Sean Kennedy
Paul Kusuda
Paul Kusuda was 19 years old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. A U.S. citizen of Japanese American descent, he was living in Los Angeles at the time, studying to become an engineer at a community college. Kusuda says he was not afraid of being targeted for being Japanese; he just felt angry that his country was under attack.
“Identification with the United States was foremost, and so we really did not identify as being Japanese,” says Kusuda, 94, who has lived in Madison since the 1950s. “That explains why we had no real fear, at least in Los Angeles. The fear factor was the endemic fear that everyone had that the Japanese government might come over and drop bombs on us.”
About two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order for the forced evacuation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans — mostly American citizens. Kusuda, his parents and two siblings were sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in early spring 1942. He had to drop out of college and his father lost the small grocery store he had tended in Los Angeles.
On April 28 Kusuda will be part of a panel discussion on the internment of Japanese American citizens and its implications for civil liberties under President Donald Trump. In advance of the forum, the retired public administrator and activist sat down with Isthmus for a wide-ranging, three-hour interview. Hear his own words here:
Kusuda
Manzanar, now a national historic site between Sequoia and Death Valley national parks in California, was one of 10 “war relocation centers” designated by the U.S. government to hold incarcerated issei and nisei. Kusuda and his siblings were nisei — first-generation Americans born to Japanese immigrants. His parents were issei — the older generation born in Japan.
Kusuda’s family was housed in Block 33 at Manzanar. Each block comprised 13 to 14 barracks for living, one double barrack as a mess hall, and one latrine building each for men and women. There were 33 blocks in total. The Kusudas lived in the very corner of the camp. Right outside their door was a tower, which was always occupied by an armed guard; a few thin lines of barbed wire separated the camp from the rest of the world.
The first priority of the internees was to set up a school so junior high and high school students wouldn’t fall behind their peers. With two years of community college under his belt, Kusuda taught junior high math and English. Eventually, the superintendent of California schools fully accepted the credits earned by students in Manzanar.
Kusuda says the internees at Manzanar were guided by complementary philosophies.
“The people of Japanese ancestry, aliens as well as citizens, decided that to create a disturbance would be antagonistic to the security of the United States, and if we created a disturbance, they would deploy forces to combat that disturbance,” he says.
“As a group, we decided to comply. The basic philosophy there was shikata ga nai, meaning ‘it cannot be helped.’ The other underlying force was the Japanese concept of gambatte, which means ‘persevere, stay with it.’”
Kusuda says most of the internees at Manzanar considered themselves unquestionably American. Yet, they knew their allegiance to their country was now considered suspect because of their Japanese ancestry.
In 1943, the War Department and War Relocation Authority sent a “loyalty questionnaire” to all adults in relocation centers; these surveys were designed to recruit an all-nisei combat unit to serve in the U.S. armed forces.
“Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” asked question 27.
“Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America...and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor…?” read question 28.
Internees worried that the government was trying to trick them. Would answering yes to question 28 be an implicit admission of loyalty to the Japanese emperor? According to Kusuda, two groups emerged among the internees: the “yes-yes” group and the “no-no” group.
Kusuda was a “yes-yes.” In fact, he developed a reputation as an outspoken advocate for loyalty to the U.S. government. Kusuda describes himself as “anti-anti-American,” rather than “pro-American.”
At times Kusuda feared for his life. In December 1942, a group of dissidents disillusioned with their treatment by the U.S. government demonstrated at Manzanar. The military police guarding the relocation center opened fire on the crowd, killing three people, including one under 18.
Kusuda became increasingly fearful of the anti-American dissidents within the camp who had previously beaten Fred Tayama, a vocal leader of the Japanese American Citizens League. The group favored a more cooperative stance toward the government.
As intragroup tensions rose, Kusuda’s father, who was a cook in the mess hall, pocketed bags of black and red pepper for Paul to throw in the faces of anyone who might accost him. Due to his precarious situation and with the support of his family, Paul was able to work through the American Friends Service Committee and the United Church of the Brethren to leave the camp in 1943 and enroll in college in Chicago.
Kusuda’s time in the camp lasted just over a year. The rest of his family remained until 1945.
Due to his internment experience, Kusuda embarked on a different career path. Hopeful of affecting public policy, he switched from engineering to social work.
Kusuda worked eight hours a day while earning his social work degree at the University of Chicago. He married his wife, Atsuko, in Chicago in 1950. After a short stint working for the state of Illinois in Springfield, Kusuda followed his boss to Madison in 1951. The Kusudas moved into an apartment on Atwood Avenue and Paul began working for Wisconsin’s Health and Human Services Department as a social work analyst. The couple now have three children and five grandchildren.
Roosevelt’s executive order was eventually rescinded by President Gerald Ford in 1976. President George H.W. Bush later issued a letter of apology and reparations in the amount of $20,000 to each of the internees who were still alive in 1990. The oldest received the first checks. Kusuda and his wife, also an internee, donated their reparations payments to the nonprofit organizations that helped them after their time of incarceration.
“If we look back dispassionately and consider what was happening, we have to include two factors,” he says. “One — xenophobia. There was an anti-Asian feeling on the West Coast throughout the whole time. The second major factor was hysteria. When you combine the two, we have the result that our good president is currently trying to foment against the Muslims.”
Kusuda says Trump and his followers have demonized Muslims because they practice a different religion and pray to a different God. “And so we put them into a grouping of non-Americans, but they are American. We put them in a group saying they are not American, saying they are a dangerous force, that we have to worry about security. So then we have to weigh security versus civil liberties. And in a time of hysteria and anti-Muslim feelings, the scales get tipped toward security.”
Not surprisingly, Kusuda is critical of Trump’s recent executive orders targeting people from majority-Muslim countries.
“My first response was that it is completely unconstitutional and that it’s a play toward meeting the needs of hysteria and trying to gain strength from that hysteria, trying to gain personal profit from that without consideration of the welfare of the people who are directly involved.”
Quelling this type of hysteria won’t be easy to do, he says.
“I believe that it’s extremely difficult because we have in the United States a growing group of people who are really anti-American,” Kusuda says. “They are the neo-Nazis, they are the white supremacists, they are the Ku Klux Klanners. They are the people who want something for nothing. They think the world owes them a living, that others have the responsibility of taking care of them because they deserve it, and others do not deserve it because they are a group unto themselves. Their allegiance is toward themselves and not toward the nation.”
Kusuda’s political vision has been shaped in part by his career as a social worker and as deputy director of the Bureau of Juvenile Services for the state Department of Corrections.
“I believe that people can change,” Kusuda says. “I believe, for example, in our correctional system, we should give more credence to the influence of maturity, which we do not give. I believe at some point adult offenders can be redeemed.”
Kusuda defies easy categorization as a political liberal. His approach to social and political problems is both holistic and fundamental, which sometimes puts him at odds with mainstream progressive causes in America.
“We have all kinds of obstacles to overcome, obstacles that people of goodwill misconstrue,” he says. “We have something called ‘diversity.’ We previously had a concept of the United States as a melting pot, and we had a feeling that Americans are Americans whether they are of a different color, religion, origin, or other differing concepts. But as Americans, we are one.
“Society decided we would go into the model called diversity, and we would say that ‘in diversity there is strength’ because the U.S. grew from a variety of sources, groups that came in and became Americans. Now we have something called the Asian Americans, the Hispanic Americans, the Native Americans, and the African Americans. In fact at [UW-Madison] we have ethnic programs for each of the four groups. But they are silos.”
Despite his critique, Kusuda helped establish the Asian-American Studies Department at UW-Madison. It was the first such program at a Midwestern university. UW-Madison also offers Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies; Afro-American Studies; and American Indian Studies. Kusuda has since lobbied for the different centers to merge into a singular ethnic studies department, but has been unsuccessful.
According to Kusuda, the diversity paradigm has backfired. Political and social alliances built around ethnic or other identities, he argues, can fragment a sense of the greater good. Kusuda says this fragmentation pits groups against one another, ratchets up hysteria, and prevents us from seeing a clear resolution that benefits all involved.
“Citizenship is the best part of democracy, the best part of rule by law. It is a denial of imperialism, a denial of monarchy, a denial of single-purposed action. I want to see a continuation of the American dream. I guess I basically like what is written in the Declaration of Independence and in the preamble to the Constitution.”
Kusuda pulls a tattered booklet out of his back pocket — a well-worn pocket copy of the the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — and begins reading.
“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ And I believe that.”
At 94, Kusuda remains active. He writes a monthly column for the Asian Wisconzine in which he frequently advocates on behalf of seniors.
Kusuda also has his sights set on fixing what he sees as the country’s most pressing problem. That would be to “undo Trump and Trumpism.”
Kusuda and UW constitutional law professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes will be featured on a panel discussion organized by the Madison Chapter of the American Constitution Society on April 28, noon-1:30 p.m, at Madison Central Library, 201 W. Mifflin St. Former Wisconsin Public Radio host Jean Feraca will moderate the discussion.
