Posted on: Thursday, May 5, 2005
KOJI ARIYOSHI | MAN OF MANY CAUSES
Ariyoshi's thoughts on key moments in time
| • | Koji Ariyoshi: Portrait of an era |
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Koji Ariyoshi on ...
His internment at Manzanar: "Racists who discriminated against non-whites were quick to question our loyalty. This is the behavior of people who feel they are "the" Americans. Here are a people with a different concept of what America means. One thinks of it as a monopoly by a few, while the other believes in the extension of constitutional rights to all." Leaving his wife at Manzanar to join the U.S. Military Intelligence Service: "I said goodbye to Taeko inside the barbed wire as she could not step outside. As we drove away, we saw the people who had come to see us off waving from inside the desert city of exiles which was full of bitterness and charged like dynamite." The early communist movement in China: "In a way, the struggle of the peasants to own the land they tilled was like the struggle of workers in this country to organize unions for collective bargaining. I feel that human decency and respect everywhere among all people will come when man's exploitation of man ends everywhere." His arrest under the Smith Act: "I am charged with the violent overthrow of the government. Is the fight against discrimination because of color, religion or belief, against abuses of laborers, colonialism and subjugation of hundreds of millions, or the struggle for civil liberties and for a sane and peaceful world destructive to our government? Only a government which is for Big Business, which neglects and ignores civil liberties, and which is for perpetuating and is for a war program would label such pursuits dangerous." McCarthyism (in 1951): "The McCarthy political environment can sweep over this country again. There is danger today that in an economic depression the industrialists and their partners in government may instigate another war somewhere to get our industries moving, to put dissatisfied, unemployed workers back to their jobs in order to make people condone such a war."
