Nevertheless, They Persisted

On February 7, 2017, members of the United States Senate were debating whether to confirm one of their own (Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) as the nation's next Attorney General when Senator Elizabeth Warren began to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986. Mrs. King's letter stated that:

"Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Mr. Sessions' conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge."

After a vote was passed to silence Senator Warren on a procedural technicality, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the following statement:

"Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."

Much to McConnell's surprise, the words "Nevertheless, she persisted" became a war cry for the women's movement, which was already starting to rebel against the Trump administration's blatant misogyny. In the year that followed, Americans would witness the birth of the #Me Too and #Time's Up movements as well as massive teachers' strikes across the nation in a profession dominated by women. While persistence is often necessary for progress, it is a quality shared by men and women alike. Sometimes persistence is required to overcome prejudice, often it is necessary to overcome a handicap.

Zion Clark at his high school graduation

During the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, a 10-minute documentary by Floyd Russ focused on Zion Clark, a high school student in Ohio who, despite having been born without legs and moved from one foster home to another, has managed to become quite a remarkable wrestler. While Russ tries to find a distributor for Zion, the following two videos tell an inspiring story about what can be accomplished through sheer persistence.

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The Center for Asian-American Media is presenting the Bay area premiere of The Registry during CAAMFest 2018. Co-directed by cousins Bill Kubota and Steve Ozone, this 56-minute documentary (created for eventual screening on PBS) may eventually be lengthened to a 90-minute feature.

The Registry (which deals with a piece of top secret World War II history) describes how, in the aftermath of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, young Nisei and Kibei men who had been sent to Japanese-American internment camps were nevertheless asked to volunteer to serve their country. Their assignment was to perform a highly specialized task by working as Japanese translators for the nation’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS).

Poster art for The Registry

As part of the war effort, more than 7,000 Japanese-Americans were relocated to Minnesota's Camp Savage and Fort Snelling, where they secretly studied Nihongo and Japanese military terminology. Their work as translators, interpreters, and interrogators is purported to have shortened the war in the Pacific theatre by two years (Roy Matsumoto, who died in 2014 at the age of 100, is credited with having used his skills to order Japanese soldiers to come out of a cave in which they were hiding in order to charge the Americans -- a successful ambush that killed several dozen men).

On October 5, 2010, the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion, as well as more than 6,000 Japanese Americans who served in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II. Footage from a 2013 reunion in Minnesota is also featured in The Registry.


Some 75 years later, a rapidly shrinking number of veterans who were part of “Merrill’s Marauders” are still alive. And yet, the timeliness of this new documentary is painfully obvious. At a time when the Trump administration’s xenophobia and anti-immigration policies are traumatizing DACA children, Dreamers, and immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Africa, and the Middle East, the nation is once again witnessing immigrants who enlisted in the military to serve the country they have grown to love be subjected to institutionalized ingratitude and threats of deportation.

A screen shot shown in The Registry

For Kobuta and Ozone, part of the challenge in making The Registry was a dearth of searchable data.

• Few records of Japanese-American participation were kept by the Military Intelligence Service.
• What little data was available only identified soldiers by their first initial and last name.
• In 1973, a fire destroyed a substantial amount of data that had been stored in the National Personnel Records Center.
• Like many veterans, some of these men chose not to tell their families exactly what they had seen and done during the war because some memories were too painful.
• Because Japanese culture encourages humility (and discourages trying to draw attention to one’s self), many Japanese-Americans were reluctant to share their stories.
• More than seven decades after World War II, many veterans have died or (due to physical and mental health issues) can no longer tell their stories.

Masaji Inoshita is featured in The Registry

A great deal of the credit for creating the registry goes to Seiki Oshiro, a retired computer expert living in Minnesota who, working with Grant Ichikawa and Paul Tani, built a database of everyone they could find who attended the MIS school and started to document what these men did after the war. Although they worked as volunteers, their research was frustrated by the fact that (a) in those days, there was no Internet, (b) record-keeping wasn’t a high priority, and (c) many men had been loaned out to various Army units in other branches of the United States Armed Forces.

Japanese-American soldiers during World War II

Among those whose families are featured in the documentary are Mas Inoshita, Terry “Guts” Doi, John Okada (the author of “No-No Boy”), and Karen Matsumoto, who co-produced a documentary about her father entitled “Honor & Sacrifice: The Roy Matsumoto Story.”

Grant Ichikawa and Tom Sakamoto in a scene from The Registry

Because their activities were considered top secret, Japanese-American men working for the MIS were told not to discuss experiences during World War II. “It’s not that they didn’t want to tell us their stories,” explains Kobuta. “It’s that they didn’t know what to tell us and we didn’t know what to ask!” The Registry offers a fascinating look at a hidden part of Asian-American history. Here's the trailer.

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HBO is releasing a beautifully crafted documentary this month about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Simply (and appropriately) entitled RBG, the film goes into great depth about Ginsburg's early history, her incredible stamina, her marriage to Martin Ginsburg, and her impact on American law. Sworn in as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court on August 10, 1993, Ginsburg is celebrating her 25th year on the court.


In addition to Ginsburg's personal and professional history, what makes this documentary stand out is the intelligence and clarity with which it has been crafted. In their Directors’ Statement, Betsy West and Julie Cohen write:

“We first had the idea of making a feature documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg in January 2015. Meeting RBG in person is a powerful experience. Her voice is soft, but her words are so clear and carefully chosen that you find yourself drawing closer, riveted. We had both, separately, interviewed the Justice for projects in the past and had both admired her trail-blazing work for women’s rights. But that was before she had broken out as the octogenarian rock star “Notorious RBG,” with Millennials extolling her virtues on Twitter and Tumblr, stocking up on RBG tee-shirts and tote bags and, in extreme cases, getting tattoos (big, permanent, multi-color tattoos) of her face.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg chatting with her
granddaughter, Clara Spera, about law school

“A phrase we used in our early conversations was that RBG was 'having her moment.' What we didn’t fully grasp then was how that moment was about to expand into something bigger and more important even as we were documenting her extraordinary life. We began tracking down the dramatic stories of the clients she represented as a young lawyer arguing before the Supreme Court in the 1970s. RBG’s brilliant legal strategy resulted in five groundbreaking rulings that made great strides towards putting women and men on an equal footing before the law. Justice Ginsburg’s steadfast commitment remains, not only for gender equality but for democratic institutions that protect the rights of all citizens. No wonder she is a millennial icon.”

During the film, viewers get a chance to see Ginsburg working out to stay fit as well as working late into the night as she carefully constructs her legal opinions in cases that have come before the Supreme Court. Her candor (and the care with which she chooses her words) offer a sharp contrast to the belligerence and bloviating which have taken over the Executive Branch of our government.

It’s no secret that Ginsburg is a life-long opera fan and, in one delightful segment, viewers witness her surprise appearance with the Washington National Opera as the Duchess of Krakentorp in Gaetano Donizetti’s 1840 opera, The Daughter of the Regiment.


For deeper insights into Justice Ginsburg's musical passions (which show a solid knowledge of contemporary American operas), I highly recommend the first 30 minutes of the following clip, in which she is interviewed by Marc Scorca, the Executive Director of OPERA America.