Blog #10 Japanese Internment Memorial

Following the surprise military attack conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941, the United States government implemented a forced relocation of nearly 110,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps located along the west coast.

The United States to become scared of anyone with a Japanese ancestry. Impelled by the military, the Japanese were taken to various relocation camps for “security reasons.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized these relocation camps through Executive Order 9066 which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." It was not until 1988 that President Ronald Regan apologized for the exclusion of Japanese Americans.

I became familiar with Japanese interment camps in my high school history classes. However, I was not aware of the impact the camps had on San Jose solely and that there is a memorial in downtown. So, I was surprised to find the 5 foot high, bronze sculpture at south 2nd and San Carlos Street, a location I frequently pass.

There is so much going on in this commemorative piece of art. I found trouble resting my eyes on one spot. There is a wide variety of people and activities being pictured among the landscape. I assume this depiction of created chaos is appropriate because the internment camps were that of many things, chaotic.

The artist, Ruth Asawa, did a wonderful job at displaying this chaos and the crowdedness of the camps. This is most likely because Asawa is a Japanese-American artist who was held at the Santa Anita racetrack internment camp in 1942 and was also imprisoned at the Rowher War Relocation Center in Arkansas. The experience of internment lead Ruth to create this Japanese American Interment Memorial.

Like Asawa, many citizens from San Jose’s Japan Town were sent to the internment camps. Among those residents that were sent was Norman Mineta, who would eventually go on to become the mayor of San Jose. San Jose State University also played a role in this part of history. In 1942, SJSU's Yoshihiro Uchida Hall, which was a gym at the time, was used to collect and register Japanese Americans in the San Jose area before they were sent to the camps.

The vignettes in the Japanese Memorial are all very beautiful, but give the viewer and underlying feeling of sadness. The vignette paper airplane flying peacefully above the crowds and the barb wire fence. The free flowing object is a symbol of freedom, in my eyes, something that at the time, innocent people had been stripped of, but looked up to. The other vignette that was particularly emotional was that of a family having to burn their possessions. Children are being forced to give up their toys, along with their lives.

I do not see the United States ever resorting to something like Internment Camps ever again. I remember noticing after the September 11, 2001 attacks, hostility towards Middle Eastern immigrants in our country. I like to think that people are more tolerant today than they were a few decades ago, but I think memorials like this one are important to remind people to be accepting of all citizens in the United States of America.

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