The Excluded Cub Scout
February 16, 2007
Norman Mineta has a distinguished record of service in the government, corporate and volunteer sectors. He has served on countless community group boards, mentored thousands of young Asian Pacific Americans, and served as a role model to many APA politicians and civil servants, no matter what their political affiliation.
Yet, if there is one image that captures and explains his life, it is this: an 11-year-old Japanese American boy, wearing his Cub Scout uniform, carrying a baseball mitt, and marching with his family to a barbed wire-enclosed detention center in 1942, makes the best of a bad situation but vows that this exclusion will never happen again to anyone else.
Sixty-five years later, Mineta can look back on his life and say that he kept his promise.
Proof of his success was on display on Feb. 6, in Washington, D.C., where over 500 members of the local and national APA community crowded into the Great Hall of the historic Smithsonian Castle to pay tribute to a man who started as an appointed member of the San Jose City Council in 1967, and worked his way up to service as San Jose mayor, congressman, Secretary of Commerce and then Secretary of Transportation.
Along the way, he championed innovations in transportation, science, technology and civil rights, and became one of the rare individuals to serve in the cabinets of both democratic and republican presidents. He pushed for and played a decisive role in redressing the wrong committed against himself and other Japanese Americans during World War II. He was a sponsor of the original bill that created Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. And he helped to create enduring community institutions such as the Congressional APA Caucus and the APA Institute for Congressional Studies.
At the February 6th tribute, Japanese American World War II veterans wearing their medals mingled with a new generation of activists young enough to be their grandchildren.
If you looked above and around the musicians and the crowds bunched around the food tables and bar stands, however, you noticed that this was really a museum, not an entertainment hall. Stuffed wild animals, medieval helmets, and hundreds of old books and artifacts lined the walls of this original Smithsonian building, which today is known mainly as an information center and administrative building.
Walking away from the stage and crowds in the Castle’s Great Hall, past the book-lined Commons area into another cavernous open space, Schermer Hall, the room was dominated by a white conveyor belt three feet off the ground and perpendicular to a full sushi bar. It moved in a slow clockwise arc.
Chefs created makizushi rolls, two to a tiny plate, as well as fresh unagi and other favorites. They placed them on the conveyor belt, which carried them around to the assembled well-dressed patrons.
Somehow it was appropriate that a tribute to a great Japanese American featured a classic of Japanese cuisine in a quintessentially American building. Like the man himself, who had gone far beyond his Japanese American roots, the sushi was just one part of a much bigger event. The tables of Asian food embodied the Asian Pacific America that he helped to create, celebrate and empower. The surrounding cases of artifacts and books represented an American history that he helped to shape and then preserve as a Smithsonian trustee.
Despite this lifetime of accomplishment, however, Norm was still Norm at the Feb. 6, event. He still remembered everyone’s name. He still took the time to ask about one person’s child and another one’s ailing parent. He still gave a stirring speech that minimized his own part in a community’s march toward recognition and inclusion, and reminded everyone in attendance that more work remained undone. Everyone, he said, had a part to play in moving this country forward.
A portrait of Norman Mineta is being painted for inclusion in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, and the record books reflect that he was the longest-serving transportation secretary in the nation’s history. A hundred years from now, however, Norm’s greatest legacy may well be the way a young Cub Scout overcame a personal exclusion to help his family and his community achieve the inclusion they deserved.
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