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{ "url_title": "Karl Yoneda", "title_sort": "yonedakarl", "links": { "json": "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/articles/Karl%20Yoneda/?format=api", "html": "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Karl%20Yoneda?format=api" }, "modified": "2023-12-12T02:21:31", "title": "Karl Yoneda", "body": "<div class=\"mw-parser-output\">\n <div id=\"databox-PeopleDisplay\">\n <table class=\"infobox\" width=\"200px;\">\n <tbody>\n <tr>\n <th scope=\"row\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Name\n </th>\n <td style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Karl Yoneda\n </td>\n </tr>\n <tr>\n <th scope=\"row\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Born\n </th>\n <td style=\"text-align:left;\">\n 1906\n </td>\n </tr>\n <tr>\n <th scope=\"row\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Died\n </th>\n <td style=\"text-align:left;\">\n 1999\n </td>\n </tr>\n <tr>\n <th scope=\"row\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Birth Location\n </th>\n <td style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Glendale, CA\n </td>\n </tr>\n <tr>\n <th scope=\"row\" style=\"text-align:left;\">\n Generational Identifier\n </th>\n <td style=\"text-align:left;\">\n </td>\n </tr>\n </tbody>\n </table>\n </div>\n <div id=\"databox-People\" style=\"display:none;\">\n <p>\n FirstName:Karl;\nLastName:Yoneda;\nDisplayName:Karl Yoneda;\nBirthDate:1906-01-01;\nDeathDate:1999-01-01;\nBirthLocation:Glendale, CA;\nGender:Male;\nEthnicity:JA;\nGenerationIdentifier:Kibei;\nNationality:;\nExternalResourceLink:;\nPrimaryGeography:;\nReligion:;\n </p>\n </div>\n <div class=\"floatright\">\n </div>\n <div class=\"floatright\">\n </div>\n <p>\n Kibei activist, union organizer, World War II veteran, and writer. Karl Yoneda (1906–99) was born in southern California, but as a child went to Japan where he attended school and participated in political struggles for thirteen years. He returned to the U.S. in 1926 and joined the U.S. Communist Party. During World War II, he focused on defeating fascism and volunteered from\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Manzanar/\" title=\"Manzanar\">\n Manzanar\n </a>\n concentration camp for the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Military_Intelligence_Service/\" title=\"Military Intelligence Service\">\n Military Intelligence Service\n </a>\n . Following the war, he remained active in social justice movements, including mobilizations for redress and reparations. He wrote three books: an autobiography in the English language and two books in Japanese, including one on Japanese American labor history.\n </p>\n <div aria-labelledby=\"mw-toc-heading\" class=\"toc\" id=\"toc\" role=\"navigation\">\n <input class=\"toctogglecheckbox\" id=\"toctogglecheckbox\" role=\"button\" style=\"display:none\" type=\"checkbox\"/>\n <div class=\"toctitle\" dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">\n <h2 id=\"mw-toc-heading\">\n Contents\n </h2>\n <span class=\"toctogglespan\">\n <label class=\"toctogglelabel\" for=\"toctogglecheckbox\">\n </label>\n </span>\n </div>\n <ul>\n <li class=\"toclevel-1 tocsection-1\">\n <a class=\"\" href=\"#Before_the_War\">\n <span class=\"tocnumber\">\n 1\n </span>\n <span class=\"toctext\">\n Before the War\n </span>\n </a>\n </li>\n <li class=\"toclevel-1 tocsection-2\">\n <a class=\"\" href=\"#Wartime_Experiences\">\n <span class=\"tocnumber\">\n 2\n </span>\n <span class=\"toctext\">\n Wartime Experiences\n </span>\n </a>\n </li>\n <li class=\"toclevel-1 tocsection-3\">\n <a class=\"\" href=\"#Aftermath\">\n <span class=\"tocnumber\">\n 3\n </span>\n <span class=\"toctext\">\n Aftermath\n </span>\n </a>\n </li>\n <li class=\"toclevel-1 tocsection-4\">\n <a class=\"\" href=\"#For_More_Information\">\n <span class=\"tocnumber\">\n 4\n </span>\n <span class=\"toctext\">\n For More Information\n </span>\n </a>\n </li>\n </ul>\n </div>\n <div class=\"section\" id=\"Before_the_War\">\n <h2>\n <span class=\"mw-headline\" id=\"Before_the_War\">\n Before the War\n </span>\n </h2>\n <div class=\"section_content\">\n <p>\n Karl Yoneda was born as Goso Yoneda on a small farm in Glendale, California in 1906, becoming one of the first U.S.-born Japanese Americans. In 1913, his ill father took him and his cousin to Yasuno, a remote mountain area in Hiroshima Prefecture. A year later, they were joined by his mother and two sisters. His father died of tuberculosis in 1915. While attending schools, he became politically active, participating in a high school students' strike in 1921 against \"a dictatorial dormitory supervisor\" and in a newspaper boys' strike in the same year. At the age of fifteen, he hitchhiked to Beijing in search of the Russian anarchist Vasily Eroshenko whose writings intrigued him. After traveling and working for four months in Korea and Manchuria, he stayed with Eroshenko for two months. Upon returning to Japan, he decided not to go back to school and joined the labor movement and participated in several strikes.\n </p>\n <p>\n In 1926, he returned to the United States to avoid being drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army. In Los Angeles, he quickly became involved in the\n <i>\n Rafu Nihonjin Rodo Kyokai\n </i>\n (Los Angeles Japanese Workers' Association) and in 1927 joined the U.S. Communist Party, under the name \"Karl Hama,\" taking the name \"Karl\" in tribute to Karl Marx. For the next fifteen years, he helped organize agricultural workers in southern and central California and cannery workers in the Pacific Northwest and participated in numerous struggles for immigrant rights, civil rights for African Americans, and against political repression. From 1933 to 1936, he served as editor for\n <i>\n Rodo Shimbun\n </i>\n , a labor newspaper focusing on Japanese immigrants published in San Francisco by the Communist Party. In 1934, he became one of the first Japanese Americans to run for political office, garnering more than a thousand votes in a campaign for a State Assembly seat from the San Francisco Fillmore District as a Communist Party candidate. In 1936, he married activist Elaine Black, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant revolutionaries. Due to anti-miscegenation laws in California, the couple traveled to Washington state to be legally wed. The couple had one son, Thomas, born in 1939. In 1936 in San Francisco, Yoneda became the first Japanese American union longshoreman on the mainland and worked on the docks for several periods of his life until his retirement in 1972.\n </p>\n <p>\n From his early years onward, he opposed Japanese militarism and fascism. As a teenager, he joined worker strikes in Japan to promote democracy and also briefly published a progressive monthly for poor farmers called\n <i>\n Tsuchi\n </i>\n (Earth). After returning to the U.S., he organized protests against Japan's repression of pro-democracy movements and its invasion of China. In the late 1930s in West Coast Japanese immigrant communities, he spoke out against pro-Japan sentiment, especially efforts by religious and community leaders to collect funds in support of Japan's actions in China.\n </p>\n </div>\n </div>\n <div class=\"section\" id=\"Wartime_Experiences\">\n <h2>\n <span class=\"mw-headline\" id=\"Wartime_Experiences\">\n Wartime Experiences\n </span>\n </h2>\n <div class=\"section_content\">\n <p>\n Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Communist Party suspended all Japanese American members to demonstrate its backing for the U.S. war against Japan. Although Yoneda and other Party members opposed what they called an \"anti-working class, racist edict,\" they decided that it was not the time to protest but to help carry out the Party's campaign against worldwide fascism. Yoneda went to his draft board to enlist but was turned down due to his ethnicity, his family status, and his age. After President\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Franklin_D._Roosevelt/\" title=\"Franklin D. Roosevelt\">\n Roosevelt\n </a>\n issued\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Executive_Order_9066/\" title=\"Executive Order 9066\">\n Executive Order 9066\n </a>\n , Yoneda volunteered as a construction worker for Manzanar concentration camp. At Manzanar, he was soon joined by his wife, Elaine, his infant son and thousands of other Japanese Americans.\n </p>\n <p>\n At Manzanar, Yoneda and others who supported the U.S. war effort, such as leaders of the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Japanese_American_Citizens_League/\" title=\"Japanese American Citizens League\">\n Japanese American Citizens League\n </a>\n (JACL), clashed with the Black Dragon Association led by\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Joe_Kurihara/\" title=\"Joe Kurihara\">\n Joe Kurihara\n </a>\n and others whom Yoneda termed as \"pro-Japan.\" With JACL leaders, he helped form the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Manzanar_Citizens_Federation/\" title=\"Manzanar Citizens Federation\">\n Manzanar Citizens Federation\n </a>\n and circulated a petition to President Roosevelt urging the U.S. Army to accept\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Nisei/\" title=\"Nisei\">\n Nisei\n </a>\n volunteers. Yoneda's fervent activities to mobilize fellow Japanese Americans for the war against Japan were recorded by\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation/\" title=\"Federal Bureau of Investigation\">\n Federal Bureau of Investigation\n </a>\n (FBI) informants in the camp and led FBI head\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/J._Edgar_Hoover/\" title=\"J. Edgar Hoover\">\n J. Edgar Hoover\n </a>\n to file a memo stating: \"…Yoneda is one of those rare individuals who is of Japanese descent, but is open and avowed in his Communist sympathies and anything but in sympathy with the present militaristic regime in Japan.\" His activities also angered Black Dragons who threatened him and his family for colluding with camp officials and government surveillance agencies.\n </p>\n <p>\n Camp conflict—along with widespread complaints about living conditions in the camp and charges of corruption against camp officials—culminated in early December 1942, in the severe beating of JACL leader\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Fred_Tayama/\" title=\"Fred Tayama\">\n Fred Tayama\n </a>\n by masked assailants. Camp authorities arrested kitchen worker\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Harry_Ueno/\" title=\"Harry Ueno\">\n Harry Ueno\n </a>\n as a suspect in the beating, provoking large-scale protests, which resulted in the killing of James Ito by military police.\n </p>\n <p>\n At the time of the \"\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Manzanar_riot/uprising/\" title=\"Manzanar riot/uprising\">\n Manzanar riot\n </a>\n ,\" Yoneda and others were in Minnesota for training for the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Military_Intelligence_Service/\" title=\"Military Intelligence Service\">\n Military Intelligence Service\n </a>\n (MIS). In early 1944, his team was dispatched to Burma where he created propaganda leaflets to urge Japanese troops to surrender. Later his team worked with the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Office_of_War_Information/\" title=\"Office of War Information\">\n Office of War Information\n </a>\n (OWI) in China and India.\n </p>\n </div>\n </div>\n <div class=\"section\" id=\"Aftermath\">\n <h2>\n <span class=\"mw-headline\" id=\"Aftermath\">\n Aftermath\n </span>\n </h2>\n <div class=\"section_content\">\n <p>\n Yoneda and his wife returned to San Francisco and resumed work in the Communist Party. They urged Party leaders to overturn its racist wartime exclusion policy against members of Japanese ancestry. For a decade, due to health problems, Yoneda became an owner of a chicken farm but eventually returned to work on the docks as a member of the\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/International_Longshoreman%27s_and_Warehouseman%27s_Union/\" title=\"International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union\">\n International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union\n </a>\n (ILWU) until his retirement in 1972. From the late 1960s onward, he served as a guest lecturer in Asian American Studies classes on college campuses sharing his scholarship and personal experiences relating to Japanese American labor history and activism. He and his wife helped organize the first\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Camp_pilgrimages/\" title=\"Camp pilgrimages\">\n pilgrimages\n </a>\n to Manzanar and were involved in early initiatives calling for\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Redress_movement/\" title=\"Redress movement\">\n redress and reparations\n </a>\n . In the 1980s and 1990s, he continued to join picket lines and protests and express solidarity for movements for social justice, especially those organized by young Asian Americans.\n </p>\n <div id=\"authorByline\">\n <b>\n Authored by\n <a class=\"encyc notrg\" href=\"/Glenn_Omatsu/\" title=\"Glenn Omatsu\">\n Glenn Omatsu\n </a>\n , California State University, Northridge\n </b>\n </div>\n <div id=\"citationAuthor\" style=\"display:none;\">\n Omatsu, Glenn\n </div>\n </div>\n </div>\n <div class=\"section\" id=\"For_More_Information\">\n <h2>\n <span class=\"mw-headline\" id=\"For_More_Information\">\n For More Information\n </span>\n </h2>\n <div class=\"section_content\">\n <p>\n Yoneda, Karl.\n <a class=\"external text offsite\" href=\"https://archive.org/details/ganbattesixtyyea00yone\" rel=\"nofollow\">\n <i>\n Ganbatte: Sixty-year Struggle of a Kibei Worker\n </i>\n .\n </a>\n Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1983.\n </p>\n <!-- \nNewPP limit report\nCached time: 20240418160735\nCache expiry: 86400\nDynamic content: false\nComplications: []\nCPU time usage: 0.015 seconds\nReal time usage: 0.020 seconds\nPreprocessor visited node count: 151/1000000\nPost‐expand include size: 1858/2097152 bytes\nTemplate argument size: 296/2097152 bytes\nHighest expansion depth: 6/40\nExpensive parser function count: 0/100\nUnstrip recursion depth: 0/20\nUnstrip post‐expand size: 0/5000000 bytes\nExtLoops count: 0\n-->\n <!--\nTransclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template)\n100.00% 5.216 1 -total\n 43.50% 2.269 1 Template:Databox-People\n 27.49% 1.434 1 Template:Published\n 26.74% 1.395 1 Template:AuthorByline\n-->\n <!-- Saved in parser cache with key encycmw:pcache:idhash:36-0!canonical and timestamp 20240418160735 and revision id 35596\n -->\n </div>\n </div>\n</div>\n<div class=\"toplink\">\n <a href=\"#top\">\n <i class=\"icon-chevron-up\">\n </i>\n Top\n </a>\n</div>", "categories": [ "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/categories/People/?format=api" ], "sources": [ "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/sources/en-denshopd-i151-00376-1/?format=api", "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/sources/en-denshopd-i67-00042-1/?format=api" ], "coordinates": {}, "authors": [ "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/authors/Glenn%20Omatsu/?format=api" ], "ddr_topic_terms": [ "https://ddr.densho.org/api/0.2/facet/topics/topics-91/objects/", "https://ddr.densho.org/api/0.2/facet/topics/topics-160/objects/" ], "prev_page": "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/articles/Karl%20Bendetsen/?format=api", "next_page": "http://encyclopedia.densho.org/api/0.1/articles/Kash:%20The%20Legend%20and%20Legacy%20of%20Shiro%20Kashino%20(film)/?format=api" }