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February 19th in the United States marked the Day of Remembrance (追憶の日; tsuioku no hi) for Japanese-Americans. It was on that day in 1942 that President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which rounded up all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into concentration camps. Japanese Americans rallied in person and on social media under the hashtag #NeverAgainIsNow, standing in solidarity with those immigrants currently held in detention across the United States.

Unfortunately, one remembrance in Bellevue, WA was marred by an act of censorship. The local Japanese American and Asian-Pacific Islander communities came together in protest over the act – and, just as importantly, to restore that which had been desecrated.

Censoring Local History

The controversy began when Bellevue College agreed to host the memorial installation “Never Again is Now” by Seattle artist Erin Shigaki. Shigaki seeks, in her own words, to “create murals and installations that are community based and focused on POC experiences, especially the WWII incarceration of her family and community.” Shigaki's mural depicts two children who were held at a concentration camp during the war.

Soon after the installation was placed, however, someone whited out a portion of the placard accompanying the picture of the children. The whited out portion read:

After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans included the 60 families (300 individuals) who farmed Bellevue.

Eventually, it came out that someone had blotted out the sentence on the order of Gayle Colston Barge, the college's Vice President of Institutional Advancement. The blatant act of censorship outraged the community – even more so when people discovered it had been committed by someone high up in the college's administration.

The Day of Remembrance placard that accompanies Erin Shigaki's installation. You can see the sentence that was whited out in the second paragraph. (A student inserted the sentence back in.) The placard has since been replaced with a new printing with the sentence intact. (Picture by the author)

Bellevue College boasts a 50% non-white population – higher than the average of 41% for other colleges, the majority of whom are Asian. Given that demographic, it's not surprising such an action would generate controversy. What's surprising is that, given that population, such an incident even occurred in the first place.

As the community's outrage grew, so did the damage to the college and its reputation. Barge was placed on leave. According to the Seattle Times, Barge apologized to Shigaki; however, she didn't reveal what prompted her to remove the sentence referencing Miller Freeman. The college's board has also refused to divulge Barge's motivation.

College President Jerry Weber also apologized to the community. However, his response was seen as tepid and insufficient. Earlier this week, in a bid to contain the fallout, Bellevue College's Board of Trustees announced it would remove Weber as President.

Miller Freeman's Land Grab

So who was Miller Freeman, anyway?

As Doug Blair makes clear in an article at the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, the incarceration of Japanese citizens in World War II didn't just happen out of the blue. By that point, prominent Americans had agitated against America's Japanese population for decades. Some of them – such as WA state Congressman Albert Johnson – even helped lead attacks against America's Asian population, such as the 1907 riot in Bellingham that forced many South Asians to flee to Canada.

Miller Freeman was one such agitator. A prominent local businessman, Freeman advocated for many local projects such as the original floating bridge connecting Bellevue to Seattle. Freeman was also a militant white supremacist racist who spent decades targeting the Seattle area's Japanese American community. Freeman maintained that “the Japanese could not be assimilated”, railed against mixed-race marriages, and championed Washington's infamous Alien Land Laws that prevented Japanese residents from owning property.

So Who is Miller Freeman Anyway? – Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment The name Miller Freeman has been in the news this past week after a Day of Remembrance installation at Bellevue College by artist Erin Shigaki was defaced by a school administrator. Shigaki's art installation, “Never Again Is Now,” depicts two Japanese American children in a WWII concentration camp, and an accompanying artist statement described the …

Freeman founded Washington State's Anti-Japanese League in 1916. In 1921, Freeman and the League were successful in getting Washington to pass the Alien Land Law.

When Executive Order 9066 came down and Japanese citizens were rounded up into camps, Miller Freeman was one of its biggest beneficiaries. At the time, large swaths of Bellevue were farmland. And many of the farmers were Japanese Americans. With Japanese American citizens detained in concentration camps, Freeman and other developers bought their vacant, unattended land at bargain basement prices.

Freeman's racist advocacy didn't stop after the Executive Order. He also agitated against Japanese citizens ever returning once the war was over. Freeman didn't get his wish – but he did do extensive damage: only 11 of Bellevue's 60 Japanese families made their way home after the war. The ones who didn't lose their property outright came home to find it desecrated.

Why would anyone want to defend or obscure such a legacy? Two words: money and shame. Miller Freeman's son, Kemper Freeman, built on his father's land-grab legacy by creating Bellevue Square, the area's first shopping mall, and kick-starting Bellevue as a bustling suburb of Seattle. Bellevue Square and the surrounding Bellevue Collection are managed today by Miller's grandson, Kemper Freeman Jr.

As Densho notes in their article, this isn't the first time that references to Miller Freeman have been excised:

This past fall a similar line was struck from Shigaki’s work when it appeared at the City of Bellevue’s Bellwether Festival. Dr. Ron Magden, while doing research on Japanese American history, discovered that papers and letters documenting Freeman’s anti-Japanese writings were removed from the University of Washington archives. Also, Professor Roger Daniels, the nationally acclaimed history expert, did a Seattle TV news segment about Miller Freeman’s anti-Japanese actions, and this news story was never shown.

In other words, the Freemans are a powerful local family. And digging into the family's racist past requires facing the uncomfortable truth that modern Bellevue was built off of the suffering of its Japanese citizens.

A Remembrance – and a Re-Dedication

Volunteers hold placards with the names of the concentration camps where Japanese citizens where held during World War II during a re-dedication ceremony at Bellevue College. (Photo by the author)

If there's one positive in this bleak incident, it's watching how the Asian-Pacific Islander community around Bellevue and its supporters came together in response.

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On March 3rd, hundreds of people gathered for a memorial ceremony and re-dedication of Erin Shigaki's mural. As South Seattle Emerald notes, several members of the local Japanese American community who survived the camps attended the ceremony. Stan Shikuma, President of the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, also spoke at length. In his final speech, he called upon the College to offer a full apology and to cover the cost of the vandalism, and he called on the school to take “concrete steps to keep the values of equity, diversity and inclusion alive on the Bellevue College campus.”

“We will be watching,” he added.

Shigaki herself spoke and led a ceremony where she called out the names of the concentration camps where Japanese citizens were imprisoned. As Shigaki called each name and rang a Tibetan healing bowl, volunteers stepped forward with placards holding the name of the camp. The crowd then observed a moment of silence, after which Shigaki asked crowd members to call out the names of people they knew who had suffered from unjust incarceration.

After the ceremony, Shigaki and others installed a new version of the defaced placard.

One hopes that the administration of Bellevue College learns a valuable lesson from this. We can't learn from the past if people in power are determined to bury it. As Shigaki told Unseen Japan in an e-mail:

The United States’ history of racism should not be erased or modified, just because some find it difficult to come to terms with, or because it names people whose generational wealth and power is entwined with that racism. In fact, it is this constant desire to whitewash the past that dooms us to repeat it. Three generations later, the cruel and thoughtless attempt to silence my art stirs up the same emotions my ancestors felt but were unable to speak of in order to survive their incarceration: sorrow, anger, confusion, mistrust, dismissal, disrespect, shame, and self-hate.

If you wish to help keep the memory of the Japanese incarceration alive, please consider supporting Densho, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to preserving the history of the WWII incarceration in order to promote equity and justice today.

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