Asian Americans for Action

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Asian Americans for Action
Established1969  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg (54 years ago)
Founders Kazu Iijima, Minn Matsuda   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Typesactivist group  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

In 1969, Shizuko "Minn" Matsuda and Kazu Iijima founded the Asian Americans for Action (Triple A or AAA) in New York City. The two women were inspired by the Black Power movement and originally planned a Japanese American political and social action movement, but ultimately chose to make it a pan-Asian organization, inviting members of all Asian ethnic groups to join. [1] The story goes that it was Iijima's son, Chris Iijima, who convinced them to broaden their focus. [2]

Contents

Triple A became part of the wider Asian American movement which channelled anger and discontent among Asian Americans during the 1960s and beyond. AAA was largely an East Coast movement, while a number of other Asian organizations, including the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), operated primarily on the West Coast.

The Founders

According to Iijima, AAA began with "two old ladies" sitting on a park bench worrying about their children's future. In fact, Matsuda was approximately 58 years of age and Iijima about 51 when they set up the organization in 1969. Iijima had been interned at the Topaz internment camp during World War II, while Matsuda had moved with her family to Utah before the war due to anti-Japanese hostility in the Bay Area. By the time they founded AAA, both had been involved in pro-Asian movements for many years. [3]

Kazu Iijima

Born Kazuko Ikeda in California, Iijima grew up in Oakland and attended college at UC Berkeley. She encountered Marxist critiques of racism through her older sister and the Young Communist League at Berkeley, and became involved in radical politics. [4] By 1938, she had helped to form the Oakland Nisei Democratic Club to encourage more Niseis to take up radical responses to working class issues and racism. She was still living and working in the Bay Area when Japanese Americans on the west coast were subjected to incarceration under Executive Order 9066. She was sent first to Tanforan Assembly Center and then to Topaz concentration camp in Utah. She married Tak Iijima in Utah (he had been drafted into the US Army just before Pearl Harbor), and was released to move to Mississippi with him soon after. [5]

After the war, the couple settled in New York City, and began to raise a family. Although Iijima joined the Japanese American Committee for Democracy at that time, it wasn't until the late 1960s that she returned to organizing with the founding of Asian Americans for Action.

Minn Matsuda

Born Shizu Utsunomiya in Seattle, Washington, in 1911, at some point Matsuda moved to the Bay Area where she earned an art degree at the California School of Arts and Crafts in 1933. She received some recognition for her watercolor paintings. [6] [7] She worked for a time for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the federal art project. [7]

Matsuda and Iijima met in California before the war. Unlike Iijima, Matsuda avoided the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II because she had moved inland to Utah prior to the signing of Executive Order 9066. [3] In Salt Lake City, Matsuda managed to find a job creating ads for a retail store despite hostility toward people of Japanese heritage. [3] Her artwork from the WPA was included in an exhibit at the Utah State Arts Center in 1939. [7]

Matsuda died on August 6, 2003, two years after witnessing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. [3] [8]

Causes and Activities

The war in Vietnam, which the women considered an act of American aggression, became the first cause they espoused. To enlist members, they approached persons of Asian descent at rallies protesting the Vietnam War. One of the first actions they took after forming in 1969 was to challenge the Japanese American Citizens League to take a stand against the Vietnam War. The AAA also took a stand against the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan which allowed for American military bases on Japanese soil, including Okinawa. [1]

The core group of founders were mostly older women who had experienced the Japanese internment of World War II or its consequences. [9] However, it would soon become a multi-ethnic, intergenerational cause. Their life experiences led them to join forces with their children's generation during the turbulent sixties. [10] The first meeting was held in New York City on April 6, 1969; attendees included a number of college students. One of the first members of AAA was activist Yuri Kochiyama. [1] Other notable members were Bill Kochiyama, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, actress turned activist Nobuko JoAnne Miyamoto, Pat Sumi, and Iijima's son, Chris Iijima. [2] Many of the younger members of the group were Chinese Americans.

Among their activities, the Triple A staged a rally in Washington D.C., in November 1969, in a futile attempt to stop the signing of the security treaty. Newspaper coverage of the event featured a cloth dragon with caricatures of Uncle Sam and Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato as the head and tail. [1] The group was instrumental in opening the United Asian Communities Center in New York City in 1972, but that program lasted only a short time due to lack of funding. [1]

The group continued to evolve, changing its name in 1976 to Union of Activists to emphasize political struggle rather than racial identity. The Triple A dissolved after about ten years after losing membership to other more radical organizations, including those that espoused communism. [1] [11]

Related Research Articles

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Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. "This order authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to "relocation centers" further inland—resulting in the incarceration of Japanese Americans." Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, born and raised in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internment of Japanese Americans</span> World War II mass incarceration in the United States

During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated at least 125,284 people of Japanese descent in 75 identified incarceration sites. Most lived on the Pacific Coast, in concentration camps in the western interior of the country. Approximately two-thirds of the inmates were United States citizens. These actions were initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Executive Order 9066 following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Sansei is a Japanese and North American English term used in parts of the world to refer to the children of children born to ethnically Japanese emigrants (Issei) in a new country of residence, outside of Japan. The nisei are considered the second generation, while grandchildren of the Japanese-born emigrants are called Sansei. The fourth generation is referred to as yonsei. The children of at least one nisei parent are called Sansei; they are usually the first generation, of whom a high percentage are mixed-race, given that their parents were (usually), themselves, born and raised in America.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese American Citizens League</span> Asian-American civil rights charity based in San Francisco, California

The Japanese American Citizens League is an Asian American civil rights charity, headquartered in San Francisco, with regional chapters across the United States.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Topaz War Relocation Center</span> United States historic place

The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp that housed Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945.

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The Asian American Movement was a sociopolitical movement in which the widespread grassroots effort of Asian Americans affected racial, social and political change in the U.S., reaching its peak in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. During this period Asian Americans promoted anti-war and anti-imperialist activism, directly opposing what was viewed as an unjust Vietnam war. The American Asian Movement (AAM) differs from previous Asian American activism due to its emphasis on Pan-Asianism and its solidarity with U.S. and international Third World movements such as the Third World Liberation Front.

Toyo Suyemoto was a Japanese-American poet, memoirist, and librarian. Her memoir I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment was published posthumously in 2007 by Rutgers University Press. She was incarcerated due to her Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS) was a research project funded by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), an agency responsible for overseeing the relocation of Japanese Americans, The University of California, the Giannini Foundation, the Columbian Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation with the total amount of funding reaching almost 100,000 U.S. dollars. It was conducted by a team of social scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. The team was led by sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a Lecturer in Sociology for the Giannini Foundation and a professor of rural sociology, and included anthropologists John Collier Jr. and Alexander Leighton, among others. The study combined each of the major social sciences such as sociology, social anthropology, political science, social psychology, and economics to effectively illustrate the effects of internment on Japanese Americans. The terminology of "relocation" can be confusing: The WRA termed the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast an "evacuation" and called the incarceration of these people in the ten camps as "relocation." Later it also applied the term "relocation" to the program that enabled the evacuees to leave the camps (provided they had been certified as loyal.

Kazu Iijima was a Japanese American activist and community organizer who was a co-founder of Asian Americans for Action and the United Asian Communities Center.

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Shizu "Minn" Matsuda (1911-2003) was a Japanese-American activist who co-founded the group Asian Americans for Action - one of the first East Coast pan-Asian organizations - with Kazu Iijima (1918-2007).

Koho Yamamoto is an American artist known for her artistry in sumi-e, a style of Japanese brushwork using black ink.

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