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Tag: WWII

  • World War II Hero, Artist and Activist Yoshio Nakamura Dies at 100 – LAmag

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    The veteran was one of the last from the famed Japanese American “Go For Broke” regiment

    Yoshio “Yosh” Nakamura has died at age 100. The longtime art teacher, school administrator, activist and World War II hero was born in Rosemead and lived in Whittier when he died on November 22nd.

    Yoshio Nakamura speaking at the Japanese American National Museum in 2024
    Credit: Photo courtesy Japanese American National Museum

    Some people spend their whole lives helping others find the best that’s inside them; this writer will never forget spending an afternoon with Yosh and one of his former students, LeRoy Schmaltz, at an art fair several years ago. Schmaltz had made his name in the 1950s and 60s, carving tikis for Disneyland, Don the Beachcomber and hundreds of shops and restaurants at his shop Oceanic Arts. The octogenarian carver had long since slowed down so I was surprised when he introduced his energetic friend Yosh as a former teacher who had inspired his art and become a lifelong friend. It seems like Nakamura had that effect on almost everyone he met.

    “From the very beginning he was a humble, gracious leader who offered unwavering support and kindness,” Teresa Dreyfuss, president of Rio Hondo College, tells Los Angeles. “Yosh embodied the values we hold dear, and his legacy of compassion, service and integrity will continue to inspire us.”

    Japanese-American infantrymen of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team hike up a muddy French road in the Chambois Sector, France, in late 1944
    Credit: Photo by Army Center for Military History

    The lifelong San Gabriel Valley resident was a teenager when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. He remembered his history teacher reassuring him that American citizens of all ancestry were protected by the Constitution, but nonetheless, Nakamura and his family were among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans rounded up and sent to internment camps. “It was demoralizing,” Nakamura told a reporter in 2020. “To be blamed for something you didn’t do, just because of how you look.”

    The Nakamura family was living at Gila River Camp in the Arizona desert when Yoshio enlisted in the United States Army, ending up in the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, united under the “Go For Broke!” motto. He, like many other incarcerated Americans of Japanese descent, was eager to prove their allegiance to the United States.

    More than 30,000 Japanese Americans enlisted in the military, and the famed 442nd, an almost entirely Japanese American infantry regiment, became the most decorated unit of its size in U.S. military history. The 442nd fought in battles that ultimately broke the Nazis’ last line of defense in Northern Italy. They have been honored with a monument in Little Tokyo, their story was dramatized in a 1951 film by MGM and in 2021, the United States Postal Service honored the group with a Forever stamp. Nakamura was awarded the Bronze Star for his service. In 2011, he received the Congressional Gold Medal.

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    Yoshio Nakamura teaching art at Whittier High School in 1960
    Credit: Photo courtesy Whittier Public Library

    Nakamura married another artist, Grace Shinoda Nakamura, and the pair were together for 67 years, advocating for education and the environment. Nakamura is survived by three children, Linda, Daniel and Joel.

    While stationed in Italy, he discovered his love for art and delved into the works of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael. Following the war, Nakamura studied art in Florence, Italy, and at USC under renowned artists including Glen Lukens and Francis de Erdely. By 1952, he was teaching watercolor and oil painting at Whittier High School, where he would eventually lead the department. He became one of the first employees of the new Rio Hondo College in Whittier in 1963 and stayed with the school for decades. Nakamura became Rio Hondo’s very first dean of fine arts. The Fine Arts building at Whittier High School and the gallery are named for him. Nakamura’s artwork is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.

    Yoshio Nakamura at Rio Hondo College
    Credit: Photo Courtesy Rio Hondo College

    “Yosh Nakamura was a true American hero,” Mitch Maki, President and CEO of the Go For Broke National Education Center tells Los Angeles. “He demonstrated his true patriotism and loyalty to our nation despite the fact that his family and over 120,000 Japanese Americans were wrongfully incarcerated during World War II. He believed in America’s Promise – the promise that in our nation no one is to be judged by the color of one’s skin, the nation of one’s origins, or the faith that one chooses to keep. We lost a hero, a kind human being, and a friend.”

    Yoshio Nakamura at 2024 Nisei Week festivities
    Credit: Photo by Mark/Flickr

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    Chris Nichols

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  • Unbelievable facts

    Unbelievable facts

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    There is a cemetery in the Netherlands with over 8,000 U.S. WWII veterans’ graves. For over 70…

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  • September 11th Is Nothing But a Meme to Gen Z

    September 11th Is Nothing But a Meme to Gen Z

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    Unlike the infamous December 7th date that baby boomers would forever be conditioned to remember and respect by their forebears, September 11th is becoming less and less of a date to “revere” and more and more of a “thing” to meme. And, although the attack on the World Trade Center hasn’t even yet reached its twenty-fifth anniversary, it’s already but “fodder” for a generation that was barely coherent, if even born at all, when the calamity occurred. Thus, it’s easy to find “levity” in the incongruous images from that immortal day (including a screen grab of an advertisement for Mariah Carey’s doomed movie, Glitter, against the backdrop of the smoking towers).

    And oh, how Gen Z has found quite the substantial amount of levity in 9/11. As a recent article from Rolling Stone characterized this phenomenon, “To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral.” An Instagram account called always_forget_never_remember (a “tasteless 9/11 Meme Dealer”) describes the latest glut of memes about the tragedy as having “the effect of exorcising the event from America’s collective consciousness.” While some might view that as a “positive” form of “healing,” others are aware of the long-term damage it can cause to “forget” (hence, the long-standing 9/11 urging to “never forget”—especially if you still have the non-presence of mind to live in New York).

    Germany didn’t make the mistake of “forgetting” about World War II and Adolf Hitler’s dangerous, life-destroying demagoguery. Ergo, the reason why its ratio of neo-Nazis is actually far smaller than the one in the United States, where the history taught in schools is often not exactly “on the level.” Therefore, making it easy to forget the lessons that are theoretically supposed to be imparted by history. If 9/11 was meant to impart any such lesson, it’s that hubris will be the U.S.’ ultimate undoing. And yet, Gen Z has instead seen fit to take up allegiance with Osama bin Laden in the matter after his “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok. Mainly because part of his “logic” for killing thousands of people stemmed from the U.S.’ de facto support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. But, as the aphorism goes, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Especially Gen Z—blind to the severity and unprecedented nature of this event that has continued to negatively impact people’s lives to this day.

    And not just the lives of those who lost loved ones in the most brutal and unfathomable manner, but to those still living who were subjected to the toxic materials of the aftermath. As the CDC phrases it, 9/11 “created massive dust clouds that filled the air and left hundreds of highly populated city blocks covered with ash, debris and harmful particles, including asbestos, silica, metals, concrete and glass.” Consequently, many people, young and old alike, were subjected to toxins that would result in ongoing health issues or even death.

    Indeed, according to the Mesothelioma Center, “more people have now died from this toxic exposure than in the 9/11 attacks [themselves].” But that is of no importance to Gen Z, who could give a goddamn about anything (except looking young and excoriating those who don’t). Perhaps Rue Bennett (Zendaya), the ultimate numb/disaffected Gen Zer in Euphoria, puts it best when she narrates in the series’ pilot episode, “I was born three days after 9/11. My mother and father spent two days in the hospital, holding me under the soft glow of the television, watching those towers fall over and over again, until the feelings of grief gave way to numbness.” In a sense, she’s not just talking about her parents’ numbness, but also referring to the osmosis of those images—played ad nauseam until they meant nothing anymore—contributing to her own eventual numbness. Not just to 9/11 and its “weight,” but to life itself.

    While there are those who would take up the defense of Gen Z (including Gen Z itself) by saying it’s not their fault they didn’t live through the catastrophe in order to be “appropriately sad” enough about it (therefore not make totally callous memes about it), others are aware of the growing sociopathy that exists within each new generation—and yes, it arguably started with baby boomers themselves, the generation first accused of being selfish and sociopathic via an illustrious 1976 article by Tom Wolfe for New York Magazine called “The ‘Me’ Decade.” And yet, while boomers might have been quick to join cults and indulge in many a bad acid trip, one can’t imagine them ever creating content that eradicated the entire emotional meaning of December 7, 1941.

    Undoubtedly, Gen Z, in contrast, comes across as particularly sociopathic because they are the first generation to “forget” about 9/11. Not, however, the first generation to have the internet-oriented platforms to mock it. That would be millennials. But millennials were in the trenches when it happened, affected by the news coverage and anti-Middle East rhetoric that followed in such a way as to not even dream of poking fun at such a serious moment in the culture. After all, this was when people were still even taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. As for previous generations that were made aware of somber historical events, baby boomers didn’t have the means to mock Pearl Harbor (the event consistently likened to 9/11 because it was the only other large-scale attack on U.S. soil), nor did Gen X didn’t have the means to mock, say, the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War. At least not in a manner that could be disseminated to so many thousands of people.

    The irony, of course, is that Gen Z is known for being the most “sensitive” generation yet—even though everything about them and their reactions to things connotes the exact opposite. Treating 9/11 like nothing more than a “trend” or meme to fill the internet space is, thus, but part and parcel of this generation’s highly limited capacity for empathy. Oh sure, there’s using humor as a coping mechanism, as many did try to in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 (which meant being “canceled” before that was a term). But that’s not what it’s about with Gen Z, who has no emotional attachment whatsoever to that day. Nor do they seem to have much of an emotional attachment to anything (again, except to looking hot). Leading some to ask the question: can you blame them? After all, they live in a post-Empire world—how can they trust that it’s even worth it to attach to something, knowing how ephemeral it all is. The decimation of the Twin Towers certainly proves that, if nothing else, to Gen Z, so overexposed to tragedy and trauma at this point that their desensitization can be “justified.” As anything can be when it suits a purpose…sort of like bin Laden justifying the attacks.   

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    Genna Rivieccio

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  • There’s bleak, and then there’s Netflix’s Nazi occupation thriller, Will

    There’s bleak, and then there’s Netflix’s Nazi occupation thriller, Will

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    Will, Netflix’s imported Belgian movie about the moral impossibility of life under Nazi occupation during World War II, announces itself with shocking bluntness. Within its first 10 minutes, it’s made clear that co-writer and director Tim Mielants intends to confront the grisly horrors of the Holocaust head-on. But it’s also apparent that the film is constructed more like a thriller than a somber drama, and it tightens the screws on its lead character — young policeman Wilfried Wils (Stef Aerts) — in a series of breathless setups with escalating stakes.

    It’s an effective way to pull viewers into empathizing with the awful dilemmas faced by an occupied population, and into bearing fresh witness to familiar horrors. But the thriller genre sets up expectations — climax, catharsis, redemption — which risk trivializing the material, and set something of an ethical trap. Who’s going to fall into it: the filmmakers, or the audience? Mielants is too tough-minded to be caught, it turns out, but that’s bad news for the rest of us. Will nurses a glimmer of hope in the darkness, only to snuff it out completely. This is a bleak, bleak movie.

    It’s 1942, and Wil (referred to in the subtitles by the Dutch spelling of his name, despite the English title Will) and Lode (Matteo Simoni) are fresh recruits to the police force in the port city of Antwerp. Before their first patrol, their commanding officer, Jean (Jan Bijvoet), hands out regulation platitudes about the police being “mediators between our people and the Germans.” Then he sheds that pretense and offers some off-the-record advice: “You stand there and you just watch.” The ambiguity of these words echoes through the whole movie. Is it cowardice to stand by and watch the Nazis at work, or heroism to refuse to cooperate with them? Are the occupied Belgians washing their hands of the Nazis’ crimes, or bearing witness to them?

    Wil and Lode don’t have long to contemplate these questions. No sooner have they left the station on their first patrol than a ranting, drugged-up German soldier demands they accompany him on the arrest of some people who “refuse to work”: a Jewish family, in other words. The young men are initially paralyzed by the situation, but things spiral out of control, more through desperation than heroic resistance on the part of the two policemen. In the aftermath, Lode and Wil return to work in a state of paranoid terror.

    Image: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

    Mielants, working with screenwriter Carl Joos from a novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, wastes no time in using this premise to explore the paranoid quagmire of the occupied city. Can the two young men trust each other? Where do their sympathies lie? Wil’s civil-servant father leads him to seek help from local worthy Felix Verschaffel (the excellent Dirk Roofthooft), who boasts of being friends with the Germans’ commanding officer, Gregor Schnabel (Dimitrij Schaad). Suddenly, Wil is indebted to a greedy, antisemitic collaborator.

    Meanwhile, Lode’s mistrustful family — especially his fiery sister Yvette (Annelore Crollet) — want to know more. Does Wil speak any German at home? What radio station does he listen to? In occupied Antwerp — a region where German and French phrases naturally mix in with the local Dutch dialect — an innocent choice of word or of leisure listening comes freighted with dangerous political significance. “There isn’t much on the radio,” Wil responds. “Can you recommend something?”

    Time and again during the movie, Wil uses deflections like this to squirm out of taking a position on the occupation. But eventually, he starts working to save Jewish lives. Actions may speak louder than words, but even in the teeth of a febrile affair with Yvette, Wil continues to keep his words to himself. As Schnabel’s net closes in, Wil’s caution keeps him and his friends alive, but the cost is heavy.

    It’s a bold move to center a thriller about the Holocaust on a protagonist who, on some level, refuses to pick a side. We can only empathize with Wil because Mielants so effectively loads almost every scene and line of dialogue with implicit threat. Will is a tense, dark, frightening movie, filmed claustrophobically in a boxy ratio with lenses that blur the edge of the frame. The acting is intense (sometimes to a fault), and there are frequent bursts of unpleasant, graphic violence as the pressure builds.

    A man with a hat and a pointed white beard with no moustache raises his arms in triumph in front of a burning synagogue. He’s holding a gun

    Photo: Les Films Du Fleuve/Netflix

    But even though Schaad sometimes seems to be doing a weak impression of Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Will isn’t that movie, and Mielants isn’t interested in Tarantino’s style of catharsis. At the end of the movie, the vicious, inescapable trap he set for all the characters simply snaps shut. Will shows that under the remorseless illogic of Nazi occupation, survival is collaboration, and resistance is death.

    That’s a miserable payload for the movie to carry, and it’s debatable how constructive it is. Jonathan Glazer’s chilling The Zone of Interest, currently in theaters, shows that challenging new perspectives on the human mechanics of the Holocaust are as essential now as they have ever been. Thirty years ago, Schindler’s List achieved something similar, and just as necessary, through radically different means: It found a thread of hope and compassion that could lead a wide audience into the heart of the nightmare and throw it into relief.

    Will is too burdened by its point of view to manage anything similar. It’s clear-sighted on the cruel compromises of occupation and collaboration, but so fatalistic about them that it winds up wallowing in its own guilt and hopelessness. That’s a dark kind of truth, and not necessarily one that anyone needs to hear.

    Will is streaming on Netflix now.

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    Oli Welsh

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  • Blow Up the Patriarchy, Or: The Barbenheimer Experience

    Blow Up the Patriarchy, Or: The Barbenheimer Experience

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    Perhaps what they don’t warn you about with regard to “the Barbenheimer experience” is just how jarring it actually is. Certainly, that’s the entire “point” of pairing these two films together, the reason the internet has gone apeshit: because they’re so “divergent.” In fact, the phenomenon has proven to be such an excitement to people that they’ve gone “through the archives” to find similar instances of unlikely movie pairings released the same week. Such examples include Jumanji and Heat, The Matrix and 10 Things I Hate About You and The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! It’s really only the latter example (complete with also featuring a Christopher Nolan movie) that comes vaguely close to capturing the sort of genre/color palette dichotomy that Barbie and Oppenheimer do. But, on a deeper level than that, watching Oppenheimer the same day or week serves as an even more blatant method for underscoring the horrifying patriarchal system that Barbie does. 

    In Oppenheimer’s case, of course, it’s unintentional. Because never was patriarchy in America at its strongest and most accepted than in the mid-twentieth century. Nor could Nolan have planned for a movie about garden-variety male toxicity to have coincided so seamlessly with an actual moviegoing trend/phenomenon. The pairing of these two films fundamentally speaking to how patriarchy destroys lives in far more literal ways than figurative ones. While Barbie (Margot Robbie) at least gets to experience life as it should be under matriarchy in Barbie Land, maybe it’s almost worse to know what that sense of peace and freedom is like only to be forced to enter Real World territory, where males rule with an iron/button-pushing (a bomb allusion) fist. 

    Upon seeing how things are done in Real World, Ken (Ryan Gosling) decides he can no longer be subjected to the “tyranny” of matriarchal dominance. Of being unable to force a Barbie to do anything he wants them to (i.e., return his affection), least of all the specific one he’s pining over. Because, in Barbie Land, men a.k.a. Kens are just background. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) world, it’s women who are very much peripheral, serving only as vague sexual impressions. Yet there’s never any issue with making a woman “his.” Except his on-again, off-again paramour, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). Unfortunately for Oppenheimer, she’s the type of “Berkeley free spirit” who can never seem to be pinned down. Oppenheimer’s eventual wife, Katherine (Emily Blunt), on the other hand, is only too eager to take a fourth husband in “Oppi.” 

    And yet, for as important as these women are in Oppenheimer’s life (not to mention being the only sign of women anywhere within this filmic landscape), they’re really just cursory and occasional “presences” that only interrupt the “real” work he’s doing. The truly “significant” aspect of his life. Which becomes helping male politicians destroy the world in the name of war. With Oppenheimer himself growing (like a mushroom cloud) so consumed and titillated by the resources (financial or otherwise) the government provides him with in the name of scientific research, he loses sight of the monster he’s actually creating. Perhaps as Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlaman) once did as well. Not knowing that the woman she unleashed onto the world—the one quite literally made to show girls that they could be anything—only served to further highlight all the things they would never be, both body-wise and career-wise. Therefore, Handler ended up actually accenting a more palpable and depressing divide between reality and what should be…as opposed to conjuring a beacon of hope and feminism in Barbie. And yes, it bears noting that, despite all her evolutions, Mattel has never seen fit to release a “Body Positivity” Barbie. Maybe because they know just how hollow that would come across at this juncture. Though false intentions never stopped a capitalist from trying to make a fast buck. In short, to capitalize. 

    Obviously, Handler and Oppenheimer are by no means comparable for what they created—though each one did offer up, in some sense, a kind of Frankenstein. Gerwig appears to know that only too well by making Handler a prominent character in Barbie. A conceit that might seem a bit out of left field to some, but is actually entirely appropriate considering she was the brainchild behind Mattel’s best-selling and most iconic toy. And it’s cruelly ironic that Handler’s “ghost” should be left to haunt the seventeenth floor of corporate headquarters while the suits with no insight into women benefit from her invention. For yes, she was eventually forced to resign from Mattel in 1974 after the taxman cracked down on her for false financial reporting (something Gerwig refers to with a joke that Ruth herself makes in the movie).

    Difficulty getting along with the government appears to be a common characteristic in those who simply want to create. For Oppenheimer, too, was viewed with malice and contempt by the very political machine that was dependent upon him for developing an atomic weapon. One that turned out, in the end, to be rather needless as Japan would have surely surrendered without it. But such is the nature of patriarchy, with every man “in charge” needing to prove that his power is authoritative and incontrovertible by swinging his dick around while lives hang in the balance. 

    Oppenheimer makes that disgustingly clear when Henry L. Stimson (James Remar), the Secretary of War at the time, decides they shouldn’t bomb Kyoto because he and his wife honeymooned there and it’s a “lovely” place that has cultural value not just to him, but the Japanese. In other words, fuck those arbitrary shitholes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To see a scene like this play out is indicative of just how damaging patriarchy is, for it is a system run by a gender that thrives on violence, ego and heartless decision-making. A gender that proves, ultimately, gender is no illusion; for this particular one feeds on destruction, whereas the female one is founded metaphorically and literally on creation. The great yin and yang endeavors of each type of being. 

    So yes, more than merely a means to appreciate the contrasting cinematography styles of Hoyte van Hoytema and Rodrigo Prieto, the Barbenheimer experience does feel somehow essential. Like it shouldn’t get reduced to being categorized as “frivolous pandering to internet tastemaking,” but rather, seen as a brutal and unique way to watch how patriarchy upends male and female lives alike on a daily basis. All because someone wanted to prove he has clout and “intelligence.” Though the dumbest thing of all is to assume that one has any significance whatsoever in the grand scheme. 

    Especially a grand scheme that might now invariably include going “kabluey” because a man wanted to show off the prowess of his mind knowing full well that said result would be used for evil. Indeed, quoting from a Hindu scripture, Oppenheimer would say of his creation, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” In some sense, Barbie destroyed worlds as well. Bringing “fire” to the “cavewomen” who were still stuck playing with (read: playing at mothering) baby dolls throughout their childhood. Accordingly, this is the very scene Greta Gerwig rightly chooses to commence Barbie with. And would that playing with/learning to emulate a “slutty” doll was the most affronting and harmful thing a man (/man-boy) ever did. 

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    Genna Rivieccio

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