Kenji

Background

In late 2006, Clear Channel Music posted the entire The Rising Tied album complete with commentaries from Mike Shinoda before each song. On "Kenji", he said, "When I was growing up, there were groups like Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions that would talk about more uhm, maybe political issues, or social issues... just whatever was affecting them, they thought, in their community and personally, and uhm, I don’t know, I feel like, and maybe that’s not completely missing from today’s hip-hop, but it’s definitely something that I’ve never done before on a record and I wanted to do. Uhm, especially when I thought about the fact that there’s never been a song done about Japanese internment. I’m half Japanese. My family was interned during World War II. What happened is after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government basically went through a period, of what we would call now racial profiling. And they took all the Japanese Americans, anybody who was of Japanese descent and stuck them in internment camps. You can imagine, you come home from work, and the FBI’s sitting there and they tell you to pack up your stuff and you’re leaving today to go to a camp for the rest of the war, and you don’t know how long it’s gonna be, and it ended up being, you know, one to two years for a lot of people. Even after that there was a lot of racial tension going on and everything was just very difficult for families like mine, so I wanted to make a song about that. A lot of people when they hear that this happened, they can’t even imagine that this happened in the US, but it did. "

Interview Version

"Kenji (Interview Version)" was released by Mike Shinoda for free download exclusively for Fort Minor Militia members in December 2005. The song was produced and mixed by Mike. He wrote: "this song is a fort minor militia preview. it will be available on fortminor.com later, but you're hearing it here first. this version of the song contains interview clips only...all the things that were in the interviews that i couldn't fit into the song, but i thought i should put this out there for you to hear. i think this version really tells the intimate side of my family's internment camp story well. also, don't miss this part of the story: my dad's family was pretty successful before they were forced into the camp; when they got out, they had newspaper for wallpaper and were picking grapes as day-laborers. the internment had hit them pretty hard."

This version was also made available for download through Fort Minor's official website in March 2006.

Versions

Note: Only the date of the very first release of each version is listed.

Title	Album	Length	Recorded	Released	Notes
Kenji	The Rising Tied	3:51	2005	November 22, 2005	Features interview clips with Mike Shinoda's dad and aunt.
Kenji	The Rising Tied (Non-PA Version)	3:51	2005	November 22, 2005	Censored. All digital releases of the clean album comes with an explicit version of the song. The physical release however, comes with the clean version.
Kenji (Interview Version)		2:24	2005	December 2005	Full interviews with Mike Shinoda's dad and aunt. No verses by Mike Shinoda. Released for free download to Fort Minor Militia members in December 2005. Released for free download on Fort Minor's official website on March 1, 2006.
Kenji	Instrumental Album: The Rising Tied	3:50	2005		Official instrumental version.

Live

"Kenji" was not performed at all until 2015 when Fort Minor made its comeback with "Welcome". Mike performed the song as a mashup with "Castle Of Glass" - the instrumental was a remix of the M. Shinoda Remix found on Recharged, and featured the regular lyrics of "Castle Of Glass" until the bridge, where Mike performed all of the parts of "Kenji" over the bridge instrumental (with the speeches included over the speaker). "Kenji" has never been performed live in its studio form.

Variations

Last Updated: September 14, 2016

Type	Description	First Played	Last Played
Alternative	Mashup with "Castle Of Glass"	June 29, 2015	September 8, 2015

Lyrics

"My father came from Japan in 1905,
He was 15 when he immigrated from Japan,
He worked until he was able to buy - to actually build a store.."

Let me tell you a story in the form of a dream,
I don't know why I have to tell it but I know what it means,
Close your eyes and just picture the scene, as I paint it for you,
It was World War II when this man named Kenji woke up,
Ken was not a soldier, he was just a man with a family,
Who owned a store,
In LA, that day,
He crawled out of bed like he always did,
Bacon and eggs with wife and kids,
He lived on the second floor of a little store he ran,
He moved to LA from Japan,
They called him 'Immigrant,' in Japanese,
He'd say he was called "Iisei," that meant,
'First Generation In The United States,' when,
Everybody was afraid of the Germans, afraid of the "Japs",
But most of all afraid of a homeland attack,
And that morning when Ken went out on the doormat,
His world went black 'cause,
Right there; front page news,
Three weeks before 1942,
"Pearl Harbour's Been Bombed And The Japs Are Coming,"
Pictures of soldiers dying and running,
Ken knew what it would lead to,
And just like he guessed, the president said,
"The evil Japanese in our home country would be locked away,"
They gave Ken, a couple of days,
To get his whole life packed in two bags,
Just two bags,
He couldn't even pack his clothes,
And some folks didn't even have a suitcase,
To pack anything in,
So two trash bags is all they gave them,
When the kids asked mom "Where are we going?"
Nobody even knew what to say to them,
Ken didn't wanna lie,
He said "The US is looking for spies,
So we have to live in a place called Manzanar,
Where a lot of Japanese people are.",
Stop it don't look at the gunmen!
You don't wanna get the soldiers wondering,
If you're gonna run or not 'cause if you run then you might get shot,
Other than that try not to think about it,
Try not to worry 'bout it; bein' so crowded,
Someday we'll get out, someday, someday.

"Yeah, soon as war broke out, the F.B.I. came and...they just come to the house,
and, 'You have to come.', 'All the Japanese have to go", they took Mr. Ni,
The people couldn't understand, 'Why did they have to take him,
Because he's just an innocent laborer?' "

So now they're in a town with soldiers surrounding them,
Every day, every night, looked down at them,
From watchtowers up on the wall,
Ken couldn't really hate them at all,
They were just doing their job and,
He wasn't gonna make any problems,
He had a little garden, vegetables and fruits that he gave to the troops,
In a basket his wife made,
But in the back of his mind, he wanted his family's life saved,
Prisoners of war in their own damn country,
What for?
And time passed in the prison town, he wondered,
If he'd live it down if and when they were free,
The only way out was joining the army, and supposedly,
Some men went out for the army, signed on,
And ended up flying to Japan with a bomb,
That fifteen kiloton blast, put an end to the war pretty fast,
Two cities were blown to bits,
The end of the war came quick,
And Ken got out,
Big hopes of a normal life, with his kids and his wife, but,
Then they got back to their home, and,
What they saw made them feel so alone,
These people had trashed every room,
Smashed in the windows and bashed in the doors,
Written on the walls and the floor:
"Japs not welcome anymore.",
And Kenji dropped both of his bags at his sides and just stood outside,
He, looked at his wife without words to say,
She looked back at him wiping tears away,
And, said "Someday we'll be okay, someday,"
Now the names have been changed, but the story's true,
My family was locked up back in '42,
My family was there it was dark and damp,
And they called it an "internment camp".

"When we first got back from camp, it was pretty, pretty bad."
"I remember my husband said, 'Oh we're gonna stay 'til last.'
Then my husband died before they closed the camp."

"I was a kid in, I was a, I was a baby and a young kid in camp"

"Yeah, soon as war broke out, the F.B.I. came and they took some people from Sampedo"
They just come to the house, and you have to come
They just, you know, 'We're from the F.B.I and you're one of the suspicious person'"

"They put them in horse stalls"

"They took Mr. Ni, and people couldn't understand why'd they have to take him
Because he's just an, you know, innocent laborer"

"They put them in assembly areas until, uh, they worked out the logistics to transport the people to their final relocation camp"

"We, they had the assembly center"

"What they did was they put straw on the floor for bedding"

"Then all the Japanese had to go. Each family had a number, so they had their number on this, um, duffel bag. So, they said you have to move out certain day, but you know."

"The barracks were like quads. They had four sections, so you could have four families in a row. There were no rooms. So, oh, yeah. It was cramped, and then, to get your privacy, we used to put up partitions. Sheets. The walls were just boarded with tar paper"

"I remember my husband said "Oh, we're gonna stay til 'last." Then my husband died before they closed the camp, in the camp. Uh, we had four kids and (?) was born in camp. While I was there in three years, I never went out of camp"

"Before the war, my father had a mercantile. It was very successful. But, when we first got back from camp, it was
pretty, pretty bad. When we came back from camp, we were very poor. We used to, we used to use newspapers for wallpaper. What we ended up doing was we, we day labored. I remember going out and we picked grapes and worked on, you know, farms to make a living."