Concentration Camps USA, Part 2

on the preservation/blood money embalming of democracy, or, how Israel's best friend was Japanese American

This post is dedicated to Yuri Kochiyama, who was born 105 years ago today, on May 19, 1921. She shares a birthday with Ho Chi Minh (1890), Malcolm X (1925), Lorraine Hansberry (1930), and Elena Poniatowska (1932), the last of whom is the author of a book I’m currently reading, Massacre in Mexico, on the mass murder, by the police and military, of student protesters in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, during the 1968 Olympics.

This is Part 2 of a series called Concentration Camps USA. Read Part 1, on loving ICE and preserving a concentration camp / on stealing history and erasing memory.

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The illustration (above) of a man with a machine gun is from a children’s book: Awesome Asian Americans: 20 Stars Who Made America Amazing. The man is (supposed to be) US Senator Daniel Inouye (1924-2012). The premise of the book is that, yes, Asians in America can be whoever they want to be, including machine-gun-toting soldiers; they too can “contribute to the United States and change it for the better!” (quoting from the introduction).

The cover of Awesome Asian Americans is an illustration of Asian Americans flying, like superheroes, through the sky.

My daughter has the book. She got it as a gift when she was five. (One of the authors signed it: “Aim high!”) We tried to read it, didn’t get very far, and haven’t looked at it since. I want my daughter to learn about Asian American history, not be indoctrinated into the politics and primacy of representation, the fetishization of identity, and/or the yellowwashing of empire. How else to explain the incoherence of the chapter on Yuri Kochiyama, a revolutionary international anti-imperialist, being followed by a chapter on anti-revolutionary nationalist arch-imperialist, Daniel Inouye?

I have been thinking, reluctantly, about Inouye these past few years. Specifically, about his relationship with Israel. Inouye, a Japanese American born and raised in Hawai’i, served in the Senate for fifty years, in the House for several years before that, and spent much of that time advocating for Israel, to the extent that in his obituary in The Jewish Press, he is referred to as “Israel’s best friend.” As I have been thinking about him, I remembered, a few days ago, that he is in Awesome Asian Americans, so I pulled it off the shelf, flipped past the illustration of Yuri Kochiyama shaking hands with Malcolm X, and found the above illustration of Inouye.

Here’s one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about Inouye:

On December 1, 2023, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles relaunched its National Center for the Preservation of Democracy under a new name: the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. According to their website, the mission of the Inouye Center is to explore “the rights, freedoms, and fragility of democracy” and examine “issues about race, identity, and social justice.”

The timing was questionable. Israel was 55 days into the latest phase of its ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Why, I wondered, would JANM — an institution committed (according to their website) to speaking out when social justice is “undermined”; to “vigilantly sharing the hard-fought lessons accrued from” the history of Japanese people in the US; and to creating “a more just America and, ultimately, a better world” — Why would JANM choose Day 55 of the genocide to venerate a person who Israel called its “best friend”?

It’s even more deadly than that, though. One of the Inouye Center’s main financial supporters (according to their website) is Boeing, which, in turn, is one of Israel’s main weapons suppliers. Boeing regularly provides Israel with the bombs, missiles, helicopters and jets it uses to commit war crimes. Earlier this year (January 2026), Boeing sold 25 F-15 fighter jets to Israel, a sale amounting to $8.7 billion. In March, Israel purchased 5,000 small diameter bombs from Boeing, a sale of nearly $300 million. In the days after October 7, 2023, Boeing rush-delivered 1000 small diameter bombs to Israel, establishing itself as one of the main, most reliable, on-call enablers of the genocide.

Boeing has been arming state terrorism for a long time. They produced the B-29 superfortress planes that shot the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Given all of this; given that one of Daniel Inouye’s biggest campaign donors was Boeing; and given that the director of the Inouye Center is a former senior manager of Global Corporate Citizenship, the grant-making program at Boeing, it would seem that the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy is as much a project of Boeing, as it is of JANM.

Additionally, given the many allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Inouye by women, including Native Hawaiian women, who were silenced and discredited in an effort to diminish and disappear those allegations…

Why was Inouye chosen as the figurehead of the center?

And what does all of this say about the preservation of democracy?

And what does all of this say about democracy?

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There is a long tradition of naming things, seemingly anything, after Inouye. His name is on a highway, an airport, a laboratory, a lighthouse, a courtyard, a terrace, an overlook in a botanical garden; on buildings, schools (elementary, nursing, pharmacy), and centers (for democratic leadership, health, marksmanship, oceanography, research, security studies). His name is on a warship, the missile destroyer USS Daniel Inouye, which recently deployed to the Middle East to “support Israel’s defense against threats” from Iran (quoting from the Stars and Stripes military newspaper).

On January 14, 2014, Inouye achieved a strange distinction: he became the first non-Israeli to have an Israeli military facility named after him. The Daniel K. Inouye Arrow Anti-Missile Defense Facility is home to a ballistic missile defense system that is a collaboration between Israel and the United States, Israel Aerospace Industries and, not surprisingly, Boeing.

The next day, January 15, a scholarship in Inouye’s name was established at the Israel Arts and Sciences Academy, a high school in Jerusalem. The school was founded by Robert Asher, former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who, according to a obituary in The Jerusalem Post, “helped turn the once-marginal AIPAC into a formidable force for defending Israel.” Asher was also friends with Inouye; it was Asher’s idea to have the military facility named after Inouye, who he called “Israel’s greatest supporter in Congress.”

Three years later, on June 3, 2017, the American Israel Education Foundation established the Daniel K. Inouye Symposium for Policy Experts, a week-long trip to Israel.

Inouye died in 2012. His obituary in The Jewish Press called him “Israel’s best friend.” Benjamin Netanyahu said that he loved Inouye, and that “Israel could not thank him enough.” (He said these things to Colleen Hanabusa, Democratic congressperson, also from Hawai’i, during her visit to Israel.)

Israel loved Inouye because Inouye loved Israel. The story of why Inouye loved Israel goes like this:

Inouye, good Christian son/grandson of Japanese immigrants, fights in WWII, as part of a racially segregated, all-Japanese American combat team. Loses his arm while killing a German soldier. In the hospital, he meets a Jewish soldier, who tells Inouye about the Holocaust. Seeing his own experience as a Japanese American reflected in the experience of the Jews in Europe, he decides to devote his life to supporting the Jewish people, which transforms, paratactically, into a lifelong devotion to Israel.

Israel did not exist when Inouye met the Jewish soldier (Zionism did), but Inouye was an immediate and ardent supporter, two years later, when it did. He sold Israel bonds as soon as they were first issued, in 1951, to pay for his education. Did he question how Israel came to exist? Did he question what its existence required, i.e. the ethnic cleansing of an entire population of Palestinian people? He had plenty of time, over half a century, to make the connection between the fascism he was fighting in Europe and Zionism, between the Jews in Europe and the Palestinians, but Inouye was not beset by an inability to make these connections. He was motivated by the expedient belief that Palestinians and Palestine were inherently hostile, terroristic, and “committed to Israel’s ultimate destruction” (quoting from a speech he gave at the 1988 Democratic Convention).

He spent his career brokering, solidifying, and maintaining the relationship between Israel and the US, a relationship that was based, from the start, in warcraft, Inouye’s passion. He led US support for the development of missile defense systems (Arrow, David’s Sling, Iron Dome), and helped to bring Israeli technologies to the US. “Israel’s contribution to U.S. military intelligence is greater than all NATO countries combined,” he said.

One of the ways Israel repaid Inouye for his tireless efforts was to credit him with playing the pivotal role in ushering in the present — and so far, enduring — era of the relationship between Israel and the US: it was Inouye who insisted that the US stop loaning money to Israel, and instead, simply give it to them, debt-free.

“Think how much Israel has gotten altogether,” Robert Asher said. “Inouye was the guy who started it.” Colleen Hanabusa corroborated that without Inouye, “there would be no US aid to Israel as we know it today.”

The US gives Israel $3.8 billion each year (plus $500 million for missile defense), 99% of which goes to the Israeli military.

This historicization of Inouye’s role in the story of the US’s unlimited funding of Israel is dissected, powerfully and comprehensively, by Candace Fujikane in “Against the Yellowwashing of Israel: The BDS Movement and Liberatory Solidarities across Settler State.” Fujikane writes about Israel’s use of Inouye, and of his experience as a Japanese American and a self-sacrificing war hero, in crafting its image; she writes about the “incorporation of Japanese American history into a Zionist mythos.” Although Inouye is credited with ushering in “a new era marked by the erasure of Israel’s debt to the US,” the contract was secured by the Cranston Amendment, named after another senator, Alan Cranston. But Cranston, a white man, was not as fitting and beneficial to the “Zionist mythos.” There is little indication, however, that Inouye sought to diminish or discredit his role in making Israel what another Senator at the time called a “preferential state.”

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Two weeks before the unveiling of the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, two friends and I met with the President/CEO of JANM to discuss the urgency of the museum ending its relationship with another company complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and genocide of the Palestinian people: Toyota. Toyota manufactures vehicles used by the Israeli army and police, including the border police, which patrol the destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and help to build, in their wake, illegal settlements, with all of the violence this destruction entails. (Inouye refused to condemn the settlements.) Toyota provides the frames for the “David” light armored vehicles, which, according to whoprofits.org, are “the most common armored vehicle in the Israeli military.” Earlier that year, Toyota vehicles were used in raids in Nablus and the Tulkarm Refugee Camp, and in the demolition of houses in Masafer Yatta. We demanded to know what the museum had to say about all of this, and about benefiting from Toyota’s largesse.

(I write about this in my next (not-yet-published) book of poetry and prose, Rest House, so I won’t rehash the whole meeting here. This is a paraphrase.)

The meeting with the President/CEO — not Japanese American, strangely, but a white woman, whose bio highlights her “experience as a young activist in her native South Africa where she was jailed as a political prisoner for her opposition to apartheid” — was, though predictable, demoralizing. It affirmed that the museum was not as committed to the things it lists in its mission (speaking out, social justice, vigilance, a better world, etc.) as it was to using those things to seal itself off from accountability. The museum was more concerned with staying afloat financially and not upsetting people — board members and donors, presumably — who might feel a diminished sense of safety because of even the most minimally pro-Palestinian sentiment, i.e. if the museum were to call for a ceasefire (which they were adamant about not calling for). What the museum was committed to was upholding the Palestine exception, while disguising it, however transparently, in liberal innocence.

“We’re not a political organization,” the President/CEO said.

I did not, until then, know that JANM was not a political organization.

I also did not, until then, understand just how much of a political organization JANM actually is.

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By December 1, 2023 — when the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy was inaugurated — Israel had murdered nearly 20,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly 2 million, 90% of the population. A month earlier, Israel dropped several 1-ton thermobaric (bunker buster) bombs on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing approximately 150 people, half of whom were children, and wounding approximately 300 others. Some families were killed in their entirety. Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest trauma hospital in Gaza, was emerging from a weeks-long siege and bombardment, during which the Israeli army murdered hundreds of Palestinians. Hundreds of patients, including babies and ICU patients, thousands of people seeking shelter, and the entire medical staff, were trapped inside the hospital. Snipers roamed the hallways. There was no food, water, electricity, fuel, the solar panels were destroyed, no dialysis, oxygen, no cooling system in the morgue, bodies were decomposing in the open. By the end of November, Israel had destroyed schools, universities, libraries, museums, cultural centers and sites, and archives, including the Central Archives of Gaza City, which contained thousands of historical documents dating back hundreds of years. On December 1, 2023, Palestinians were ordered to evacuate Khan Younis. That same day, the months-long siege and bombardment of Khan Younis began.

It is imperative to emphasize that all of this murder and mass destruction, this genocide, was in service of “defending” what has been called “the only democracy in the Middle East.” It would seem that this might represent, at the very least, a threat to the meaning of democracy. It would seem, therefore, that the Inouye Center for the Preservation of Democracy might have felt it imperative to, at the very least, address this crisis.

A scan of the Inouye Center’s Instagram shows that between December 1, 2023, and this month (that’s 29 months), they posted zero times about the genocide. Zero times about Gaza, zero times about Palestine, zero times about Israel, zero times about the US’s role in the genocide, zero times about how the genocide was in defense of preserving the only democracy in the Middle East. The fact that they did not post about the genocide does not mean it wasn’t addressed in their programming; if they did address it in their programming, then they did not find it necessary to post about it. Meanwhile, between December 1, 2023 and this month, they posted about the Alien Enemies Act, the Voting Rights Act, Vincent Chin, Juneteenth, the Delano grape strike, authoritarianism, sustainable activism, and natural disasters. On February 12, 2025, they posted that, in defiance of the Trump Administration’s attempt to erase history, they will continue to celebrate Holocaust Remembrance Day. On September 11, 2025, they posted about a panel discussion (that took place on September 15) called “Silencing History: Protecting Truth in Public Spaces and Museums,” which was on “the politicization of public memory” and the “real-world consequences of historical erasure.” On May 2 of this year, they posted about World Press Freedom Day (May 3) and “the constitutional crisis that has arisen as more journalists have been met with force from law enforcement.” They also quoted the Deputy Director of Advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation saying that "without documentation, abuses fade into denial" and "without witnesses, power goes unchecked.”

According to the International Federation of Journalists and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, by April 2026, at least 235 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since October 2023. If you add to that the journalists killed by Israel in Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, the number is closer to 260.

There was no mention of any of this — on World Press Freedom Day, or at all.

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On the “about” page of its website, the Inouye Center notes that the Center is located at “the site where Japanese American families assembled in the wake of Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the forcible removal of over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes and their incarceration in US concentration camps for the duration of World War II.”

What are we meant to do with this information? Are we meant to understand the Inouye Center as being a memorial to that event? I have been writing about Japanese American incarceration for over twenty years, and have written and said some version of the above incarceration acknowledgment (EO 9066, forced removal, 125,000 people, concentration camps, WWII) innumerable times, and yet I wonder: are these facts beginning to lose their meaning? Rarely do these words extend beyond the violence and trauma of white supremacy to encompass and indict the sustained annihilation of imperialism and settler colonialism, the structures through which incarceration can and must be more fully understood. And because they don’t, they have the potential of serving — certainly for institutions that draw their moral authority from standing on the bulwark monument of incarceration while simultaneously being powered by, and therefore normalizing, empire (in this case, imperial and colonial death-making) — to proliferate alibis. The invocation of the concentration camps becomes, then, more like a land acknowledgment, that is, a cover for a more legitimate, rigorous engagement with/assessment of an institution’s complicity in perpetuating the structure of violence it is acknowledging.

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A month after our meeting with the President/CEO of JANM, I wrote her a letter. It was a break-up letter; I was ending a relationship. I had served on the advisory committee for their core exhibition; they hosted my personal collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and, most meaningfully for me, they exhibited one of my grandfather’s photographs in an exhibition of early-20th century Japanese American photography. So it was personal. As I wrote in the letter:

JANM has been of enormous importance to me. JANM has helped orient and inform my understanding of JA history, including how it illuminates and helps make sense of the experience and trajectories of communities of color in the United States. I take to heart JANM’s mission, including its statement that the museum “speaks out when individual dignity and social justice are undermined,” and that its “underlying purpose is to transform lives, create a more just America and, ultimately, a better world.”

The letter was also, therefore, an admission of having developed an earnest, naive relationship with an institution, of having mistaken an institution for people, rather than seeing it more clearly as a people-esque arrangement of negotiations, special interests and transactions. Did I not see the word “National” in the museum’s name? Was I not taking that word seriously? (See my previous post on what happen when a concentration camp becomes a National Historic Site.)

And yet, I couldn’t help it. I was thinking, while writing the letter, about my grandfather, who died long before his photograph was exhibited. My entire family attended the opening of the exhibition (February 27, 2016); my grandfather’s photograph became a pilgrimage site. The pilgrimage turned into a reunion. I saw Shimodas and Okamotos (my grandfather’s mother’s side of the family) I hadn’t seen in years, and several who I was meeting for the first time, including family members who were incarcerated in the Heart Mountain and Poston concentration camps. I was thinking — at the reunion and while writing the letter — of the ways camp, and/or, for those of us who were not there (who fled during the period of “voluntary evacuation,” lived in Utah, or were born after the war), being Japanese in America, influenced each of us, and I was wondering what each of us was doing with that influence. We were not only survivors and descendants of forced removal and incarceration, we were citizens of one colonial empire and descendants of another, inheritors and beneficiaries of those systems, however reparably or irremediably we had internalized them, however we made them work for us. It was a lot to be thinking about — at a family reunion, no less. My letter continued:

It was clear that the perspective you were offering was one of fear—not of the rapidly escalating death toll in Gaza, nor of the disablement and starvation of an entire population, nor of the destruction of hundreds of cultural and educational institutions (which I assume JANM would be particularly sensitive to), nor of benefiting from money made by a corporation contributing to this devastation, but, instead, the fear that JANM might lose its funding, or otherwise the fear that JANM might be subject to protest or boycott.

I began, during the meeting, to grieve. If, against the gravity of an unsurpassable crisis, an organization is neither willing nor able to pull the brakes on a relationship that is enabling, supporting, and profiting from that crisis, then what is the moral purpose of that organization? If an organization that prioritizes, in large part, telling the story of the dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, and incarceration of an entire population—against erasure—is neither willing nor able to fight, within the range of its powers, the dehumanization, dispossession, displacement, and incarceration—the erasure—of another entire population in real time, then why are they telling the story? What is the story meant to illuminate? I have been asking myself these questions too, because I too have been telling the story—in my writing, in my teaching—which means that I too am responsible for why and the ways it is told, and to whom, and who the story and its telling exclude; I too am responsible for ensuring that the story is not being told simply to reassert, in the face of other people’s fight for life, Nikkei identity, or to entertain the sad solipsism of our citizenship.

What is a Japanese American like me, who understands the story of Japanese America to be meaningful as a way to illuminate and redress oppression and injustice in the present, supposed to do in this moment? We have a government that does not care and is diabolical in its lack of caring. I can voice concern to my representatives, and I have, but I can turn to my community. And yet, I need more from my community, including organizations in which I am meant to see and understand some part of myself, and that purport to speak out “when individual dignity and social justice are undermined,” than silence. Mine is one voice, one perspective. But it represents, as the signatories of the open letter indicate, the voices and perspectives of many others. I am sad—frustrated and confused—that JANM has not been able to explain itself. Because I am listening and because I am waiting, and many others are too. As of the writing of this letter, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been murdered, including nearly 10,000 children, over 100 journalists, dozens of poets and writers; countless thousands have been injured, countless thousands are missing beneath the rubble, all while the illegal settlements this devastation is making way for continue unabated.

I wrote the letter on New Year’s Day, 2024.

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Today is May 19, Yuri Kochiyama’s birthday. Kochiyama was lucid and uncompromising in her commitment to anti-imperialism. She recognized the importance of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, in Asian American organizing and in general, and understood it as related to organizing around Wounded Knee, the International Hotel, My Lai, Aztlán Nation, and the movement against the American War in Vietnam. (Incidentally, Awesome Asian Americans decries her admiration for Vietnamese revolutionary/birthday mate Ho Chi Minh, suggesting that her praising of him is “contradictory” to her struggle against oppression). “The cause of Palestine is that of Vietnam’s,” Kochiyama wrote in her memoir, Passing It On, “the liberation struggles of Mozambique and Angola are related to the guerrillas’ involvement in Uruguay and Bolivia. The Philippines’ sentiment against military colonialism is mutual with that of Puerto Rico’s.”

photo by An Rong Xu

End of Part 2.

To be continued…