20:30

When we talk about debt, we often mean a kind of personal debt that comes from borrowing money and paying it back. But there’s another kind of debt – when someone has wronged you big time, and now they owe it to you to make it up somehow. The U.S. government is no stranger to this kind of debt, or this kind of big wrong. There was slavery. And what happened to the Native Americans. And then there was what happened during World War II.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. rounded up 120,000 people of Japanese decent and put them in internment camps. Nearly two-thirds of them were American citizens. Years later the U.S. government would apologize and pay reparations to people who had been held in the camps, but it took decades to make that happen.

In this story, Chiye Tomihiro and Sam Ozaki, two survivors of internment, describe how they went from being seen as model citizens to being seen as the enemy, and how they fought to get what was owed to them after the country admitted its mistake.  They tackle the question: how do you pay someone back when what’s been taken away is their  basic human dignity?

This piece was produced as a collaboration between Robin Amer and Jesse Seay, and narrated by Jesse.

Photo: Women at the Tulle Lake War Relocation Camp, circa 1942. Photo by Bob Bobster.  From Bob: “Tule Lake was the largest and most controversial of the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps used to carry out the government’s system of exclusion and detention of persons of Japanese descent…Tule Lake became a Segregation Center to detain Japanese-Americans who were deemed potential enemies of America because of their response to an infamous, confusing loyalty questionnaire intended to distinguish loyal American citizens from enemy alien supporters of Japan.”

My friend Xander Marro, co-founder of the Dirt Palace and Managing Director of AS220, guest curated a selection of her favorite hand-made offerings from Etsy on the site’s Storque blog today.  She was kind enough to include the CD of my documentary Reconstructing Providence among her selections. Thanks Xander! And welcome to anyone who found their way here from Etsy.

If you haven’t checked out Etsy, it’s an amazing site filled with enticing hand-made goodies from what’s probably now hundreds of thousands of artists from around the world. I bought my coffee table there, a felt molskine pouch, and half a dozen other objects I’m pretty attached to. My favorite seller at the moment is OctopusME, who casts silver jewlery from real octopus tentacles.

While you’re there you should also check out the work selected by my other Providence-expat friends Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Anderson of Lucky Dragons, Sumi Ink Club and other projects. I really like both of them and the work they produce together, which is often (as another friend of ours put it) kind of like this magical artistic metaphor for their relationship.  I haven’t been in touch with them as much as I would like…I missed their Chicago show last spring and wasn’t able to look them up when I was in LA this past December.  Hopefully it won’t be too long before I have another opportunity to see them, one I’ll actually take up.

If you fish around my site, you’ll notice that I featured Luke’s work in a couple different episodes of No Soap Radio.  He also helped me build a Max/Msp player I used when I first performed RP in 2004, which I’m still grateful for.

Originally broadcast Thursday Oct. 3, 2003. Full listing of Inside Out episodes here.

What’s in a name? In this episode we think about the this word (or words) that precede us everywhere we go. Hosted by Adeline Goss, with executive producer Anna Goldman. Contributors to this show include Robin Amer, Ali Budner, Anna Goldman, and Jenny Asarnow. Thanks to Beth Taylor.

In this episode:

Anna Goldman interviews her friend Mojo (yes, that’s his real name) about just what his parents were thinking, and how he deals with peoples’ expectations of him based on his name.

Robin Amer talks to Sarah McDermott about how she got her very much trademarked corporate nickname.

Ali Budner talks to Luke Woodward, formerly Ayesha, about what it was like to change his name when he also changed his gender.

Jenny Asarnow talks to Rebecca Subar about taking a name, and then leaving it behind.

Then, Ali’s twin sister Brooke Budner tells her about the time she convinced a group of strangers she was someone else all together.

Photo by Caro Scuro.