L.A. County
Board repeals support of WWII Japanese internment
By Michael Martinez,
CNN
updated 6:00 PM EDT,
Wed June 6, 2012
Los Angeles (CNN) -- The Los Angeles County Board of
Supervisors on Wednesday unanimously repealed a resolution made seven decades
ago supporting the internment of Japanese Americans shortly after Japan's Pearl
Harbor attacks, which led the United States to enter World War II.
The
five-member board heard emotional testimony from Japanese-Americans who were
incarcerated in the internment camps or whose parents were placed in the camps.
They
recounted the racial hysteria of the era.
Donald
Nose, president of the Go For Broke National Education Center, a nonprofit
group dedicated to Japanese-American civil liberties issues during WWII, said,
"To this day, my uncle and mother still have nightmares about the
incarceration process."
Los
Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas introduced the motion Wednesday to
void the board's 1942 endorsement of the barbed-wired camps.
"The
internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry was no doubt a low point
in American history. The county of Los Angeles in ... 1942 contributed to that
by a resolution that is on the books of this great institution,"
Ridley-Thomas said during the meeting.
"To
ignore this and leave it as unfinished business is essentially to trivialize
it, and we choose not to trivialize this travesty," Ridley-Thomas said.
More
than 70 years ago, the board voted unanimously to endorse President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 that put 120,000 Japanese
Americans, about a third from Los Angeles County, in internment camps for up to
three years, Ridley-Thomas said.
The
board said then it was difficult "if not impossible to distinguish between
loyal and disloyal Japanese aliens."
Ridley-Thomas said his proposal was meant "to address a
historic wrong."
Bill Watanabe, the recently retired executive director of
the Little Tokyo Service Center in Los Angeles, a social welfare agency, said
he read the 1942 resolution on Tuesday and found it disturbing.
"It would be comical if it weren't so tragic,"
Watanabe told the board. "Since you can't tell between loyal and disloyal
Japanese aliens), let's round them all up and put them away.
"This kind of thinking cannot exist in the county of
Los Angeles, which takes pride in its diversity," Watanabe said.
Los Angeles County Chief Executive Officer William Fujioka,
a third-generation Japanese-American, told the board that his grandfather, a
prominent businessman in Los Angeles' Little Toyko neighborhood, was among the
first detainees rounded up and was sent to Fort Leavenworth because the U.S.
government "thought he was a spy."
Fujioka's father was also put in a camp while in his fourth
year at the University of California, Berkeley, and he had never finished
college at the time of his death in 1992, Fujioka said. Despite the
indignities, his family "taught me to be a proud American," Fujioka
told the board. He then began crying.
Actor George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu on the television series
"Star Trek," also testified in support of the motion and recalled his
experience when two U.S. soldiers with bayonet rifles took him, then age 5, and
his parents and family from their Los Angeles home and placed them in reeking
horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack.
"My mother remembers it as the most degrading,
humiliating experience she ever had in her life. She didn't know the other
humiliations that were going to follow," Takei told the board. "But
for me, I remember it as it was kind of fun to sleep where the horsies
sleep." Takei and his family were then sent to internment camps in Rohwer,
Arkansas, and Tule Lake, California.
 |
| Marlene Shigekawa |
Marlene Shigekawa (Poston 21-11-D) ,
67, of Lafayette, California, didn't attend Wednesday's board meeting, but in
an interview with CNN, she said she was born in barbed-wire-enclosed internment
camp in Poston, Arizona, in 1944. Her mother (21-11-D) , now 103, lives in Culver
City near Los Angeles, she said.
"For the Japanese-Americans of all generations, the
interment experience was a defining moment," Shigekawa said. "It
spoke to the courage and ability to endure and to overcome a painful experience
in which Japanese-Americans at the time of the war were dishonored and shunned
by their own country.
"It brings back a bittersweet experience in the sense
that there was so much pain in terms of shame and humiliation associated with
it, but the community was triumphant in overcoming adverse circumstances and
building a future for subsequent generations," she said.
 |
| The Shigekawa family |
Shigekawa, a board member of the Poston Community
Alliance, a nonprofit restoring the Poston internment camp, said she and
the group are making a documentary on Japanese-American mothers and their
children born in Poston, located on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.
At the end of this month, the group is planning to return to
the Poston internment camp site an original wooden barracks that's now located
15 miles away in Parker, Arizona, where a local man had bought the barracks,
she said.
The Alliance is now in the process of having the Poston camp
declared a National Historic Landmark because it was the largest of the
camps, with 18,000 Japanese-Americans at its peak, making it the third largest
city in Arizona then, she said.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/06/us/california-japanese-internment/index.html?iphoneemail
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