This interview is one of many I am privileged to be conducting with men and women from across the United States whose kindness and courage advanced the cause of justice. They deserve to be known. Their actions are evidence for what the great philosopher Eli Siegel, founder of the education Aesthetic Realism, described as the “force of ethics” working in individual people throughout history. “ Ethics,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is giving to yourself what is coming to you while at the same time giving to everything else what is coming to it. ” And in the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #74, he wrote, “Ethics has not been seen as a moving, effective, powerful thing which...can take hundreds of forms.”

            Earlier, Jack Hasegawa spoke about the imprisonment of his parents and grandparents during World War II in U.S. detention camps also known as concentration camps. Though his parents were American citizens, they were among over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forced to give up their land, their homes, their personal property. Nevertheless, his father did serve in the U.S. Army fighting in Italy with the distinguished 442 nd segregated Japanese-American battalion. My interview with Jack’s mother, Yoshino Hasegawa about her life in the camp, and her later work as a librarian and oral historian, will appear next week.

            Mr. Hasegawa grew up in California. In college he was active in the Civil Rights movement, going to Nashville, Atlanta, and later to Boston. In this final part, I learned a great deal about how the struggle for Civil Rights is a worldwide struggle. Through it all, we can see what Aesthetic Realism explains about the two drives in humanity: to be fair, just, ethical, in our relations with others; and also the desire to have contempt, to build ourselves up by making less of the world and people. Contempt, is the cause of racism and every injustice.

From Boston to Kyoto, Japan

            Alice Bernstein: You mentioned working with the Black Panthers for a while in the Roxbury section of Boston, where they served free breakfasts to poor school children long before the federal government did.

            Jack Hasegawa:   Yes, that was in 1966. From 1965 to 68, I also did community center work with regular groups of teenagers three times a week. On weekends we often had dances. I coached the basketball team and went with them as their adult sponsor to the basketball league. I also spent a lot of nights walking around. The night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, there were a lot of near-riots in our neighborhood. So with a group who worked at the community center, we walked the streets all night trying to find the kids we knew and keep them from doing things that they shouldn’t.        

            AB: You also spoke about attending the memorial for Dr. King at Boston’s White Stadium. Did anything stand out for you in the memorial?

            JH: Yes─a lot of discussion about Afro-Asian unity and speeches against the war in Vietnam. At that point I was committed to being a conscientious objector. That day I decided that I wanted to seek a missionary placement in Asia rather than in Africa.    After graduating from seminary in Harvard, I was given draft deferment as a conscientious objector. In Japan I did organizing in housing projects. You don’t think of Japan as being a segregated society, but there are two groups: one is an outcast group (like the outcasts in India), buraku, coming from certain villages. This was a historically constructed group by the Shogunate, the old feudal government in Japan.

            In Japan, Okinawans and Koreans were treated as second class citizens. In 1970 the country elected a socialist government, and the first thing they did was to open public housing to any Japanese persons. The city of Kyoto integrated its housing projects. At that time Koreans, Okinawans and Taiwanese were not yet Japanese citizens, even though they’d been there for five generations. Okinawa had been annexed to Japan and had become a prefecture. Okinawans could enter public housing but there was opposition to that, just as when American housing projects integrated black and white. In Japan, I was working with a community organizing group, going through the housing projects as I had done in the United States.

The Big Questions

A big influence on his thinking, Jack Hasegawa told me, was Ronald Fujiyoshi, a Japanese American born and raised in Hawaii, the son of a Christian minister. 

Jack Hasegawa: I met Ron after I finished seminary and was working in Japan. Ron was a graduate of the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he was a schoolmate of Jesse Jackson. He was trained as a community organizer and worked with an influential group of Christian organizers in Asia. Their style and intent was in contrast to the purely secular and highly confrontational tactics pioneered by the other great Chicago community organizing group led by Saul Alinsky.

When Ron and I were working together on a community project in Japan, he said that he went to seminary because they asked the biggest (and best) questions.  I instantly recognized that as a central reason that I had gone to seminary, even though I had never articulated it so clearly until I heard Ron say it.”

I was moved hearing this, and told Mr. Hasegawa of the question asked by Eli Siegel: “What does a person deserve by being alive?” This question is central in the struggle for justice, and when it is articulated, it makes things clearer. Jack Hasegawa continued:

“Ron was based in Singapore when I first met him. He made frequent trips to Japan and Korea as a community organizing trainer for those of us based in those countries. He eventually was reassigned to Japan by the United Church of Christ Board of Missions. He spent several years there during and after my own time in Japan, from 1968-1977. He worked closely with the Korean minority in Japan on civil rights issues, and continued his mentoring work in Korea and Singapore. 

“Ron’s involvement with the Korean community in Japan led him to a sustained 25-day hunger strike to protest the fact that the Japanese government refused to give him a re-entry permit when he tried to visit his father-in-law who was dying of cancer. He had refused to be fingerprinted under the Alien Registration Law and was also arrested for his work against discrimination of the Korean minority. He was tried and sentenced to deportation, but he refused to leave, until his own health failed. His wife and children had already returned to Hawaii. The last time I heard of him, he was pastor of a small church on one of the Hawaiian Islands.”

            AB: Are there any other matters you would like to mention?

            JH: Yes, about Korea. There was tremendous repression in South Korea by the military government. Friends of ours who were in the ministry and labor union organizers—who were often the same persons—the secret police would descend on them and take them away without arresting them. I was part of several delegations going to Korea to find them or to visit them after they’d been released. We visited a minister who just returned from prison and was unrecognizable, he had been beaten so badly. The ability of the Korean people to keep the struggle for justice alive through all of that is one of those big stories.

The Story of Hsieh Tsung-min

            Jack Hasegawa: At the same time, I was involved with the Osaka chapter of Amnesty International in Japan. There was a young scholar who had disappeared in Taiwan, named Hsieh Tsung-min. He and his professor had published a manifesto denouncing the dictatorship of [the Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek, who fought against his own countrymen and was forced to retreat to Taiwan]. Chiang Kai-shek was succeeded by his son who had a much softer public face but in fact had many political prisoners.

             The professor was then teaching in the U.S.   He called in a panic to say that he learned that his student, Hsieh Tsung-min had disappeared. The Japanese chapter was determined to send someone to find him.

            I was asked, “Will you go to Taiwan for us?” So I went. I spent a week trying to find Mr. Hsieh. I desperately made the rounds: police stations, government offices ,   correctional institutions. Nobody knew anything about him. I was in a taxi cab one day talking to the cabby in Japanese. Remember that Taiwan had been a Japanese protectorate until the end of the Second World War. Everybody in the older generation spoke Japanese because they’d been required to learn it in school. This cabby asks, “Why are you here?” I said, “I don’t know if I should tell you, but I’m here to see if I can find a political prisoner.” He drove along and said, “Where have you been?” So I told him.

            He was suspicious because there are many government agents across Taiwan, but he finally said, “I’m going to drop you off near the garrison command. I’ll drive around the corner because if I drop you off at the door the camera will catch my cab and they will question me.”

            So he left me off and I walked back to the garrison command, and gave a letter to the clerk. A major in the army came down and spoke to me in perfect English. He’d been trained as a paratrooper for special forces in Fort Bragg, a training place for a lot of foreign military personnel. I said, “I’m looking for Hsieh Tsung-min.” He said, “He’s in our custody for unpatriotic activities.” I said, “I’d like to see him,” and he said, “I can’t permit that, but if you write him a letter, I will see that he gets it.”

            I wrote to him that Amnesty in Osaka was concerned about him and his family was concerned, and asked what did he need from us.

            A couple of days later, somebody from the army came to my hotel room and said, “The major would like to see you.” I went back and he gave me a long letter which I brought to Japan. In it Hsieh Tsung-min said that he was very ill and needed medication. Amnesty was able to send medicine to his family which they gave to the prison. That way we found out where he was and were able to maintain contact with him. I met him two years ago, in 2003, when the government of Taiwan invited about forty Americans who had been active in the resistance.

            Hsieh Tsung-min is now a senior advisor to the president of Taiwan and has just returned from France where he negotiated a large deal to buy French naval frigates for the Taiwanese navy. It was remarkable—we’re actually the same age, we were both about twenty seven at that time. And so all these years later, here he was a minister of the government of Taiwan.

            AB: So Mr. Hsieh was extremely fortunate to be released.

            JH: He was fortunate to have survived, because he was very ill.

            AB: And when you saw him several years ago, was his health—

            JH: He was a big, hardy, healthy man.

            AB: Good! Good!   That has to do with ethics, too!  

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Above: Jack Hasegawa (left) and his brothers David (right) and Chris (seated) at a joint presentation at the National Association for Multicultural Education Conference, 1999 in San Diego: Multicultural Education: Crossing Borders for Equity and Justice		Jack Hasegawa with son, Peter Akira Hasegawa, and wife, Nancy Polk