What is up with Nosei?

Happy new year! Shinen Omedeto Gozaimasu! First of all, thank you for being a part of the Nosei list serve, posting your thoughts, events and actions to help build a strong community of people committed to building a progressive Nikkei agenda.

Over the past year, several folks who’ve planned Nosei events and actions have been meeting to talk about building a more formal organization for the Nosei Network. (You’ve probably seen a lot of e-mail postings about meetings.) In light of the current war hysteria and attacks on communities here in the US and abroad, we have felt compelled to figure out how Nosei can continue to build community and to strategically advocate for a more peaceful and just world.

Since September 11, 2001, Nosei has taken flight from its original path of community building through summits and the listserve. Many of you came to the vigil at Peace Plaza several days after the bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon. We’ve also built solidarity with the Muslim community through a peace event in Santa Clara last December and taken a more active stance against the War on Terrorism by attending rallies and marches over the past year. The Japanese American community’s experience with internment during WWII parallels that of many communities who are now being targeted as “terrorists.” In November, several of us went to Los Angeles to attend a summit entitled “Preserving the Legacy of Internment” to support camp preservation efforts and to continue to learn about the linkages between racism against Nikkei, specifically internment, and the current US War on Terrorism.

In our effort to build this more formal organization separate from the Nosei network and list serve, we believe our community is in a position to educate the broader public about the history of US racism and injustice based on our own experiences. We believe that building an organization of progressive Nikkei can unify our community, will influence public opinion and can have an impact on the direction that our country moves in domestically and internationally.
In the immediate future, we are working with the San Francisco Day of Remembrance Committee to organize a successful fundraiser for the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project and Campaign for Justice. We are also mobilizing for the actions against the forced registration and INS detentions of Middle Eastern men throughout the country.

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