Xenophobia and Cherry Trees

An echo report published by NBC News, written by Angela Yang

Burned and vandalized: A history of cherry blossoms bearing the brunt of xenophobia*: From December 8, 1941's attack on Pearl Harbor to the COVID-19 scapegoating, Japanese cherry blossom trees have a history of being destroyed during times of heightened anti-Asian sentiment.

George Takei captured hearts and minds worldwide with his captivating stage presence and outspoken commitment to equal rights. But long before he braved new frontiers in Star Trek, he woke up as a four-year-old boy to find his own birth country at war with his father’s—and their entire family forced from their home into an uncertain future. In a stunning graphic memoir, Takei revisits his haunting childhood in American concentration camps, as one of over 100,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping (graphic) tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love.

WASHINGTON, DC- In early spring every year, a sea of bright pink flowers frames outdoor spaces from the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle to the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., as thousands of cherry trees reach full bloom. The trees, which are nonnative to North America, now blossom across the country after the U.S. first imported them from Japan more than a century ago.

People visit the cherry blossoms as they bloom at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., on March 24. Saul Loeb / AFP

In fact, the trees symbolize a history of friendship between Japan and the United States. They also have a variety of meanings — including life, death and renewal — for the Japanese diaspora. Yet, at times when fear and prejudice flare up in the U.S., they have also been targets of violence against Japanese Americans or Asians at large.

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941, vandals cut down four of the cherry trees around Washington’s Tidal Basin, inscribing “To Hell With the Japanese” on one of the severed trunks. Cherry blossoms have been an iconic sight in the capital since Tokyo gave them to the U.S. in the early 20th century.

Since 1912, Washington has regularly hosted an annual National Cherry Blossom Festival, which draws more than 1.5 million people every year to celebrate the friendship between the two countries. The festival ceased throughout much of World War II as anti-Japan sentiment spiked, according to the National Park Service, and people insisted on renaming the trees “Oriental” cherry trees.

As Asian Americans confront another wave of xenophobia brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and tense U.S. relations with China, a Japanese cultural center in San Francisco’s Japantown — the largest and longest-standing Japanese American community in the country — has felt the scapegoating continue.

Three cherry trees were vandalized outside the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California at the start of 2021. After an outpouring of support from donors, the center planted four cherry blossom trees this year and hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony Saturday to dedicate the fourth tree to the donors.

When the center found the trees last year, every branch had been ripped off to leave only the trunks. Law enforcement agencies did not label the incident a hate crime, but one thing was clear to Paul Osaki, the cultural center’s director: This was more than breaking a few branches —it was an act meant to destroy the trees.

“It really felt like an attack against our cultural heritage. And so that hurt,” Osaki said. “I’d almost prefer them to attack me versus those trees. They were very special and meant a lot more than just a tree growing up in the sidewalk.”

The cherry blossoms, which were planted nearly 30 years ago to commemorate a visit from the emperor and empress of Japan, were the first to have been planted in more than half a century. The city uprooted every tree in Japantown from the 1960s to the 1980s during a redevelopment initiative targeted at areas of “urban blight” — defined partly as neighborhoods with major influxes of non-European populations — the San Francisco Planning Department said in a report.

Osaki said residents first got notice in 1948 about the urban renewal project, which planned to raze and reconstruct much of Japantown at a time when Japanese Americans were still a “very hated community” as a result of World War II.

Families in the area, many of whom had just begun returning from prison camps a couple of years previously, were given a deadline to sell their homes or be evicted.

The cherry blossom trees that were removed during the period included those planted by the earliest generation to settle down in the part of San Francisco that became home to the country’s first Japantown, Osaki said.

When the U.S. first received the blossoms from Japan, officials rejected them. About two years before the blossoms were planted, Japan had given Washington an initial gift of 2,000 cherry trees. But when they arrived in 1910, the Agriculture Department discovered upon inspection that they were diseased and infested with insects, according to the National Park Service. The trees were burned.

Some anthropologists, including Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, are skeptical about whether the trees were, indeed, infested. An editorial published in response by The New York Times also said: “We have been importing ornamental plants from Japan for years, and by the shipload, and it is remarkable that this particular invoice should have contained any new infections.”

After the turn of the century, Ohnuki-Tierney said, U.S. isolationists found themselves gradually beginning a tug-of-war with policymakers who were open to greater internationalism.

Nativist Charles Marlatt headed the Agriculture Department’s Bureau of Entomology, which inspected imported plants.

Marlatt, who held strong concerns about pests from nonnative plants, had campaigned unsuccessfully for plant quarantine legislation. Entomology experts have suggested that his honeymoon trip to China and Japan, during which his wife contracted an unknown illness that later caused her death, influenced his concerns.

“The plants from Japan and China, on one hand, people tried to welcome them. On the other hand, the isolationists started to object to them,” Ohnuki-Tierney said. “And it is very interesting the way anti-Asian racism very, very easily comes up in the United States.”

So when Japanese officials prepared a second shipment, they enlisted multiple quarantine and horticultural experts to supervise the cherry trees’ cultivation before they reassured the Agriculture Department that preventive measures had been taken to eliminate the possibility of pests. Park Service records show that that batch of trees was accepted and planted along the Potomac River in 1912.

Since the end of World War II, the Park Service has recorded no further acts of vandalism to cherry trees in the capital — although the concern has resurfaced in light of increased violence against Asian communities in recent years, said Ryan Shaffer, the president of Japan-America Society of Washington.

Shaffer, who is on the board of the Cherry Blossom Festival, oversees the Sakura Matsuri Japanese Street Festival, the largest annual celebration of Japanese culture in the U.S. Both events had been disrupted for the past two years, and Shaffer said it was “incredibly heartening” to see this year’s full-fledged festivals attract even larger turnouts than those of 2019.

“Many of us in the national capital region and around the country could easily forget that the cherry trees were connected to Japan at all, because they’ve become such an iconic and treasured piece of the cultural legacy of our area,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for everybody to come out and show their love for the cherry trees and Japan’s gift to the United States every spring.”

*xenophobia- dislike or prejudice against people from other countries.

"A Day Which Will Live in Infamy" echoes from Franklin Roosevelt

Just after noon on Dec. 8, the president, Franklin Roosevelt, attached his heavy steel leg braces and was driven to the Capitol, where he held onto his cane and his son, a Marine, and walked into the (Capitol) chamber. 

The USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Honolulu HI

While the insensitive Donald Trump touts an ambiguously ambitious economic deal with Japan, the fact is, the Trumpzi announcment was poorly timed. Again, Donald Trump demonstrated a complete disregard for protocol and an ignorance about the value to ceremony.  His announcement, sans details, could've certainly waited until after the 75th anniversary of the remembrance of the attack on Pearl Harbor, by the aggressive Japanese, on December 7, 1941.  In  fact, the Pacific has not emotionally recovered from the Second World War. In the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore or South Korea.....there are horrible and lingering memories. Having lived in the Philippines with my family for three years and traveled considerably throughout East Asia, the WWII memories are simmering close to the surface of the people who pass along the horrors their families experienced via by oral histories.

In "The Washington Post":

75 years later, remembering FDR’s day of ‘infamy,’ a phrase that almost wasn’t, by Katie Mettler

When the phone rang, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sitting in the Oval Study, on the White House’s second floor, examining his stamp collection.

The time was 1:47 p.m. The day was Dec. 7, 1941.

Across the country and thousands of miles away, Japanese bombs were raining on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Ships were sinking. Men were dying. The Secretary of the Navy (Frank Knox 1874-1944) was calling with the news.

In that privacy of his office, without a grand audience, the president’s response was spontaneous and unrestrained:

“No!” But it was just three hours later, as some of the wounded and dying were brought ashore, their foreheads marked with a lipstick “M” for morphine, that the 32nd president of the United States wrote a different response, this one for the world, a measured but defiant speech that would last less than seven minutes and ultimately transform his presidency and the nation’s role in the 20th century and beyond.


President Franklin Roosevelt "A Day Which Will Live in Infamy" speech before a joint session of the US Congress
It is remembered for a single, indelible word — infamy — that almost wasn’t written.

The final version of FDR’s formal address to the joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, the version we study in history books and hear in documentaries, went like this:

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

The 11th word of that sentence became the defining element of his war declaration. It was dubbed his “Day of Infamy” speech, and at times distilled even further to just his “Infamy” speech.

But in Roosevelt’s first draft, “infamy” didn’t exist.

The path to the “infamy” version began with a meeting between Roosevelt and his closest confidants, Paul M. Sparrow, director of the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, in Hyde Park, N.Y., wrote in an essay for the Poughkeepsie Journal. It began just after 3 p.m. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had held a luncheon that day, said her husband was “deadly calm,” Sparrow wrote.

His meeting was contentious. 

Roosevelt told the room that he wanted his address to Congress to be concise and sweeping, a speech that captured the emotion of the moment. Secretary of State Cordell Hull pushed for something longer, a full and detailed accounting of Japan’s mounting offenses.

In his diary, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, recalled the scene:

“There was some discussion about the President’s message to Congress. The President expressed himself very strongly that he was going to submit a precise message. Hull urged very strongly that the President review the whole history of the Japanese relations in a strong document that might take a half an hour to read. The President objected.”

When the meeting broke at 4:15 p.m., the president waited for everyone to leave before calling his personal secretary, Grace Tully, into the Oval Study.

He was seated alone behind his desk, Tully wrote in her memoir, wearing a “gray sack jacket.” A collection of neat piles were stacked before him, notes taken since he had gotten the news. As the secretary walked in, Roosevelt lit a cigarette and “took a deep drag.”

“Sit down, Grace,” Tully recalled the president saying. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”

Roosevelt’s speechwriters were out of town in New York. Consequently, the president was on his own.

Tully detailed the speech’s genesis in her memoir:

I sat down without a word; it was no time for words other than those to become part of the war effort.

Once more he inhaled deeply, then he began in the same calm tone in which he dictated his mail. Only his diction was a little different as he spoke each word incisively and slowly, carefully specifying each punctuation mark and paragraph . ..

The entire message ran under 500 words, a coldblooded indictment of Japanese treachery and aggression, delivered to me without hesitation, interruption or second thoughts.

The first version, though, said this:

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history, the United States of America was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Roosevelt carried the first draft around with him all day, marking it up, adding dashes, eliminating words, writing in new ones, among them “infamy.”

“If you think about that word choice change . . . it’s not just a rhetorical flourish,” White House speechwriter Sarada Peri told The Washington Post’s Lillian Cunningham in her Presidential podcast. “It actually, it gives greater meaning. He is making a judgment call about what this moment is. It is an act that is treacherous and requires some kind of response, and it’s part of what speech writing is about, which is clarifying to the point of finding the right word.”

Another alteration, a suggestion made by Vice President Henry Wallace, garnered the “greatest round of applause the next day,” Sparrow wrote in his essay:

“No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people will in their righteous might win through to absolute victory.”

Just after noon on Dec. 8, the president attached his heavy steel leg braces and was driven to the Capitol, where he held onto his cane and his son, a Marine, and walked into the chamber.

Sparrow wrote:

His presentation is truly remarkable, delivered with a solemn but determined tone, and with absolute conviction in his voice. It was a clarion call, a profound statement of national values and a fierce show of determination that justice would be served. When he gets to the part where he lists the many places the Japanese have attacked it takes on the rhythm of a sermon. And when he gets to the end, he makes clear his main point:

“With confidence in our armed forces — with the unbounding determination of our people — we will gain the inevitable triumph- so help us God."

Less than an hour later, the Senate and the House voted for war, with just one dissenting vote from pacifist Rep. Jeannette Rankin of Montana.

One untold element of the story, explained by Allida Black, the founding editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt papers, involves the voice Americans heard a full day before the “Infamy” speech: the first lady’s.

During their time in the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt gave about 300 radio addresses, Black told the Presidential podcast. One such program was already scheduled for Dec. 7, 1941, long before the bombs came. Amid the destruction, the first lady spoke anyway.

For the first four minutes, she directly addressed the American people.

For months now, the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and yet it seemed impossible to believe, impossible to drop the everyday things of life and feel that there was only one thing which was important — preparation to meet an enemy no matter where he struck. That is all over now and there is no more uncertainty.

We know what we have to face and we know that we are ready to face it.

She ended in what Black called an “ultimate, triumphant, resolute note,” addressing the women of the nation.

“You cannot escape anxiety. You cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart,” Eleanor Roosevelt said. “And yet I hope the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these fears.” (Wow, this is exactly what leadership is made of...)

It was, Black said, a critical moment for the first lady, the president and the country.

“That really sets the stage,” Black said, “for the president’s address to Congress the next day.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase is ranked as one of the greatest and most memorable in U.S. history, along with “Four score and seven years ago,” “I have a dream” and “Ask not what your country can do for you,” as well as a talisman of the World War II and postwar era, which included Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” in March 1946.

Sparrow considers Roosevelt’s speech the most important of the 20th Century.

“FDR’s great leadership is perhaps best illustrated by his approach to this speech,” Sparrow wrote in his essay. “For it was much more than merely an address to Congress. It needed to be a statement to the world — a battle cry for freedom — an unquestioned call to arms.”  

Meanwhile, I continue to question Donald Trump's judgement. Surely, he could have waited to make his unspecified "Japanese 'huuuge' investment" announcement, until after the 75th Anniversary ceremonies, remembering the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.