May 1995 My first visit to the infamous Alcatraz Island, the former federal prison. I became interested in Alcatraz when I learned of the imprisonment of a Japanese American there as well as the Native American occupation in 1969 after the prison was closed. Tomoya Kawakita, a second-generation Japanese American, was indicted and sentenced to death on the charge of treason against the United States during World War II. Kawakita was accused of and tried for this most serious crime against the country in 1947, soon after the war’s end, when anti-Japanese sentiment was still strong, especially in California. At the time, Japanese American communities on the West Coast seemed to have remained silent concerning this incident. In 1953, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. I thought of the famous passage from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” Ironically, Kawakita was granted a presidential pardon by President Kennedy in 1963, in one of his last official acts before his assassination. “Yukinori Yanagi Field Work on Alcatraz” 1996, published by Yukinori Yanagi & Capp Street Project