BNN provides English-language US and world news, analysis and opinion from all over the Internet. We strive for high standards, ethical behavior, and the presentation of multiple responsible points of view.
|
Get More Traffic For Your Blog! Blog Explosion brings hundreds of interested visitors to your blog - without costing you a cent. BNN News Archive Page |
Saturday, March 25, 2006
CELEBRATING KOJI ARIYOSHI: AN AMERICAN G.I. AND HUMAN CULTURAL BRIDGE  It has not been so long ago that I came to the realization that those people I idolize or mark as heroes in my life are those who did not have to endure hardships foisted on them, but only because they never accepted their arduous plights as irreversible. I celebrate the extraordinary in the everyday people like my parents. My father lived in a Masonic Tuberculosis sanitorium as a teen. My mother was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage. And life never balanced out their pain, but added more hardship. Through all of it they found solace in small things. My mother gave what little she had to anyone that needed it more than she did. My father heroically gave his life for a reviled war. I lionize the priest, Father Biddle, who, at over 80 years of age, brought forbidden communion to prisoners in an Asian prison when it could have cost him his freedom. I weep, overcome with awe, when I see Ms Yue's father smile a wholly satisfied smile when not so long ago he spent six years in a brutal re-education camp following the cultural revolution. And I am mesemrized when her mother laughs with one as infectious as my own mother's, when once she could barely keep fed during her husbands confinement and never gave up on him, herself or her family. I sing the praises of women like Maxine Russell, whose son Darren Russell was brutally murdered last year in Guangzhou, and now devotes her time and talents to helping the parents of other murdered children. A woman who has rejected offers of money for her story and instead freely focused on enabling legislation and protocols that will prevent future deaths of foreign experts in China. I am dumbstruck by people like Clarence Darrow and Koji Ariyoshi who gave their all for the sake of others. They never sought fame or material reward, but only the chance to keep helping. It is close to the 30th Anniversary of the Hawaiian Legislature's passage of a resolution honoring one of history's greatest, and nearly forgotten, cultural bridge builders and dedicated human rights activists: Koji Ariyoshi. He was born the son of an immigrant and indentured sugar plantation worker who later became a coffee farmer. He worked on his father's small farm as a child, became a dock worker in Honolulu and later San Francisco. And then in San Francisco he was rounded up with more than 100,000 others of Japanese descent and interned during our war with Imperial Japan. During World War Two he became a leader of other Japanese interned ( a euphemism for falsely imprisoned) in a California "relocation camp." He volunteered for the US Army and became an Intelligence Officer in India, Burma, and China and served the country who had stripped him of rights honorably to conquer a world threat. After WWII he founded a newspaper in Hawaii that fought for workers rights and was subsequently arrested by the FBI and convicted, during the McCarthy era, for conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the US Government with his pro labor activism. Six years later his conviction was reversed by a higher US Court. He became friends with many of Chinese leaders and acted as president of the US-China People's Friendship Association. During this time he wrote eloquently about his experiences in post war and Maoist China. His early devotions to study, that won him a scholarship as a youth to the University of Georgia, served to shape his natural gift for the written word in articulate treatises on racism, injustice and the human condition. Early on in his life he saw oppression as a "...belt running round the world." And he did his best to rally people to se the ills and correct them. He later became a revered lecturer at the University of Hawaii in its ethnic studies program. Ariyoshi, despite a life of immense conflict and hardship remained an optimist. In a letter, written in 1976 to a newborn baby girl named for him, he wrote: "Welcome to our world full of challenges! It is a promising world vastly matured in some sectors, but in the main underdeveloped. There are elements and forces for progressive development to uplift the quality of life of the vast majority we identify as the common people. You will learn that the compass of human societies is set in the direction of change and the helmsmen change their watch as mankind crosses newer horizons. The historical trend is for the common people to take the bridge, grip the helmsman's wheel and steer the ship to a distant, promising harbor. You could not have chosen a better time to join us. I envision an exciting, useful and satisfying life ahead for you." Perhaps one of the best tributes to Ariyoshi was written by the controversial journalist Israel Epstein: "Such a life does not evaporate like a drop of dew but flows down to swell the mighty ocean of all the peoples. Through those whom you impelled to go persistently forward, and those whom they in turn impel, you will always live on as part of the irresistible tide." Ideologies, beliefs, or political leanings should not stop us from celebrating or enulating, even in small ways, such a man. He life became a mirror for all that is just and unjust in civilized society. It was with awe and admiration that I immersed myself in learning about a phenomena, a legend, made of toil and subsequent losses few can even imagine and I marveled at his subsequent triumph over them with an unwavering lifelong dedication to assisting others. Look for the chances in your own life to reach out. Sentimental? Sure. Heartfelt? Absolutely! China Asia Blogging China Blogs China Blog Blogging Koji Ariyoshi Storytelling WWII Lonnie Hodge Mao Chinese History China Blog Onemanbandwidth is: Located here Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by Lonnie at 11:58 AM |
Subscribe to BNN and get a daily bulletin of all our news postings. Interested in writing for BNN? Want information on our news service? Contact The Editor Writing for BNN BNN Editorial Policies Previous Posts
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home