Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

26: A Day to Remember

A D A Y T O R E M E M B E R P A G E 242 The following is a column written in 2003 by the author for Pacific Citizen, the weekly publication of the Japanese American Citizens League. Congressman Mike Honda, the California Democrat, has introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives that would designate the 19th day of February as National Day of Remembrance. February 19 is the day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, in a time of war hysteria, signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the imprisonment of 115,000 Japanese Americans and suspension of their civil rights without the due process guaranteed by the Constitution. Honda’s proposal, press reports indicate, has substantial support in Congress. Congressman Honda’s resolution would set aside February 19 as the occasion to remember a nation’s shame as it sent some c h a p t e r t w e n t y - s i x A D A Y T O R E M E M B E R A D A Y T O R E M E M B E R P A G E 243 of its citizens, on the basis of their race, into exile. It would be a day to contemplate the circumstances behind the callous disregard for the principles that distinguish America, an occasion to remember the tears that were shed by the victims and the desperation and heartbreak that never should have occurred. True, the nation already has done penance. President Ford went through the formality of abolishing an already invalid 9066. President Reagan signed legislation to redress—in small measure—the victims of 9066. The first Bush signed a formal apology in distributing token recompense. But there is another side to the day of shame and infamy. February 19, 1942, marks the beginning of the end of a society in which: ♦ Nisei in Los Angeles with Phi Beta Kappa keys hidden away in their ghetto homes made a living stacking oranges in fruit markets because other doors to employment were closed to them; ♦ Nisei in San Francisco were happy to be employed for $15 a week as clerks in Grant Avenue Oriental art goods stores; ♦ Nisei from Seattle worked 60-hour weeks in summer for $35 a month, a bunk and meals mostly of rice, in Alaskan salmon canneries to help support their families; ♦ Nisei with the education and skills to be lawyers and doctors, scientists and business executives and engineers and teachers, turned to Japan for their futures because race prejudice denied them opportunities in their native land; ♦ Issei who cleared the brush and literally turned the deserts of the West into farms, orchards and vineyards were not permitted to own the land they tilled because they were stigmatized as aliens ineligible to citizenship. A D A Y T O R E M E M B E R P A G E 244 Although we could not understand it at the time, relief from those racially based injustices began even as we were driven at bayonet-point into American-style concentration camps. Ironically , it was the dispersal of Japanese Americans from the camps under the government’s forced “relocation” program that gave them hitherto nonexisting integration opportunities. Change was accelerated by the amazing courage of Japanese Americans who went to war in defense of the country that held their families behind barbed wire. Today, Japanese Americans are part and parcel of their country. They, like Honda himself, serve at the highest levels of government. They, like Norman Mineta, have served in the cabinets of two presidents. They direct medical and scientific research, heal the ailing, provide spiritual counseling, administer universities, head business corporations, drill for oil and grow vast quantities of the nation’s food supply, run city governments, administer justice through the courts, create beauty as artists and musicians, educate the children who are the nation’s future. Times have changed for a once reviled people. That change began even as tears flowed on the original Day of Remembrance back in 1942. February 19th is a sad anniversary, but a good day to remember, in Colorado and everywhere that good people believe in justice. ...