Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker Committee members Brian Maeda (left to right), Emily Winters, Phyllis Hayashibara, and Arnold Maeda receive 11th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin’s $5K donation from Field Deputy Len Nguyen (center, with check). Bill Rosendahl, former LA City Councilmember, 11th District, looks on in the foreground. (Photo courtesy of Masako Ido)
Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker Reaches $100,000 Goal with Fundraiser at HamaSushi in Venice
By Phyllis Hayashibara, member of the VJAMM Committee
The Venice Japanese America Memorial Marker reached its goal of raising $100,000 to build and install a permanent monument on the northwest corner of Venice and Lincoln Boulevards, after the Wednesday, April 23, 2014 VJAMM fundraiser at Hama Sushi Restaurant in Venice, California.
Hama Sushi proprietor, Esther Chaing, for the third year in a row, donated 100% of the profits of the bento lunches sold and 10% of the dinner sales to the VJAMM Committee.
This year, 204 bento were sold, compared to 189 bento in 2013 and 92 bento in 2012.
Corporate orders included 25 bento orders from Susie Baik of His and Her Hair Goods; and 23 bento orders from Adam Riesz. Riesz bought the bento for the employees of one of his clients, whose parents had been removed from their home and business in Northern California.
“Obviously this was a terrible thing to have happened,” said Riesz, “and people need to remember this history.[This fundraiser] is for a cause near and dear to their hearts.”
Hama Sushi staff who volunteered their culinary and administrative expertise included chefs Kinya Aota, Masayo Onuki, and managers Tony Kim and Naoko Matsumura.
Chaing’s cumulative donations towards the VJAMM amount to well over $5,000, the threshold for major donor recognition and permanent acknowledgement on the VJAMM.
The Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker will mark the intersection to which some 1,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, forcibly removed from Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu, reported with only what they could carry.
Over several days in April, 1942, they would be transported from that site to what would become the War Relocation Authority camp at Manzanar in Inyo County, a dusty, four-hour bus ride away via Highway 395.
Many would spend the duration of World War II in Manzanar, unless they were drafted into the U. S. Army, removed to the Tule Lake Segregation Center for refusing to answer “yes” to the so-called Loyalty Questions, or volunteered for work furloughs to alleviate the labor shortages around the U. S.
The VJAMM design echoes the white obelisk erected in the Manzanar Cemetery in 1943 as a “monument to console the dead.”
The black granite VJAMM obelisk, however, seeks to remind the living “to be forever vigilant about defending our Constitutional rights, so that the powers of government shall never again perpetrate an injustice against any group based solely on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion.”
The Wednesday morning program of speakers included Len Nguyen, Field Deputy for Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who presented the VJAMM Committee with a huge facsimile check for $5,000.
“I’m proud to support the Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker. It will serve as an important reminder to us and future generations to be vigilant about protecting the rights of the voiceless,” said Bonin in a written statement.
This generous donation continues the support for the VJAMM from the 11th District which began with former LA City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl, who donated $5,000.00 to the VJAMM in April, 2011.
On Wednesday, Rosendahl reiterated his rigorous endorsement of the VJAMM project, which he first brought to the Los Angeles City Council in 2009, in response to letters soliciting his support for a permanent marker from New Media Academy students at Venice High School.
Venice High School graduate, Scott Pine, had been the student who brought to his U. S. History class the April 2009 edition of the Free Venice Beachhead. This issue featured articles on the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, and urged its readers to support the idea of a permanent memorial, “lest we forget.”
Pine, now a Jack Kent Cooke scholar at UCLA, pledged to solicit support for the maintenance of the VJAMM from among other student activists, clubs, and organizations on campus.
Jim Smith, one of the original VJAMM Committee members and formerly of the Free Venice Beachhead Collective, sent in personal donation of $1,000, and reiterated his remarks of 2011: “We are all immigrants whose rights should be respected in Arizona and elsewhere. We are all potentially homeless whose rights should be respected in Venice and elsewhere. We are the same as Arabs or Muslims whose rights should be respected throughout this nation. And when it comes to recognizing what was done here on this very intersection 69 years ago, we are all Japanese Americans.”
Emily Winters, Chair of the Venice Arts Council and a member of the VJAMM Committee, traced the history of the VJAMM to 9-11-2001.
In the wake of those attacks on the U. S., hate crimes against perceived Middle Easterners or Muslims reminded Venice artists and activists of the removal and imprisonment of persons of Japanese ancestry after Imperial Japan bombed the U. S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941.
They vowed to remind people that what happened to persons of Japanese ancestry in 1942 should never happen again to any minority group, in complete violation of Constitutional guarantees of due process and the writ of habeas corpus.
Other speakers at the Wednesday fundraiser at Hama Sushi included Suzanne Thompson, Chair of the Endangered Art Fund of the VAC, who read aloud the complete text on the VJAMM;
Linda Lucks, President of the Venice Neighborhood Council, one of the earliest supporters of the VJAMM, and representative of the Venice Community Housing Corporation, the fiscal sponsor for the VAC and the VJAMM Committee;
Randi Tahara, Senior Deputy for 2nd District Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas who had donated $5,000 in August 2013; Betsy Butler, former California Assemblymember, 53rd District, who had co-sponsored with California State Senator Ted Lieu, 28th District, Assembly Concurrent Resolution 46 requesting that CalTrans grant an encroachment permit for the VJAMM; and Melissa Ramoso, Field Representative for Senator Lieu.
Ramoso contacted the VJAMM Committee the day after the fundraiser with the welcome news that Lieu had pledged a $5,000 donation to the VJAMM, and sent this quote: “The Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker will be a staunch reminder of a big part of our community’s history. We can never take back what was done, but we can certainly speak up in the face of injustice. I commend the VJAMM Committee, the Venice Arts Council, and the Venice Community Housing Corporation for all their hard work and support in this great endeavor. As a co-author of the legislation to allow the placement of the marker, I am honored to contribute to their effort.”
Arnold Maeda, former Manzanar internee, shared stories of fellow incarcerees Mae, Haru, Rose, Rosie, Glenn, Reggie, and Sam.
Brian Maeda, born in Manzanar and both a documentary and dramatic filmmaker, screened the trailer for his newest film, “We Said No No,” about the Tule Lake Segregation Center.
Bruce Embrey of the Manzanar Committee shared Manzanar Pilgrimage’s ten camp banners to decorate the Hama Sushi patio, and urged continued protest against the LADWP’s proposal to build a 1,200 acre solar farm adjacent to the Manzanar National Historic Site.
The program ended with the screening of a YouTube performance by Sean Miura, who read his poem, “Yonsei,” at the February 15, 2014 Day of Remembrance program at the Japanese American National Museum.
VJAMM Committee member and program emcee Phyllis Hayashibara echoed the last line of Miura’s poem, “How could we ever forget?” by saying, “and we will NOT forget, as long as the Yonsei pass on the legacy of their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ wartime evacuation from the West Coast to ten American concentration camps during World War II.”
Additional major donors to the VJAMM not already mentioned above include the National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites grant of $50,000 announced in March 2012; Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 3rd District, who donated $5,000 in February 2013; and Don Knabe, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 4th District, who donated $5,000 in February 2014.
Much-appreciated, tax-deductible donations may be sent to Venice Arts Council/VJAMM, P. O. Box 993, Venice, CA 90294, payable to “VCHC/VJAMM.” The Venice Community Housing Corporation serves as fiscal sponsor for the Venice Arts Council and the Venice Japanese American Memorial Marker Committee. For more information, please visit www.venicejamm.org.
