We slept wonderfully in a real bed with a real bathroom that had a real shower with enough room to move around in. In the morning, I had been planning to send my first travel log but had trouble getting a connection. I was able to connect to the hotel’s wifi but it said there was no internet. WTF?? B called the front desk who transferred her to their tech support, who talked me through finding the IP for the wifi and they entered that somewhere on their end and then I was able to connect. But by then, we were short on time to get showered before our friend Gregg came to meet us. So I gave up on the computer and we showered and collected our things and checked out. The hotel kindly allowed us to stash our bags until after dinner so we didn’t have to schlep them around LA with us.
Gregg showed us around Little Tokyo, including the garden on the rooftop of our own hotel. It has a couple of levels and water features. Very nice getaway in the heart of downtown. We wandered a few blocks and looked at several places for lunch, and chose one where we could be seated outside with at least a canvas barrier between us and the traffic. We had a delicious lunch and wonderful conversation. We had not seen Gregg in some time so it was good to catch up.
About 1PM we bid Gregg farewell and headed over to the Japanese American National Museum, again just a block or two away. If you have never been here, I urge you to come and see it. Words do not suffice this incredible display of a piece of American history that many Americans don’t even know about. Names, photos, artifacts, informative educational plaques. Pictures, videos. We spent four hours being overwhelmed. Brought me to tears several times.
I learned a few things: it was the Japanese American Army unit 442 that liberated Dachau, at the same time their own families back home were incarcerated in American concentration camps. Also, the US government was so paranoid we not only incarcerated our own citizens, we went into South America, Peru, and essentially kidnapped Japanese Peruvians and incarcerated them as well. No reparations were ever made to the Peruvians.
The final amazing memory as we thought we were leaving: Bernadette asked about the big book of names which was shown in a video in the lobby. A team of researchers collected all the names of everyone who was incarcerated and created a “paper monument”, a huge book, of all the names. They invite friends, family, anyone, to put an ink dot below the names of people they want to honor and remember. Like placing a stone on a grave.
The book is housed, for now, in a beautiful little alcove with wooden sticks which name all the concentration camps, and a bit the soil from each camp. It’s the kind of space you walk into and know right away that it is sacred. The book has all five elements incorporated into it: earth and fire were used to make the stone that adorns the front of the book, wood is represented in the paper pages, metal in the embossed name on the cover of the book (“Ireicho”, meaning consoling, spirit, book), and water in the ink stamps.
The goal of the book monument project is to repair, like broken ceramics that are repaired and made stronger by the repair, broken lives and families can be repaired with remembrance and love and made stronger. We placed dots by the names of family members of our friend Toby. It was a very moving experience and we were honored to do it.
For more information on the book of names, see the official website: https://ireizo.com/
We walked the couple of blocks back to our hotel and were met by Bernadette’s great niece, Amaris, and taken to dinner at an Indian restaurant, Mr. Masala, where we were met by Bernadette’s cousins, brothers Anthony and Edward (we’ll be seeing their parents in New Orleans), and B’s 2nd cousin, Alyse. We enjoyed another delicious meal and good conversation, again catching up with people we had not seen in some years. I stuffed myself on tofu masala and rice.
As we got ready to leave, the rain was bucketing outside. We stepped out under the restaurant’s awning and waited to see if it would abate a bit. Amaris said “someone needs to push the crosswalk signal” so, since I was in my hooded raincoat and being a good Oregonian, I stepped out and pushed the button. When the light changed, we dashed across and around the corner to Amaris’ car. She took us back to the hotel where we collected our bags and then on to the Amtrak station. She also then took Alyse home, who had taken an expensive Uber into town earlier.
At the station we made our way upstairs to the first-class lounge (since we have a sleeper, we get to use the lounge), only to find out that they were already boarding. We barely had time for a quick pit stop and then were shepherded out to our train car.
Since the departure was at 10PM, the room was already set up as beds. We did our best to get settled, and were a little peeved that the attendant in this car had not even said hello or asked us if we needed anything or anything. We didn’t even know who our attendant was until we saw her the next day.
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Adrian Dee, flutist, composer 