{"id":189056,"date":"2025-08-31T08:46:47","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T08:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/189056\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T08:46:47","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T08:46:47","slug":"the-afterlife-is-letting-go-confronting-unresolved-family-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/189056\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Afterlife Is Letting Go”: Confronting unresolved family history"},"content":{"rendered":"

This book won the 2025 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Best Wishes for the Future<\/p>\n

The reparations my grandfather received from the United States government were used to pay for his first year in the nursing home where he spent the last five years of his life. My grandmother received a check for $20,000. She spent it on my grandfather\u2019s rent. He never saw it. He did not know anything about it. He was ten years into Alzheimer\u2019s. He did not know he had, fifty years earlier, been classified as an enemy alien of the United States and incarcerated in a Department of Justice prison under suspicion of being a spy for Japan. The check was a coin placed in my grandfather\u2019s mouth. It came with a letter: a form apology from the White House. It was not addressed to my grandfather. It was not addressed to anyone. It was stamped with the signature of George H. W. Bush. The last sentence read: \u201cYou and your family have our best wishes for the future.<\/p>\n

UNDERWRITTEN BY<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at\u00a0coloradosun.com\/sunlit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Five years later my grandfather was dead. His funeral was held in a nondescript church in North Carolina. The church was filled with people my grandfather did not know or would not have remembered. There was a small number of Japanese Americans, but they were outnumbered by white people, some of whom were there to support my grandmother, most of whom were on their way into the sanctuary when they caught a glimpse of the photograph, surrounded by flowers, of an Asian man they recognized but did not know, and thought, with fleeting sympathy, He\u2019s dead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was not there. I was eighteen, first year in college, upstate New York.\u00a0 My mother called. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to go,\u201d she said. I believed her. Or I believed that my grandfather, who had long since lost his mind, was already dead, and that I had made my peace with his being gone, which quickly proved to be untrue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I was young, I did not know anything about Japanese American incarceration. I was not, as a young person\u2014or a person, in general\u2014uncommon in this. Not only did I not know anything about Japanese American incarceration, I did not know that my grandfather had been incarcerated, nor that other members of my family were also incarcerated: my great-aunt Joy in Poston; my great-uncle Makio (Roy), great-aunt Tsuruyo (Pearl), and their daughters, Sally and Carole, in Heart Mountain, my great-aunt Setsuko\u2019s family in Manzanar.<\/p>\n

I do not remember when I first heard of internment, which was the only word that seemed to exist. I do not remember if I heard it at home, from my parents, at my grandparents\u2019 house, school. I have a vague memory of a small gray box in my ninth-grade US History textbook, stating, in one lackluster paragraph, a wartime, therefore justifiable, injustice. In the white town in Connecticut where I grew up (compositionally synonymous with the white town where my grandfather died), I might have been the only one who could see it. I do not remember if my classmates looked at me. I remember internment had something to do with my grandfather. He might as well have been the whole story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was one of only two Asian Americans in my elementary school. The other was my sister, two grades older. Among the names my classmates called me was Mr. Miyagi. 1985, 1986. Never mind that Mr. Miyagi was old, bald, had facial hair and a Japanese accent; he was a new and convenient reference with which white boys could try out their racism as comedy. I knew, from the credits of The Karate Kid, that Mr. Miyagi was played by Noriyuki \u2018Pat\u2019 Morita, but I did not know that Morita was American, and that his accent was part of his character. I did not know that when Morita was young he was in an internment camp. It was not until years later that I learned that it was not an internment camp, but a concentration camp; that internment refers to the detention of non-citizens, while incarceration refers to the detention of citizens; that two-thirds of the people who were incarcerated were citizens and that the other third were not citizens because they were not eligible, by law, to become citizens; and that therefore the difference between being incarcerated and being interned was, for those who were not citizens\u2014many of whom had lived in the United States for decades\u2014outside of their control.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Afterlife Is Letting Go\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Where to find it<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

SunLit<\/strong> present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n

I did not know that children were incarcerated. When Morita was two, he was diagnosed with spinal TB. He spent the next decade in a body cast in the Weimar Sanatorium, northeast of Sacramento, then in the Shriners Hospital in San Francisco. When his family was incarcerated in Gila River, the FBI picked him up and carried him to camp. He cried the first four days. \u201cI was homesick for the hospital,\u201d he said. \u201cI could feel and sense and hear all the colors and horrors of incarceration. The sadness, the hopelessness.\u201d Many years later, he returned to Gila River. His wife Evelyn remembers him breaking down. He told her that \u201ca day didn\u2019t go by that you didn\u2019t hear about a suicide or a stillborn or somebody dying from an illness they couldn\u2019t treat.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One night, at his house, Mr. Miyagi gets drunk and tells Daniel (Ralph Macchio) that he had a wife, that she was in a concentration camp, Manzanar, and that she had just given birth. \u201cFirst American-born Miyagi,\u201d he says, before passing out. He is holding a piece of paper. Daniel removes it from his hand. A telegram. He reads it: \u201cWe regret to inform you that on November 2, 1944 at the Manzanar Relocation Center, your wife and newborn son died due to complications arising from childbirth.\u201d Miyagi received the telegram in Europe. He was in the 442nd, the segregated, all-Nisei combat unit. That scene in Karate Kid seemed to indicate where the Japanese Americans had gone, and where, as represented by Mr. Miyagi, they were forced to keep going. The formula seemed to be that for a citizen to be born, an immigrant had to be struck down; and the citizen dies anyway. Because I was introduced to these things by a movie, and because the movie was not really about any of these things, Japanese American incarceration was introduced to me as fiction. It was my least favorite scene in The Karate Kid. Too dark, too slow, motivated by too much history. It brought the world into the room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then it was my grandmother and me. June Shimoda, born Chizuko Yamashita. Her parents were from Fukuoka, both named Yamashita (no relation), and both contract laborers\u2014he as a railroad worker, she as his wife, a picture bride.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My grandmother was not incarcerated. She was born and, except for two years in Fukuoka, raised on a farm in Utah, outside the exclusion zone. The fact that she was not incarcerated and my grandfather was, underscored, in my mind, a difference between them. There were Japanese Americans who were free and Japanese Americans who were not, but I did not know what constituted the difference\u2014gender? generation? citizenship? suspicion? None of these interpretations included racism\u2014that is, none included white people\u2014as if incarceration was a matter of immaculate misfortune.<\/p>\n

I interviewed my grandmother in 1999. I was in undergraduate school, taking a class, my first, on Asian American history. The stories she told me became the genesis of my book, The Grave on the Wall. We sat in the living room where I saw my grandfather for the last time and stared out the sliding glass doors into the trees. My grandmother told me about picnics with other families from Fukuoka. I heard the sound of parents gossiping in Japanese. I did not hear, in their gossip, the distance between the Issei and Nisei, nor did I hear gossip as commiseration. I did not see the Issei disappearing through the gossip into Fukuoka, nor the Nisei disappearing into a country that was just as foreign. Instead I felt the pangs of sadness about having missed out on what I perceived as the halcyon days of Japanese America. About having missed out on not only what it meant to be Japanese American, but a contributor to its meaning. I felt seedless and pale, the diminishment of being Japanese in favor of being American. That I, a biracial yonsei, represented, in the form of the future looking back, its mourner and nullification, both the destiny and attenuation of Japanese America.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

82,219 Japanese Americans received reparations in the form of $20,000, to account, as a formality, for what they had lost. Or, because loss is a euphemism for theft, what had been stolen. The Office of Redress Administration, created by the Civil Liberties Act\u2014the culmination of a multigenerational struggle, which included the testimonies of over 500 survivors, many of whom were confronting, articulating, and sharing their experiences for the first time\u2014paid out 1.6 billion dollars. The first nine checks were presented to nine of the oldest prisoners in a ceremony in DC, October 9, 1990. Checks 10 through 82,219, accompanied by letters without names or salutations, were delivered from 1991 to 1993.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ud83c\udfa7 Listen here!<\/p>\n

Go deeper into this story in this episode of The Daily Sun-Up podcast. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\nhttps:\/\/omny.fm\/shows\/the-colorado-sun\/author-brandon-shimoda-talks-about-award-winning-book-the-afterlife-is-letting-go\n<\/p>\n

Subscribe: <\/strong>Apple<\/a> | Spotify<\/a> | RSS<\/a><\/p>\n

Mamoru Eto, a 107-year-old Issei living in the Keiro Nursing Home in Los Angeles (where my great-grandmother, Asano Yamashita, also lived, and died), was the first to receive a check. Eto immigrated to the United States in 1919 (the same year as my grandfather). He and his wife Kura settled in Pasadena, where they had ten children. Eto worked on a farm and preached during the winter, to migrant laborers mostly, farm to farm. He opened the First Japanese Nazarene Church in his living room. He and seven of his children\u2014three had already left California; Kura had returned, alone, to Japan\u2014were incarcerated in Tulare and Gila River. Even though he was not, at the time, eligible for US citizenship, Eto forswore his allegiance to Japan. \u201cWe\u2019re not Japanese anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re American,\u201d adding: \u201cThere\u2019s no other way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know what your family members did with the reparations?\u201d I asked the descendants. \u201cThey bought a new roof,\u201d they answered. \u201cThey built a front porch. They fixed the patio. Repaved the driveway. Installed a new drainage system. A trash compactor. Hardwood floors. Floor-length curtains. They bought folding screens. A leather recliner. A camera lens. Golf club membership. Fishing equipment. Farm equipment. Groceries. They paid bills. Ambulance bills. Hospital bills. Car loans. Mortgages. They paid for a down payment on a house. Private school. College funds. A film degree. A music therapy degree. Weddings. Long-term care insurance. Assisted living. They bought stocks. Savings bonds. They gave it to their children. Their siblings. Grandchildren. They drank it away. Gambled it away. They went to Japan. Four trips to Japan. (Their first time back.) (Their first time visiting.) To Hiroshima. To China. To Singapore. To Egypt. To Norway. To Peru. To Brazil. To Portugal. On a religious pilgrimage to F\u00e1tima. To Spain. To France. On a religious pilgrimage to Lourdes. To Canada. To Mexico. To Hawaii. To Alaska. They started a teriyaki sauce business. An auto repair business. They bought a log cabin. A customized van. A red truck. A Honda Civic. A Nissan Maxima. A Mazda 626. An Acura. A Lexus ES 350. A Toyota Camry. A Toyota Corolla. They donated it to the local community center. The local library (for a collection of books about incarceration). The Red Cross. The Christian church. The Buddhist Church. The Buddhist Churches of America. The JACL. JANM. They split it. They did not want it. They never spent it. They gave it away.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe United States is not at war. The United States is war,\u201d writes Sora Han, professor of criminology and law. \u201cNecessity has no law,\u201d wrote Gratian, 4th century Roman Emperor. Gratian makes an appearance in Giorgio Agamben\u2019s State of Exception, in which \u201cstate of exception\u201d is elucidated not as a temporary suspension of law but a permanent paradigm of government. Historian Clinton Rossiter explains this paradigm as \u201ccrisis government,\u201d ruled by \u201cconstitutional dictatorship.\u201d He calls Japanese American incarceration an \u201cassertion of dictatorial power.\u201d Agamben calls it a \u201cspectacular violation of civil rights,\u201d and quotes the eighth of Walter Benjamin\u2019s Theses on the Philosophy of History, that \u201cthe tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brandon Shimoda<\/strong> is the author of several books of poetry and prose, most recently\u00a0\u201cThe Afterlife Is Letting Go\u201d\u00a0(City Lights, 2024) and\u00a0\u201cHydra Medusa\u201d\u00a0(Nightboat Books, 2023). With Brynn Saito, he co-edited \u201cThe Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration\u201d\u00a0(Haymarket Books, 2025). He teaches creative writing and Asian American literature at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, where he lives with his partner, the poet Dot Devota, and their daughter Yumi Taguchi.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This book won the 2025 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Best Wishes for the Future The reparations…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":189057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[105793,1022,105794,171,105795,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-189056","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-book-excerpts","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-creative-nonfiction","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-japanese-americans","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115122513364881294","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}