Radical Collaborations for Learning: School Librarians as Change Agents by Violet H. Harada and Sharon Coatney, Editors

Chapter Seven: "Inspiring Civic Action: Collaborating with the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii"

by Violet H. Harada

How the Project Began

Kaimuki High School is located in Honolulu with almost 700 students in grades 9 through 12. It is a diverse population with almost half of the students being Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and another third being Asian Americans. Over 20 percent are identified as SPED students and another 10 percent are classified as ELL. At least 60 percent are on free and reduced lunch. The school is organized in academies. Like all high schools in Hawaii, Kaimuki strives to improve students' test scores. In recent years, faculty members have realized that doing things the way they have always been done, may move the scores slightly upward but that it does not necessarily build something more elemental and critical in their graduates: a sense of compassion and caring motivated by engagement with the larger world.

Teachers like Kaleo Akim Hanohano, who teaches in the hospitality academy, felt that social studies might be the vehicle to develop a sense of responsible and responsive citizenship in students. She also recognized that it was the most inclusive of all school subjects and that its sheer scope often left teachers relying on textbooks with a focus on mindless memorization of facts instead of the enduring understandings described by Wiggins and McTighe (2005). She had shared her concerns with Lori Chun, the schools librarian, about how best to nudge students from merely "moving through their paces in assignments" to wrestling with the essential question: What does it mean to be a citizen in a democracy? The two educators had developed an amicable relationship in previous semesters when Kaleo was teaching a peer mediation class that brought a host of community resource speakers to the library.

At the school, Lori was respected as a go-to person for ideas and resources. She fit the description of an "internal networker" (Senge and Kaufer, 2000) distinguished by her mobility and ability to move freely within the informal networks of the school. As a valuable liaison among different units, she was a skilled communicator, often acting as an internal consultant and always welcoming opportunities to serve as a "thinking partner."

In 2014, Lori was attending a workshop in Honolulu that was being sponsored by Densho, a grassroots organization located in Seattle, Washington that preserves and shares extensive resources about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. Jane Kurahara, a volunteer with the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii (JCCH), was one of the guest presenters, who talked about the JCCH resources available for school and public use. At the end of her talk, Jane invited interested parties to meet with her. This sparked Lori into action. She approached Jane and the seeds of the Kaimuki project was born.

Collaboration at the School

Lori and Kaleo had previously discussed how students naively believed that racial tensions and bigotry were not issues in the history of Hawaii. They jumped to apply when they heard that the JCCH was advertising a grant focusing on school programs raising student awareness about the World War II treatment of Japanese Americans. The specific grant was titled, "Just Youth: Taking the Lessons of Hawaii's WWII Confinement Sites to Our High Schools." The JCCH had received funding for this initiative through the National Park Service. The ultimate goal of "Just Youth" was to have students engage in civic action projects that reflected commitment to various forms of social injustice in today's community.

The Kaimuki team settled on the theme of "preserving history to honor the past and inspire change for a better future." They wanted to open the students' eyes and minds to the controversial handling of human rights in our nation through the lens of the Japanese American experience in World War II. They saw a critical fit between this historical episode and the courses that Kaleo was teaching, namely, Participation in a Democracy and Modern History of Hawaii. They were awarded a $3,400 "Just Youth" grant to fund a range of activities and resources including purchasing literature on the internment, creating "travel trunks" of primary sources, and subsidizing students' civic action plans along with their transportation to and admission for community field trips to sites such as the Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial and the Honouliuli internment site.

As they initiated their plans, Kaleo and Lori agreed that this would be a problem-based, inquiry-focused project where students' curiosity and questions would fuel the investigation. They would serve as guides who facilitated and prodded students to seek answers to their questions. Lori launched this project with a series of archival photographs from Densho that included pictures of young Japanese American children with tags around their necks sitting on their suitcases. Students wondered: Who were these children? Where were they going? Why did they look so bewildered and anxious?

Students were stunned to discover that these youngsters were among the 110,000 citizens and noncitizens driven from their homes on the West Coast in 1941 and forced into internment camps situated in remote and desolate sections of California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. They asked questions such as

• Why were they incarcerated?
• What was the impact on their lives?
• How was this imprisonment justified?

They began their search using their social studies text in modern U.S. history. In this 700-page volume, they found a two-page section that summarized the actions taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the signing of Executive Order 9066 that authorized the wholesale incarceration of and the resulting injustice to entire Japanese American families. They were outraged that the government ultimately concluded there was no evidence of a single documented case of sabotage or espionage by an ethnic Japanese in the U.S. during World War II.

This information was insufficient for the students. They sought deeper details about specific historical events that led up to the internment. They wanted to examine this action from military, political, and social stances. They also wanted to know how members of these families felt about being torn from their homes and losing all the possessions they left behind. As they perused digital files of old newspapers and movie news clips, they began to question the role of media in influencing public opinion about this action.

While Lori helped students to conduct research with print and online materials that were accessible through the school library, she tapped into the invaluable human and primary sources available through the JCCH.

The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii

The JCCH is a nonprofit cultural organization whose mission is to "educate people in the evolving Japanese American experience in Hawaii" (https://www.jcch.com). Established in 1987, the JCCH realizes its mission through programs, workshops, talks, and publications on the culture and heritage of this ethnic group. The JCCH Tokioka Heritage Resource Center contains over 5,000 books in English and Japanese and print and digital back issues of the still publishing Japanese American newspaper, the Hawaii Herald. [Note: In 1912, the Hawaii Herald started as a Japanese language paper called the Hawaii Hochi. In 1925, it added an English language section. The paper published throughout the war years when it changed its name to the Hawaii Herald. In 1980, the paper officially split into two publications: Hawaii Hochi as a Japanese language newspaper and the Hawaii Herald as its English language counterpart.] Of special value are the archival collections of manuscripts, diaries, oral histories, letters, and photographs that are available to the public. For years, the JCCH has been steadily growing this repository of primary sources dealing with the Japanese American experience in Hawaii from the first immigrants arriving as plantation workers in 1868 to the present.

The organization has an exceptional cohort of volunteers, who promote educational outreach to the public. This group has a special interest in building cultural and historical awareness about the Japanese experience in Hawaii among the state's children and youth. Jane Kurahara and Betsy Young have spearheaded this group for over twenty years. Both are retired school librarians with a passionate dedication to make history come alive for youngsters. Jane said, "With the current world situation, we must have our younger generation realize that history will repeat itself unless they recognize the need for change." For Betsy, the chance to work with students one on one and in small groups has been inspiring. "We get to develop genuine relationships with some of them. We can see how they are making real connections to history," she said.

What sparked a deeper collaboration with Kaimuki High School was the JCCH's role in rediscovering Honouliuli, the largest POW and internment camp in Hawaii. Honouliuli was literally forgotten until a local television station contacted the JCCH in 1997 for help in finding the site. The query motivated Jane as a JCCH staff associate to initiate an investigation. The watershed moment occurred in 2002 when a three-hour exploratory expedition resulted in the rediscovery of the former facility. Although it lay in the Ewa Plains only a few miles from Pearl Harbor on Oahu, the towering monkey pod trees and overgrown brush created a tropical jungle that shut out the rest of civilization (Sato and Harada, 2018). The students' amazement grew when they found out that there were at least seventeen other smaller detention centers on all the major islands in Hawaii during World War II. [More recently, an additional five sites have been uncovered.] They realized that bigotry and racism had indeed existed in their own backyard.

Collaboration with the JCCH

While Kaleo worked on the social studies content for the project and made sure that the academy's learning expectations were being met, Lori introduced students to the inquiry process and basic skills in information searching and use. Importantly, Lori served as the liaison with Jane and Betsy as her JCCH partners. Betsy and another volunteer, Marilyn Higashide, were the initial contacts to the school team. As a group, they planned an entire day of activities at the JCCH facility that included exposing students to the primary resources housed in the resource center. Students also visited the permanent exhibition on the JCCH grounds that featured artifacts, wall murals, and displays highlighting the experiences of the first immigrants arriving in 1868 to the present contributions of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. To subsidize this and subsequent field trips, Lori secured an additional grant from the high school's alumni foundation.

Jane and Betsy, along with at least six other JCCH volunteers, served as invaluable resources for the students. They were retired professionals from backgrounds in education, librarianship, and government administration. Their common bond was a fervent desire to "tell the internment story."

Kaleo and Lori had students organize themselves into teams that took different perspectives on the internment ranging from the internees and their families to the guards at the camps and the government officials. Jane and Betsy not only provided key primary resources in the form of photographs and summaries of internees' experiences, but they made numerous school visits to work directly with the students. Teaming with Lori and Kaleo, they guided students in the use of the resources, offered suggestions for specific materials, and asked questions to challenge students to dig more deeply. As they observed what additional resources the students needed, they brought more materials into the school. Being experts on the internment literature, they often filled in gaps for the students. By the end of the project, students were affectionately calling them "Aunty Jane" and "Aunty Betsy."

As a result of their research, students discovered that unlike the mass internment of families on the West Coast sanctioned by Executive Order 9066, Hawaii was placed under martial law, therefore, internment affected a more select population. They were mostly men who held respected positions in the community. Among them were teachers, priests, and journalists that the government labeled as potentially subversive elements. While these men maintained a stoic outward demeanor, the poems they wrote in the camps revealed their inner sadness and longing. For example, students were touched by the intense feelings etched in Otokichi Muin Ozaki's terse poem as he was taken from his home by the military police:

I bid farewell
To the faces of my sleeping children
As I am taken prisoner
Into the cold night rain (Sato and Harada, 2019, 7)

Students also began to empathize with the families of internees when they read poems like this one penned by Elizabeth Sugita Horiuchi, daughter of an internee, that captured the pain and anger which time could not erase:

WHY?
In school, we pledge allegiance to the flag,
and sing the national anthem.
We read about American history, the Constitution,
about freedom, justice and equality for all.
I pray our children will retrieve
these wonderful things that passed me by.
Countless days and weeks gone by,
anxiety grows and weeks gone by.
Anxiety grows into despair as months drag on to years.
Soon my brother is released,
I find no reason to rejoice.
He is drafted into the Army,
looking back for a last farewell.
Barbed wires, guard towers, endless rows of tar-papered barracks,
an oasis in a pit of the desolate plains.
Is this all an illusion falling into the horizon?
Humiliation, rejection, sorrow and pain,
some of which may heal with time, others locked deep inside.
With a nagging thought that haunts me still,
nearly four decades after. . .WHY? (Sato and Harada, 2018, xi)

The Pivotal Experience

The pivotal moment for the students occurred when they visited the site of Honouliuli. While they stood amidst the remnants of the camp--shells of a few wooden buildings, segments of rock walls and fences, and post holes indicating where the guard towers once stood--the students experienced something of the internees' despair and desolation. The guides at the site shared stories about the internees, read the poems they wrote in camp, and showed photographs of the site as it stood during the war. As she watched the students, Lori observed:

I could see the students listening intently and feeling the humidity and the silence. The mosquitoes were all over us. The students seemed to sense the fear that internees must have experienced not knowing why they were there and if they would ever see their families again. The camp was engulfed by a jungle. It seemed to disappear into the earth. No one could see you once you were there. I saw something awakening in our students: a sense of empathy and compassion.

Kaleo connected the deep Hawaiian roots of the hospitality academy with this experience by creating a moving hula to accompany a special song, "Honouliuli: The Unheard Song" that had been composed by Alvin Okami, a local musician and ukulele maker. The intent was to teach students in the academy to perform the hula.

Sparking Civic Action

The students' research resulted in a rich array of mini-presentations of the internment experience from political, economic, military, historical, and cultural perspectives. They compared and contrasted the similarities and differences between internment in Hawaii and in the continental U.S. They delved into the feelings and tensions of incarcerated individuals and their family members who were struggling on the outside. They analyzed the propaganda literature and realized the power of media in influencing public opinion. Importantly, their findings led them to wonder, "Is this still happening?" Finally, they asked, "What can we do?"

Serendipitously in 2014-2015, the JCCH was spearheading a statewide campaign to have Honouliuli recognized as a national historic site. They needed signatures on petitions, written testimony, and letters sent to members of Congress. The students at Kaimuki volunteered for all of these activities. They drafted letters to members of Hawaii's congressional delegation and to President Barack Obama urging the establishment of Honouliuli as a national monument. Jane and Betsy along with other JCCH volunteers served as critical readers for the students' letters. The youngsters joined in the community movement to get signatures on a petition by promoting the campaign on the school campus and in their neighborhoods. They were able to help the JCCH gather a total of 6,000 signatures.

Fifty of Kaleo's students volunteered to participate in a public session held by the National Park Service (NPS) to give input in the Special Resources Study that Congress had mandated the NPS to complete. This study was a requirement for Congress to consider making Honouliuli a national historic site. Jane reported, "The students, who came to this evening session, asked such thoughtful questions. They participated in the discussion in a way that made us volunteers so proud of them!"

In 2015, another 80 students wrote letters of support to Governor Neil Abercrombie, Senators Brian Schatz and Maizie Hirono, and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell as well as President Obama. On February 24, 2015, the site was designated as the Honouliuli National Monument by Presidential Proclamation. The students were invited to meet dignitaries such as Jewell and Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, at the JCCH celebration for the event in 2015.

Impact on Students

What happened with the students at Kaimuki is best described by Levine (2016) as deliberation that brings the students' experience of taking action into their discussions and taking the ideas and values from deliberation back into their work. Students talked about what they should do, then actually did what they had talked about, and finally, reflected on the experience.

As students assumed ownership of the project, they comprehended both the complexity and relevance of history as a dynamic and constantly evolving story told by many voices. They developed an enduring understanding of what it meant to be contributing citizens in a democracy. The following examples excerpted from students' reflections revealed their new insights.

Kai and Fay discussed racial discrimination: "By doing this project we have seen the way that many people, just like us, were treated because of their ethnic background."

Nai described how history may be repeating itself: "Executive Order 9066 that interned Japanese Americans during World War II is just like President Trump's immigration ban."

Ken emphasized how knowing our history is vital to our survival: "This project has shown why history is needed to be taught to our generation. We need to pass these stories on to let everyone remember this is what our government did! And that this can happen again."

In 2016, two graduates were invited to serve as panelists for a Regional Youth Summit on the Japanese American incarceration held at the Pacific Aviation Museum in Honolulu. In the same year, one of these graduates served as the first student invited to be on the Day of Remembrance planning committee at Creighton University. The day commemorates the internment experience and is held on or near February 19, the day in 1942 that the Executive Order 9066 was signed.

In future years, Kaleo and Lori would like to have students in the school's hospitality academy train to be docents at the Honouliuli site. This would provide a rich opportunity for students to work with volunteer adult docents at the JCCH and to research information about the history of the site. Educating the public about Honouliuli would be a rare experience for the youngsters. Part of the training would also include youngsters practicing with volunteers to conduct tours of the "hotspots" or special attractions in the JCCH Gallery and the Honouliuli Education Center. As they practice communication skills, they will also be sharing a critical slice of American history in their own state.

Darvin (2017) maintains that thinking critically and exchanging perspectives about complex questions related to living in society help learners develop skills and dispositions that are essential to full participation in a democracy. This project left students with probing questions that have universal significance.

• What are human rights? How do we protect them?
• Do terrorism and war justify violating a person's human rights?
• What choices and decisions do societies face in war?
• How are racism and fear interrelated? How do individuals and groups react when influenced by racism and fear?

Power of Collaborative Partnerships

Lori and Kaleo readily admitted that this project would not have been possible without the unique relationship they had established with the JCCH. Lori said, "The primary source materials were things we would never have been able to provide without the JCCH. The site visit was so special…it made history real for the kids. And the human resources … Jane and Betsy were team teachers with us. The extent of the collaboration was amazing and incredible."

Jane and Betsy were equally impressed with their Kaimuki partners and the response of the students. Jane reflected on Lori's role, "She was always available to us. She was also knowledgeable and up to date about their project, a project in which she was clearly a valued partner." She added, "After the students went to Honouliuli, they really felt the need to do something. The timing was perfect. They were able to participate from start to finish in one school year. They came full circle and celebrated the fruits of their efforts. How special was that?"

Conclusion

When we teach young people to be citizens, we're teaching them to be lifelong askers of this question, "What should we do?" Development of civic dispositions and civic skills that result in civic action must be a major outcome of our schools. Creating a sense of public spirit results in an active interest and personal investment in the well-being of our communities (Levine, 2016).

A crucial component in developing an educated and caring citizenry is collaborating with organizations in the larger community. Stefl-Mabry (2006) emphatically states that "we need to bring together not only educators and students into classrooms, but to create an environment where knowledge flows multi-directionally inside, outside, and beyond the classroom" (xi). Lifelong learning that includes the ability to make intelligent and responsible decisions about the quality of our lives and about society's well-being is inextricably linked to establishing communities where learning occurs for everyone (Harada, 2003).

Acknowledgments

The author thanks an amazing team that is dedicated to creating inclusive learning communities: Lori Chun and Kaleo Akim Hanohano, librarian and teacher at Kaimuki High School; and Jane Kurahara, Betsy Young, and Marilyn Higashide, volunteers at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii. Both institutions are located in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Note
Untitled poem by Otokichi Muin Ozaki in A Resilient Spirit: The Voice of Hawaii's Internees, edited by Claire Sato and Violet Harada. Honolulu: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, 2018. Reprinted with permission.
Untitled poem by Elizabeth Sugita Horiuchi in A Resilient Spirit: The Voice of Hawaii's Internees, edited by Claire Sato and Violet Harada. Honolulu: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

References

Darvin, J. (2017). "The Power of the Right Vignette." Educational Leadership 75(3): 32-36.

Harada, V.H. (2003). "Taking the Lead in Developing Learning Communities." Knowledge Quest 31(2): 12-16.

Levine, P. (2016). "The Question Each Citizen Must Ask." Educational Leadership 73(6), 30-34.

Sato, C., and V. Harada. (2018). A Resilient Spirit: The Voice of Hawaii's Internees. Honolulu: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii.

Senge, P. M., and K. H. Kaufer, (2000). "Communities of Leaders or No Leaders at All." In Cutting Edge: Leadership, ed. B. Kellerman and L. R. Matusak. College Park, MD: James McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership Press.

Stefl-Mabry, J., and B. L. Lynch. (2006). Knowledge Communities: Bringing the Village into the Classroom. Landham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Wiggins, G., J. McTighe, and Gale Group. (2005). Understanding by Design (Expanded 2nd ed., Gale Virtual Reference Library). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.