Updates from the 2024 JACSC Legislative Advocacy Meeting in DC
JACSC Advocacy Cohort at the White House
After months of planning, the 2024 JACSC Legislative Advocacy Meeting was a great success. Our advocacy cohort included two dozen individuals who flew in from across the country, representing over a dozen organizations.
Working together with JACL National, JACSC participated in meetings with key decision makers in the Department of Interior, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, White House Office of Public Engagement, White House Initiative on Asian Americans Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, over a dozen senate and congressional staff, and several members of congress.
Our main advocacy focus was asking for the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program of the National Park Service to be funded at the same level that was recently enacted for FY24 at the amount of $4.655 million. Since the amount was included in the President’s FY25 budget, this was an easy ask for congressional staffers and the members of congress whom we met with. While it will likely be some time until the FY25 budget is enacted, the current FY24 budget amount will provide ample funds for the 2024 JACS grant program. The RFP is expected sometime in late August or early September with an early November deadline.
An additional ask was to fund the Japanese American Confinement Education grant for the amount of $2 million in FY25. JACE was not included in the FY24 enacted budget, nor was it in the President’s FY25 draft budget. After our meetings, we are hopeful that JACE will be added into the final FY25 budget. In the interim, we expect an update from NPS sometime in the coming months about how exactly the JACE grant program will be rolled out this year, which will be funded with money that was unspent in other program areas during the previous fiscal year. Minidoka Lava Ridge Wind Farm and the Tule Lake Fence issues were also represented during our meetings by members of the Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee and Tule Lake descendants.
In addition to the legislative advocacy visits, the JACSC meeting also served as the formal kick-off to our strategic planning. Over the next six months JACSC will be undergoing a strategic planning process that will both shape the direction of the consortium as an entity, and also challenge our many member organizations and Japanese American community members nationwide to think critically about the future of this work.
The conversation that began in DC will continue throughout the Spring/Summer months through a series of facilitated workshops, virtual community town halls, written surveys, one-on-one meetings, and informal conversations with consortium members and other stakeholders.
For additional updates, please join the JACSC listserv.
JACSC Hires Rob Buscher as Executive Director
The Japanese American Confinement Sites Consortium (JACSC) has appointed Rob Buscher as the new Executive Director of JACSC.
“We have found in Rob a leader who brings considerable experience in the leadership of non-profit arts organizations. As a scholar, curator and film maker, he is a consummate story teller who is passionately committed to telling the stories and preserving the history of Japanese Americans. He comes to us with a vision for the future of JACSC that has resonated strongly with us,” said Ann Burroughs, the Chair of JACSC.
Buscher took up his new role on November 6, 2023.
“I am honored and humbled to take on this position at what I see as a critical juncture in our community’s story. In the coming decade we will likely lose the majority of our remaining incarceration survivors, whose lived experiences and personal testimonies have been the foundation of the pilgrimage movement and other efforts to memorialize the wartime incarceration. We must continue to educate future generations about the grave injustices endured by our Japanese American community during the wartime and the tremendous resilience demonstrated by our success in the postwar era,” said Rob Buscher. “To do this work effectively, we will need to find new ways to tell these stories in the absence of our survivors, so that their legacy can be preserved and shared with Americans of all backgrounds. As we navigate this next difficult chapter, I believe JACSC can play an important role in convening its member organizations around a shared vision for how to take this work forward.”
A mixed-race Yonsei based in Philadelphia, Rob is deeply embedded in the East Coast Japanese American and broader Asian American & Pacific Islander communities where he has lived and worked since 2010. Born and raised in rural/suburban Connecticut, Rob moved to Philadelphia after five years abroad in the United Kingdom and Japan where he completed his BA Communications at Richmond The American International University in London and MA in Japan Studies at the University of London. Joining the board of the Philadelphia Chapter of Japanese American Citizens League in 2012, Rob has served as chapter president since 2018 and held other positions in the JACL National Council including Editorial Board Chair of the Pacific Citizen newspaper (2019-2022).
As a film and media specialist, Rob has held leadership positions in non-profit arts organizations for over a decade, including the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival that he helmed for six seasons as Festival Director. Rob has also pursued a secondary career in academia that he started in 2012 as a part-time lecturer in Japan Studies at Arcadia University. In 2017 Rob joined the faculty of University of Pennsylvania’s Asian American Studies Program where he currently teaches courses on Asian American Cinema and Asian American Activism. Rob’s recent research focuses largely on the postwar resettlement of Japanese Americans into the Greater Philadelphia region, and the role that arts and culture have played in historic Japanese American community movements.
Rob’s family was forcibly removed from their farm and home in current day Gardena/Torrance in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Choosing to self-relocate during the so-called “voluntary evacuation” his great grandparents, Obaachan and her siblings were spared from the indignity of wartime incarceration. However, losing everything they worked to establish over several decades, they were forced to rebuild their lives in the outer suburbs of Ogden, Utah like so many other families during the postwar era. Through extended family who were incarcerated during the war Rob has personal ties to Rohwer, Minidoka, and Crystal City.
Rob has curated several public exhibitions related to Japanese and Asian American history including the American Peril exhibit (2018, 2020) of anti-Asian racial propaganda, The Third Space virtual photo exhibition (2021) juxtaposing WRA propaganda with the lived experiences of Japanese Americans, and Okaeri (Welcome Home): The Nisei Legacy at Shofuso (2023).
Some of Rob’s recent multimedia productions include Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation’s thirteen-episode podcast Look Toward the Mountain (2021), and PBS WHYY’s six-episode television talk series Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders: A Philadelphia Story (2022).
This Thursday - JACL Briefing on Minidoka
JACL National invites members and nonmembers alike to join us for a webinar briefing on Minidoka this Thursday, October 14, at 9:00 PM ET/7:00 PM MT/6 PM PT at the link below. We plan to discuss:
How to submit public comments to the Bureau of Land Management
What you can do to help.
Information we have for the team.
Your voice matters!
Click Here to join the Zoom Webinar on Thursday
CALL to ACTION in Solidarity with Minidoka
MINIDOKA NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE – LAVA RIDGE WIND PROJECT, IDAHO
Minidoka National Historic Site in Hunt, Idaho tells the painful stories of the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Minidoka is a place to heal deep emotional trauma, educate the public about racial injustice and commemorate our ancestors. To many survivors and descendants, Minidoka is sacred ground.
LS Power, a New York private equity company, seeks to dishonor this sacred ground and destroy the park’s ability to help heal painful wounds stemming from racial injustice. If approved by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the LS Power Lava Ridge Wind Project would mark a step backward in the U.S. government’s acknowledgment that the incarceration was wrong.
At the request of LS Power, BLM recently started the process to study the project’s environmental impact. According to NPS, LS Power’s proposal would have significant negative impacts on Minidoka:
340 of the 400 wind towers of would be visible from the park visitor center.
14 towers located on camp’s historic footprint, including within two miles of the park.
Each tower could be as tall as 740 feet, which is taller than the Seattle Space Needle, with blades exceeding the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
The proposal would create a visual wall of towers and spinning blades that would dominate 115 degrees of the park's 360 degree viewshed.
There will also be a significant amount of noise generated by the 400 spinning blades.
What can you do RIGHT NOW?
✔ Write a public comment supporting Minidoka to the BLM! (Deadline: October 20) Details here.
✔ Talk to media and the press about your concerns.
✔ Call your State representative and Senator!
✔ Ask to be a consulting party!
✔ Donate to Friends of Minidoka!
For more ways to help Minidoka contact Dan Sakura at: dan@sakuraconservationstrategies.com
Support the Japanese American Confinement Education Act Hearing!
This Thursday, May 27th at 10:00am PT/1:00pm ET the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands will be holding a hearing on the Japanese American Confinement Education Act! You can watch the hearing as it is held on the NPFPL Subcommittee’s Youtube page. We're also asking members of the public to show their support for the bill by submitting their own testimony. Here’s how to help:
First, download this JACE Act Letter Template and fill it out
Second, when you are ready, send your completed letter to policy@jacl.org (send by Thursday, June 3rd, at 5:00pm ET)
JACL will compile the letters to submit as a group to the subcommittee for admittance into the hearing record.
Ebay Withdraws Listing for Manzanar Drawings
In a victory for Japanese Americans fighting the sale and commodification of World War II Japanese American concentration camp art and artifacts, eBay today withdrew the sale of 20 Manzanar drawings hours before they were to be sold.
The provenance was unclear, a family member came forth to claim them, and the sale was opposed by a national coalition of 59 organizations and 29 individuals who voiced their concern in a letter sent to eBay the day before the auction’s end. The request was amplified in a change.org petition.
The drawings were made in 1942 by an artist known only as Matsumura, according to the listing. Lori Matsumura, the granddaughter of Giichi Matsumura, who tragically lost his life in 1945 when he stopped to sketch on a mountain hike and got caught in a snowstorm, said that both her grandfather and father were artists. She learned of the listing the day before the auction’s end, when contacted by National Park Service archaeologist Jeff Burton. Lori determined that the works were made and signed by her father, after comparing his signatures on high school reports with those on the drawings online. But without seeing the drawings in person, she could not confirm this, and the auction clock was ticking down. The sale was to conclude on Tuesday, April 6, at 6:46 p.m. PST.
Just hours before the auction was to end, a coalition of community members including Mia Russell, David Inoue, Shirley Higuchi, Nancy Ukai, Bif Brigman, Bruce Embrey, Barbara Takei, and Lori Matsumura (representing, respectively, the Japanese American Confinement Sites Consortium, Japanese American Citizens League, Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, 50 Objects, Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee, Manzanar Committee, Tule Lake Committee, and the Matsumura family), met with two representatives from eBay’s Regulatory Policy Group. The meeting was arranged through an introduction to eBay officials by the Anti-Defamation League in Washington, D.C., which had been in prior discussion with eBay about the sale of Holocaust items.
As a result of the meeting, the listing was removed under eBay’s Artifacts Policy, which regulates the sale of artifacts obtained from government or protected land. eBay also is reaching out to the seller to attempt to facilitate the return of the drawings to the artist’s family, which at the time of this statement is unresolved. Members of the Consortium will continue to work with eBay to apply the Artifacts policy to other WWII Japanese American concentration camp artifacts that are listed for sale.
On the sixth anniversary of the Rago auction (which was stopped by online community mobilization, the legal actions of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, and the Japanese American National Museum permanently acquiring the collections), today’s victory came swiftly thanks to the coalition-building and community organizing work done in the past. Special thanks to Nancy Ukai, Bif Brigman, Bruce Embrey, Barbara Takei, Kimiko Marr, and Satsuki Ina for their organizing efforts, the Japanese American National Museum for their leadership in the public awareness campaign, and the broader community for their resounding support.