toppling statues and changing street names of
| dead white guys? Start with that one. What a creep.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The main architect of the Japanese internment camps (out in
| Owen Valley California) was John J McCloy:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-
| japanese...
|
| > "Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who
| oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support
| the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of
| their national heritage. The 87-year-old retired diplomat
| testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and
| Internment of Civilians, which was charted by Congress last
| year to determine whether the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who
| were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and
| relocated in camps in the East and Middle West in 1942 were
| entitled to compensation."
|
| McCloy has an interestingly creepy history - head of the
| World Bank post WWII (1947-1949), High Commissioner of
| Occupied Germany (1949-1952) (where he released a lot of Nazi
| industrialists from prison, claiming they were just good
| anti-communists), Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations
| (1954-1969), member of the Warren Commission, which buried
| any real investigation into the Kennedy Assassination in
| 1963), Board Member of the Ford Foundation (which served in
| part as cover for CIA activities) then back to a Rockefeller-
| linked law firm for the rest of his career.
|
| Most historical accounts show him pressing hard for
| internment, and FDR basically went along, not willing to
| fight about it. He defended the program up to his dying day:
|
| > "''I don't like the word 'incarcerated,' '' Mr. McCloy
| replied. ''Well, all right, behind barbed wire fences,'' Mr.
| Marutani snapped. Mr. McCloy cautioned the commission, which
| is to report the findings of its inquiry to Congress next
| year, not to advocate policies that might someday prevent the
| forcible relocation of other American citizens because of
| ethnic background."
| labster wrote:
| Instead of starting with FDR, why not first cancel the US
| Presidents who literally owned slaves or who literally
| engaged in genocide against the natives? Just a thought.
|
| I mean, imprisoning people for just minding their own
| business, based mainly on skin color, is something that every
| president has done since the laws against marijuana were
| passed. Not sure why you'd single out FDR.
| ehaliewicz2 wrote:
| Probably because FDR is very relevant to the article.
| [deleted]
| runjake wrote:
| > Trump, who I'm told is a racist and a fascist and so forth,
| never even tried to do anything close to that.
|
| Central Americans might disagree with you.
|
| https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/immigration-
| kids-t...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Also, Korematsu v. United States, one of the all time worst
| Supreme Court decisions, maybe only second to Dred Scott.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
| retrac wrote:
| The war. He won the war, or is perceived to have. Simple as
| that. Churchill gets the same treatment in the UK despite, in
| my view, being far worse than FDR, both as a man, and in
| government policy. De Gaulle got it as well, practically
| apotheosized while still alive. Stalin too; in Russia he is
| still ranked as one of their greatest leaders. It would seem
| that being in power while prevailing in a total war
| translates automatically into sainthood.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah, FDR's government really liked taking land from people.
| The TVA basically tossed black farmers out on their asses[1].
| The Housing Act of 1937 was used to clear out "slums"[2] and
| required new housing be provided, but it was largely used to
| suppress and disperse immigrants and African Americans. The New
| Deal was pretty terrible if you were black and owned anything,
| not to mention the intentional setting of minimum wages to a
| level that would ensure black unemployment[3].
|
| [1]https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9ef5262e76846dfa1074cb
| ...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1937
|
| [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-racist-history-of-
| minimu...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| From your sources:
|
| > "While the Housing Act of 1937 looked to solve American
| housing issues, it became marred by inequalities and
| problems. The main problem that rose from the legislation was
| the power given to the local governments. The Federal
| government let the local governments and voters decided on
| where and how to use the federal funding. This lead to local
| governments maintaining segregationist housing policies as
| well as allowing many public housing locations to become
| neglected."
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yes, I'm vary familiar with the history. The law was
| written and implemented poorly. It didn't have any
| enforcement mechanism for reimbursing or resettling
| residents of cleared slums. It was apparent immediately
| that it was going to funnel federal funds to segregation.
| fakedang wrote:
| You also forgot the seizure of gold and the forced sale at
| below market rates. And the mandate that prevented Americans
| from owning bullion.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I mean, I wasn't trying to write a term paper.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Mentioned by the article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
|
| This notion of freedom resonates with me the most. I want to live
| in a society where basic needs are met through automation, so
| that people can spend the majority of their time following their
| calling and finding meaning. Less than 2 hours per day should be
| spent working towards survival, or else our tech offers little
| benefit over living in a hunter-gatherer society.
|
| Concretely, that would look like:
|
| * Robots pay taxes - not people, to be used for UBI
|
| * No taxes on necessary commodities like food, high taxes on
| luxuries
|
| * Taxes on unearned income would always be higher than on earned
| income
|
| * Labor performed on process not application, so maintaining the
| things that make the things
|
| * Profit on another's labor would either be considered
| inappropriate or taxed highly: at or near 100%
|
| * Unsustainability would be suspect, as it runs counter to the
| cultural goal of providing for all people forever
|
| * Injustices which impose burdens on people doing the most
| spiritually significant work would be targeted first: no penalty
| for being a parent, teacher, nurse or other caregiver
|
| There's probably a lot more to be said about this. I feel that
| the powers that be seem to be doing everything they can to
| prevent progress in this direction. Specifically, the wealthy and
| powerful seem to be doing nothing to help makers and inventors,
| they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies
| their ego.
|
| So we all work longer and longer hours to build bigger houses and
| buy more expensive vehicles to create profit for billionaires. We
| don't invest in trusts that would pay the living expenses of
| self-sufficient communities of tiny homes with hydroponic gardens
| and solar panels and such.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Not sure what this has to do with the article. Did you post
| this comment on the wrong page or something?
| dmacedo wrote:
| The article mentions "Transcendentalism", the above comment's
| author seems to have researched, and offered their opinion on
| the matter. Seems like an appropriate comment, and a
| worthwhile discussion of what the transcendental ethos imply,
| coupled with what drives the behaviours that are antithetical
| to those goals, which leads to the historical moments the
| article refers to.
| donclark wrote:
| Maybe he is additionally commenting on where our government
| is lacking today, and what he envisions us to be experiencing
| currently - if our GOV really were trying to improve things.
|
| I am glad that he did comment - and have copied it to dive
| further into those thoughts.
| asdff wrote:
| I think an issue with this expectation is the assumption that
| our current set of technology was made for its utility alone.
| The reality is that most of the innovations of the 20th and
| 21st century only came about if they had a strong profit angle
| or lopsided military advantage to go along with them. As such,
| it's hard to actually do what you propose when everything we
| have is only stuff that was good enough to make a profit at one
| time. It's not like a bow and arrow or the wheel, fundamental
| tools that were built for their own merit, not because the
| bowstring company had a patent and legally set the standard for
| what sort of arrow is to be sold in stores or anything like
| that.
|
| So then we have to take a step back and ask what is actually
| innovative about our global culture's technology today? Is the
| 4k TV really that innovative? IMO not really, you are using
| more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have
| been watching a decade ago. It's not like the bow and arrow,
| imparting a novel function that didn't exist before. Its just
| an iteration on existing ideas, just slightly different enough
| to market on that difference and convince people to sell thing
| x that does y for thing z that does y. Even when we do work
| hard to further the capabilities of these innovations, e.g.
| computers being so much more powerful than they were 15 years
| ago, are we really reaping that fruit? Or is everyone still
| using microsoft word, email, and light web browsing like they
| were doing 25 years ago with hardware that's at least an order
| of magnitude less powerful?
|
| Real innovation is scarce imo, since we don't invest in
| innovation, we invest in profit and innovation comes as a side
| effect, if it comes at all.
| WalterBright wrote:
| LED TVs use far, far less power than the old CRT TVs. The old
| TVs would warm up a room, LEDs, not.
| ericmcer wrote:
| "If" we were able to pull this off, which right now is a total
| pipe-dream, what do you picture the average person doing in
| this world? Would you implement harsh restrictions around what
| you can do if you are dependent on the system?
|
| Can someone have 20 kids and not raise them because it isn't
| part of their calling? Would people from other societies be
| allowed to immigrate in or would it be closed to all migrants?
|
| I don't think it is some orchestrated scam from a power mad
| global elite that is fighting against your utopian worldview. I
| don't think it is feasible, barring some kind of sci-fi AI that
| manages everything for us.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nobody makes you live in a bigger house or buy an expensive
| vehicle.
|
| I bought my truck used 30 years ago, and used it daily up until
| last year when it finally expired. It cost me very little
| money.
|
| > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever
| satisfies their ego.
|
| Your sentence contradicts itself.
|
| BTW, some years ago a luxury tax was placed on yacht building,
| based on the notion that millionaires were jerks for spending
| their money on yachts. Then the local economy of one of the
| yacht building companies collapsed, because the millionaires
| went elsewhere to spend money building their yachts.
|
| So the tax was rescinded.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Namari wrote:
| eff_nogs wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-14 23:00 UTC)