Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow: Meeting the Challenge of Our Multicultural America & Beyond The Far Easterners & Pacific Rim (from pages 202-204)

One isolated event doesn't usually bring peace or start a war. A series of positive or negative events, motivated by intense human emotion, sets the stage for the trust or mistrust that eventually inspires peace or war. Yet human emotion goes full circle, just as history tends to replay those events.

Whether we're discussing peace and war, a chess match or a football game, if we're on the winning side, it feels good. Conversely, we struggle to win if we're losing, because otherwise it hurts.

The way in which an event plays itself out often depends on how the story has been reported. But in all fairness to the news media, one must empathize with the predicament of reporters whose emotions are also intense. Frequently injecting those emotions into stories with which they feel a personal connection, reporters often-intentionally or not-become puppeteers with historical events and political tides. How the story makes the front page or nightly news still depends on space or time available and editorial decisions. Like the rest of us, editors too are human. As a result, we don't hear or read all of the news.

Events are often ignored in not necessarily intentional preference to others. We won't always agree. In America in the summer of 1994, Asian newspapers covered an event overlooked by non-Asian newscasts and papers. The readers of Asian papers were outraged and accused editors of ethnic favoritism.

Michelle Young witnessed the event outside the White House in Washington, D.C., and watched for news coverage. Not intending to reflect favoritism of one Asian culture over another, she reported on the general lack of coverage by non-Asian news media and wrote a story involving three Asian cultures. All three cultures, as every culture does, deserve to be respected and honored--not always an easy task where emotions run deep.

Mournful measured drumbeats accompanied Asian demonstrators outside the White House on June 12. Pacing their footsteps with the slow, precise pulse of the drums, hundreds of Koreans and Chinese marched quietly behind a black banner that read United Against Japan for Justice and True History

The hot, muggy temperatures didn't seem to ruffle any of the sign-carrying marchers who wore summer sportswear, dresses, suits, or traditional Korean mourning clothes. But their signs told stories most World War II history books apparently failed to include.

Too young to understand, a child rode on his father's shoulders. His father had no hands left for signs. Just beyond, a businessman in his fifties who, during World War II, might have been toted on his father's shoulders, held two: Neatly stenciled blue letters on a sign in his left hand read Japanese War Criminals; in his right, three black and white photographs told of unspeakable atrocities committed against China's and Korea's youth.

A beautiful young girl stopped to distribute information sheets to bystanders. As she glided through the crowd, her youthfulness gently reminded onlookers of the beauty, ages, and vitality of the dead young women in the photos.

Nearby, another young woman in Western dress carried the chilling words on a sign lettered in blood-red: 300,000 Chinese Slaughtered In Nanking. Sign after sign wove the threads of untold history: Japan Murderer of 30 Million People; Japan War Crime. And still other signs made the demands: Japan, Apologize for the Pearl Harbor Attack, Nuremberg Trials for the Pacific Front Holocaust; Japan War Criminals Repent!; Full Apology Yes! Token Apology No!

Well into the march, a few news reporters arrived. Yet the story appeared to miss the focus of major newspapers across the United States.

In the crowd, a little girl in red held her mother's hand, walking in front of the stroller her father pushed. Elsewhere in the gathering, a slightly older boy of five or six carried a sign like his father's: Japan Liars.

Silently, police watched the orderly crowd filing past Inside the White House, the President of the United States and the Emperor of Japan spoke of diplomacy and politics, leaving history to the demonstrators outside. At the White House gates, four-year-old Matthew Young, a Chinese American tourist from Arizona watched, not understanding. His sudden scream 'to go potty' stole an on-duty security guard's heart, and he was quickly whisked inside for relief. In the streets, the demonstration went on, unnoticed by most Americans. The methodical thump, thump, thumping of the drums maintained their steady beat.

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