Resilience

Resilience: Only What You Can Carry

Resilience: Only What You Can Carry

Military police flooded into West Coast cities, curfews were enacted and enforced, businesses were forced to close indefinitely, and families were told to start packing up only what they could carry with them. On today’s episode of Resilience: The Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans, Sharon talks about the military’s limitations on “enemy aliens” both before and after President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Japanese Americans were forced to scramble. They didn’t know the specifics of what was coming next, but they knew that everything was changing rapidly.

Joining us today is Professor Lorraine Bannai and author Kimi Cunningham Grant.

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  • Host: Sharon McMahon
  • Executive Producer: Heather Jackson
  • Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder
  • Writers and Researchers: Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson

Guests

Guests

Lorraine K. Bannai

Lorraine K. Bannai is a Professor Emerita and Director Emerita of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law. After earning her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law, Professor Bannai joined what is now the San Francisco firm of Minami Tamaki. While there, she served on the legal team that successfully challenged Fred Korematsu’s World War II conviction for refusing to comply with orders that resulted in the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Professor Bannai has written and spoken widely on the wartime Japanese American incarceration and its present-day relevance. She has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and co-authored amicus briefs on behalf of the children of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui on the continuing lessons of the incarceration.

Kimi Cunningham Grant

Kimi Cunningham Grant is the author of three books. Silver Like Dust is a memoir chronicling her Japanese-American grandparents and their internment during World War II. She is also the author of two novels, Fallen Mountains and These Silent Woods. Kimi is a two-time winner of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize in Poetry and a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship in creative nonfiction. She lives with her family in Pennsylvania.