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Article Excerpt
IN THE SUMMER OF 1971, A SMALL GROUP OF JAPANESE-AMERICAN ACTIVISTS SHOOK their heads at the Los Angeles County coroner s reports. According to the official documents, Sansei (third-generation Japanese American) teenagers throughout Los Angeles County were dying from heart attacks; yet these activists, having known and worked with Sansei youth, suspected that the heart failures were caused by sudden and massive drug overdoses, not coronary disease. (1) They knew that the coroner's reports were incomplete and did not account for deaths that were unrecorded, but not forgotten. From their small cluttered office at Japanese American Community Services (JACS) in Little Tokyo, Sansei activists Mori Nishida and Ron Wakabayashi carefully added the coroner's reports to a list of names compiled by Los Angeles community groups. Realizing that their tally was incomplete but more thorough than the public record, the activists announced their unprecedented findings. In 1970 alone, at least 31 Japanese-American teenagers died from barbiturate overdoses, and a sobering two-thirds of those deaths were young Japanese-American women. (2)
From July 1970 to June 1972, the Los Angeles County Coroner's report revealed that barbiturate overdoses comprised 32% of all drug-related deaths and 70% of all drug-related suicides in the county. It also indicated that women in all ethnic and racial communities overdosed at three times the rate of men. (3) Activists in Los Angeles were especially attuned to the escalation of drug abuse in communities of color. In 1970, Los Angeles held 11% of all Japanese and Japanese living in U.S. urban cities. (4) Of those 55,845 residents, almost one-third were youth under 18 years of age; 51% of them were females ranging from 15 to 19 years old, the age group most affected by the drug epidemic. (5)
The alarming rate of women dying from drug overdoses in her generation led Merilynne Quon to apply for a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) grant to start Asian Sisters, a drug abuse counseling and outreach program for Japanese-American young women in Little Tokyo and the greater Los Angeles area. Quon had just graduated from UCLA with Phi Beta Kappa honors and had been admitted to graduate study at the Columbia School of Social Welfare in New York and the UCLA School of Social Welfare. In "a life changing decision," she chose to forego graduate school, return to her community, and dedicate her life to making substantive social change. (6) In May 1971, her proposal was accepted by the Magnolia Committee of the YMCA, which was comprised of progressive Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) women. With access to a small office, YWCA resources, and a $400 monthly stipend, Quon founded Asian Sisters in June of that year. Based on the "serve the people" principle, Asian Sisters was the first self-help drug abuse group run by and for mostly Japanese-American young women, offering crisis intervention and individual and family counseling. (7)
Unlike campaigns for voting rights, educational equity, access to public accommodations, or fair hiring practices, organizing around the effects of drug abuse may not seem to be the kind of issue that could play a crucial role in the development of a race-based social movement. But focusing on the drug epidemic among Japanese-American teenagers in Los Angeles triggered memories in the community of a long chain of injuries--of displacement, war, internment, employment discrimination, urban segregation, and myriad other barriers to full citizenship and social membership. This article examines the grass-roots political work of Sanseis who confronted the drug epidemic by launching an anti-drug offensive that addressed the immediate and practical needs of their community. It traces how they established treatment and counseling opportunities for young drug users and their parents, created supportive networks that linked communities to health care professionals, and identified the broader social conditions that made drug abuse such an attractive option for so many youth. With networks that bridged ethnic, racial, generational, and neighborhood divisions, organizers developed "serve the people" campaigns and fostered a transformative praxis that linked self-help to community self-determination.
"Serve the People" Programs
Organizing around drug abuse was not new to the Japanese-American community in Los Angeles. Since the late 1960s, community service centers run for and by local people had emerged in response to the widespread drug epidemics and socioeconomic problems affecting poor and minority communities. The JACS office was one of these programs, founded and staffed by ex-offenders, former inmates, and former drug users who were committed to direct service community programs. In 1969, Mori Nishida and other former hard-core drug users started a program out of the JACS office called Asian Involvement (AI) that specifically addressed the drug epidemic through peer counseling, outreach, and education. As part of AI's outreach efforts, they formed Asian American Hard Core (AAHC), the first and oldest drug abuse self-help residential program run by and for Japanese Americans in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles. (8)
Both the JACS-AI office and AAHC were founded on a "serve the people" philosophy of self-help and community building that played a central role in the development of local and national Asian-American activism. Drawing from the writings of Mao Tse-tung, these organizers believed that ordinary people could solve their own problems by working together. "Serving the people" meant building sustainable community programs run for and by local people; creating relationships that valued people's well-being over profit; empowering individuals to become active members of society rather than passive observers; situating personal and community struggles within social, economic, and political contexts; and, as Nishida put it, "working for something bigger or more meaningful than its own existence." (9) The ideology linked the transformation of the individual to that of the community. For AI and AAHC, "serving the people" became a way for the most disenfranchised members of the community--drug users, convicts, youth, and the elderly--to be that community's best medicine.
The humiliation of state-sanctioned incarceration, the reorganization of family life and gender roles, and the staggering loss of homes, personal property, farms, businesses, and jobs resonated with a long history of racial discrimination in the United States, and it triggered an internalization of that violence within the Japanese-American community. (10) Social worker and activist Amy Iwasaki Mass believes that after the period of forced removal and incarceration, the Nisei population was overwhelmed by the desire to prove their patriotism and obedience to the same country that imprisoned them. "We had a need to excel. We had a need to show ourselves as perfect and together and doing well.... There was a conscious driving to be 110% American. You don't want to be just a good citizen. You want to be a super good citizen." (11) Like other minority groups that experienced severe repression, many Japanese Americans attempted to deflect negative ascription by proving themselves to be model citizens--hard working, quiet, restrained, and compliant. Beyond the stigmas associated with communities of color, Niseis and Sanseis also inherited the specific disadvantages of internment, relocation, and widely circulated myths about Japanese-American disloyalty and wartime espionage. (12)
For Sanseis coming of age during the late 1960s, these dramas dovetailed with pervasive myths celebrating Asian-American success and exceptionalism. When the myth of the Asian-American model minority emerged alongside the myth of the Black underclass during the mid-1960s, both served to preserve the segregationist status quo by shifting the blame of racial discord away from state-enforced practices that bolstered white entitlement and toward the alleged incompetence of aggrieved groups. Protecting the unearned and unjust benefits of white privilege, this myth baited interracial conflict and pitted communities of color against each other. (13)
None of the organizers held professional or graduate degrees, but they all believed that addressing the causes and consequences of drug addiction required an experiential and critical understanding of societal politics, street life, and, especially, the struggles of the Sansei generation. They recognized their parents' struggles with resettlement and identified how the model minority myth exploited the trauma of internment by shifting the focus away from its gross violation of constitutional rights to encourage a brand of Japanese-American hyper-patriotism that positioned them against other communities of color. The ideology of the Asian-American model minority as simultaneously successful yet subduable, as exemplary yet obedient, corresponded with how many in the Japanese-American community coped with internment. Grass-roots organizer Nick Nagatani identified the model minority myth as one example of how the government can manipulate racist ideologies to preserve...
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