Warren Furutani reflects on a life of activism and service, and how we might come back together
By James Preston Allen, Publisher and Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Warren Furutani is concerned about the current political moment and what it portends for the future. He released a memoir entitled, ac•tiv•ist, noun: a person who works to bring about political or social change. The former California assemblyman, Los Angeles Unified School District and community college board member sat for an interview with Random Lengths News recently and aired out his concerns, particularly given the divisiveness of this particular cultural moment — a moment in which women’s bodies, identities and public education are contested spaces. Furutani noted that throughout his entire career in public services and his years as an activist, he had been an advocate for diversity and one who acknowledged the differences and the importance of different people and groups.
On the topic of cultural identity politics, Furutani’s observation is quite informed.
“I think maybe it’s time to stop and put it on hold and let’s re-examine what we have in common. Let’s talk about what our common ground is, not how we are all so different. When we do that, we might come back together,” Furutani said.
The several-term school board member noted that in this current moment in culture, there’s so much infighting and not just between left and right, but within the left itself.
“People are finding themselves and they’re all the same ilk. We’re on the same path going in the same direction. But we’re fighting each other on it because there are these purity tests and other things going on … when in fact the fundamental way to cause change is to unite the many against the few that are causing the problem,” Furutani said.
Furutani served in the State Assembly from 2008 to 2012. Prior to his ascension to the State Assembly, he served on the Los Angeles Unified School Board and then the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees. The first Asian Pacific American ever elected to the school board in 1987, he became the board’s president in 1991. A fourth-generation Japanese American, Furutani was born in San Pedro but grew up in Gardena. He graduated from Gardena High School in 1965 and went to several community colleges and earned a bachelor of arts degree at Antioch University.
The former legislator who retained much of the fire that made him a firebrand in his youth dedicated his book to his immediate family: his parents and three brothers, their families, and hundreds of friends and comrades with whom he shared experiences he enumerates in his book. He says that to this day, the movement still provides him with a sense of purpose.
Furutani noted that he purposely spelled “activist” with a lowercase “a.”
“Activism for me is a common element of people,” he said. “And for me, activism grew out of life.”
Furutani graduated high school in 1965, an era when a lot of things were fermenting in life; in society; and the community. It was one of those seminal moments where people alive during that moment knew where they were the moment they got the news that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
The septuagenarian noted that awareness of himself, the world, and his place in it did not just immediately happen, but rather he underwent a gradual awakening caused by a number of factors, the primary ones were due to his family, which he discusses in his book.
Furutani recounted his father telling him and his three brothers, “Don’t be afraid to be different.”
“And of course, as boys … as youngsters, we didn’t want to be different,” Furutani noted. “We wanted to be like everybody else. We wanted the same bicycles; imagined ourselves in the same TV shows that everybody else watched, but we were different just by virtue of the fact we were Japanese.”
Furutani noted his family was different from a lot of Japanese Americans who grew up around him, noting that his were three or four generations deep in the United States, while the parents of his classmates were second generation.
The former assemblyman described first and second generation Japanese Americans as really conservative, noting they had suffered the brunt of being put in camp and then relocated back to where they came from.
“For the most part, they had to start over from scratch. So they were very conservative,” Furutani said.
Furutani said that although his dad was of that age group, he was a sansei (third generation) because his family was from Hawaii.
“So he was different. He wasn’t conservative,” Furutani explained. “My friends told my brothers and me, ‘You have the cool dad.’ My dad would talk to my friends, my dad would give them rides on his motorcycle. Back then he had hot rods, and he played jazz music but he was Japanese-American. So it was really different.”
Furutani went on to explain how the WWII internment camps became a touchstone in the Japanese American experience.
“I was born right after the camp experience in 1947. It was talked about at family gatherings, it’s referenced here and there, but always in hushed tones. ‘What camp were you in all? Did you know so-and-so who lived in block so-and-so.’ It becomes a reference point,” Furutani explained. “Whenever someone outside the experience would ask, ‘Well what are these camps?’ Everybody would hush up. Camp was the YMCA summer camp. Camp was someplace where you learned how to make a lanyard if you were lucky to go to camp. So an incongruity existed.” It was through his activism that these camps became accurately called “concentration camps,” which is the designation on the Manzanar historic plaque where many of LA’s Japanese community ended up, except Furutani’s parents from Terminal Island were held in Arkansas during the war.
Fast forward to the 1960s, Furutani discusses the camp experience from the perspective of a third-generation Japanese American. Furutani graduated from high school in 1965, back when a lottery was instituted for draft-age students.
“Everybody wanted to stay out of the draft because we could see the war on television,” Furutani explained. “For the first time, you could see war on television and it just didn’t look good. No matter who was being killed. You would look at the people that were being killed and he said, wait a minute. That looks like obaa-san that looks like my grandmother.”
Between World War II and the war in Vietnam, there had been a smattering of incidents in which Asian American soldiers got shot because they looked like the enemy.
Furutani said he knew of Asian American Vietnam War veterans who were able to recount stories of being brought up in front of the whole troop during training camp and the sergeant would say, “This is what the enemy looks like.”
The conscientious objector recounted a story related to him by Judge Vincent Okamoto, who received the second-highest award for bravery in the Vietnam War.
“He told me a story of being on a helicopter being evacuated out of a firefight, and one of the American soldiers was getting ready to be thrown out the door because that’s what they did with the Vietnamese prisoners when they were trying to get out of a really crazy situation. They were going to throw him out because they thought he was a Vietnamese soldier until he started telling them that he was American and referencing baseball and started proving his American pedigree. Otherwise, he’d have been thrown out the door. So, if you look at that from WWII to the Korean War to the Vietnam War, all of this is an Asia war with Asian people. And when you live in a country where people basically can’t tell the difference, it doesn’t matter if you’re Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese … it’s all the same.”
Furutani’s political maturation is strikingly similar to International Longshore and Warehouse Union icon Dave Arian, who in high school attended an NAACP protest in Torrance and in 1965 was arrested (the first of many times) at the Wilshire Federal Building during a demonstration in solidarity with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights workers in Selma, Alabama.
Like Arian, Furutani was also an outspoken advocate for civil rights and an early, militant opponent of the war in Vietnam. He organized and attended demonstrations throughout the state, forming coalitions with members of the burgeoning student, Black Power, and Chicano movements.
Furutani was allied in political positions and organizationally with groups involved in ethnic power politics, he always viewed education as the linchpin that connected his activism and politics. In fact, he believes education is still key.
“Looking at how to educate people for me became a way of looking at systems and we did alternate education, experimental education, and community schools,” Furutani explained. “[I] kept coming back to a fundamental democratic institution, and I’ve always believed in democracy, [and that] a fundamental institution is public education.”
But also like Arian in his later years, Furutani has taken a more pragmatic approach to the world. In the last chapter of ac•tiv•ist, entitled OG-san (where American slang meets Japanese, oji-san for older man or uncle), Furutani reflects on the past three years covering the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, anti-immigrant policies, Asian hate, and homelessness. In his estimation, these are not new issues. But as he reveals, his BS meter is too sensitive to sit by and listen to young activists and potential candidates drone on about what they won’t do because they are too woke and progressive.
“Tell me what you’re gonna do and how you’re going to do it is my constant query,” Furutani said in the first few graphs of his book’s last chapter. In fact, he lists 10 ideas for readers to think about, but primarily among his concerns is how to bridge the divide in this country.
“I’ve been an advocate for diversity and acknowledging differences in the importance of different people in different groups. But I think maybe it’s time to stop and put it on hold,” Furutani said. “And let’s talk about what our common ground is … when we do that, we might come back together.”
On Thursday, April 27, Warren Furutani will be doing book signings on Sunday, June 4 at Sacred Grounds at 2 p.m. Visit his website, www.ac-tiv-ist.com.