APOLOGY ISSUED. Les Ouchida holds a 1943 photo of himself, front
row, center, and his siblings taken at the internment camp his
family was moved to, as he poses at the permanent exhibit titled
"Uprooted! Japanese Americans in World War II" at the California
Museum in Sacramento, California. Ouchida, who is a docent for
the exhibit, and his family were forced to move in 1942 from
their home near Sacramento. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
From The Asian Reporter, V30, #04 (March 2, 2020), page
10.
California apologizes for internment of
Japanese Americans
By Cuneyt Dil
The Associated Press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Les Ouchida was born an American just
outside California’s capital city, but his citizenship mattered
little after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States
declared war. Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the
five-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942
and imprisoned far away in Arkansas.
They were among 120,000 Japanese Americans held at 10
internment camps during World War II, their only fault being "we
had the wrong last names and wrong faces," said Ouchida, now 82
and living a short drive from where he grew up and was taken as
a boy due to fear that Japanese Americans would side with Japan
in the war.
California’s Legislature approved a resolution offering an
apology to Ouchida and other internment victims for the state’s
role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning
actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066
establishing the camps was signed on February 19, 1942, and 2/19
now is marked by Japanese Americans as a Day of Remembrance.
Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one of the
roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California,
the largest Japanese population of any state. The Democrat who
represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los
Angeles introduced the resolution.
"We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by
example," he said. "Unfortunately, in this case, California led
the racist anti-Japanese-American movement."
A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the
detentions were a result of "racial prejudice, war hysteria, and
failure of political leadership." Five years later, the U.S.
government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations
to each victim.
The money didn’t come close to replacing what was lost.
Ouchida says his father owned a profitable delivery business
with 20 trucks. He never fully recovered from losing his
business and died early.
The California resolution doesn’t come with any compensation.
It targets the actions of the California Legislature at the time
for supporting the internments. Two camps were located in the
state — Manzanar on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in
central California and Tule Lake near the Oregon state line, the
largest of all the camps.
Muratsuchi wanted the "California Legislature to officially
acknowledge and apologize while these camp survivors are still
alive." The apology took place last month.
He said anti-Japanese sentiment began in California as early
as 1913, when the state passed the California Alien Land Law,
targeting Japanese farmers who some in California’s massive
agricultural industry perceived as a threat. Seven years later
the state barred anyone with Japanese ancestry from buying
farmland.
The internment of Ouchida, his older brother, and parents
began in Fresno, California. Three months later they were sent
to Jerome, Arkansas, where they stayed for most of the war.
Given their young ages at the time, many living victims such
as Ouchida don’t remember much of life in the camps. But he does
recall straw-filled mattresses and little privacy.
Communal bathrooms had rows of toilets with no barriers
between users. "They put a bag over their heads when they went
to the bathroom" for privacy, said Ouchida, who teaches about
the internments at the California Museum in Sacramento.
Before the last camp was closed in 1946, Ouchida’s family was
shipped to a facility in Arizona. When the family was freed,
they took a Greyhound bus back to California. When it reached a
stop sign near their community outside Sacramento, "I still
remember the ladies on the bus started crying," Ouchida said.
"Because they were home."
The resolution, co-introduced by California Assembly
Republican Leader Marie Waldron of Escondido, makes a passing
reference to "recent national events" and says they serve as a
reminder "to learn from the mistakes of the past."
Muratsuchi said the inspiration for that passage were migrant
children held in U.S. government custody over the past year.
Ouchida said Japanese families like his always considered
themselves loyal citizens before and after the internments. He
holds no animosity toward the U.S. or California governments,
choosing to focus on positives outgrowths like the permanent
exhibit at the California Museum that provides an unvarnished
view of the internments.
"Even if it took time, we have the goodness to still
apologize," he said. |