Fifty Eight Years After EO 9066
By Phil Tajitsu Nash

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb.19,1942, 58 years ago this month. This action, followed by legislative, military and judicial actions, led to the wholesale roundup, removal and internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds American citizens by birth.

While token redress for this injustice was granted in 1948, the dynamic movement for redress that led to a governmental apology and token yet substantial $20,000 redress payments in 1988 was not galvanized into action until the publication of Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy in 1976.

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, thousands of us took the story of this injustice to our schools, jobs, churches, union halls, civic groups and social justice organizations. We lobbied our legislators, brought lawsuits, and finally achieved a measure of justice.

Twelve years after redress was achieved for some of us (the struggle continues for Japanese Latin Americans and others), the latest phase of the struggle has become just as important as earlier phases. Building on previous phases involving research, writing, mobilizing, litigating, lobbying, educating and reflecting (once success was achieved), the action now moves toward remembrance.

The campaign to accurately recall the camp experiences and redress movement is taking place in three separate but related forums: online publishing, offline publishing, and publicly-funded institutions such as museums.

Every year, I ask the students in my Asian American Public Policy class at the University of Maryland to research the Japanese American internment on the Internet. Happily, every year the number of new sites and the quality of those sites grows. Officiýl Web pages by the Department of Justice (http://www.usdoj.gov) and San Francisco Museum (http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/evactxt.html) are supplemented by a wealth of interesting and creative personal or local sites. (To find these yourself, type the words “Japanese American internment” in search engines such as Yahoo! or Altavista).

ûecent favorites have included http://www.library.arizona.edu/images.html, which shows what the camps located in Arizona actually looked like; http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8420/main.html, which has links to other sites; and http://www.fatherryan.or[/hcompsci/, a project by the students of Father Ryan High School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Offline, the memory of the internment is being preserved by many new thoughtful publications (see the Asian American Curriculum Project at http://www.best.com/~aacp/ to order these and others). Law professors Carol Izumi, Frank Wu and others are creating a new textbook on the camps that will be suitable for law school as well as undergraduate classes.

Anthropologist Lane Hirabayashi’s The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp (University of Arizona, 1999) revisits the Japanese Evacuation Resettlement Study as carried out at Poston, a camp in Colorado. It gives us insights into camp life, fieldwork methods, as well as the politics of racism.

University of Hawai’i law professor Eric Yamamoto has written Interracial Justice: Conflict and Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America (NYU Press, 1999), which goes beyond the Japanese American situation to explore race relations with Native Hawai’ians and Africans seeking justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa.

I can remember teaching Asian American History in 1984 with just a few works available from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and some collections of fiction, so the outpouring of new scholarship on the Japanese American experience is a good sign indeed.

In the museums and schools, the struggle to control the future through the preservation and interpretation of the past has been won by Japanese Americans in many important venues. The Smithsonian Institution’s A More Perfect Union exhibit in Washington, D.C., has been seen by millions of visitors over the years, and an online version has just been created. Furthermore, plaques commemorating the sites of internment centers have been placed near the remains of many of the camps. And many school systems now teach about the camps as part of their curricula on World War II or race relations. In fact, this year for the first time, half of the students in my public policy class at the University of Maryland said they had heard about the camp experience while in high school.

The Japanese American community, however, is split in terms of the appropriate way to view and preserve the past. There is an open battle to create a monument to Japanese Americans, a project spearheaded by the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation (NJAMF). One group on the NJAMF board wants to use the name and words of Mike Masaoka, the former Washington Representative of the Japanese American Citizen’s League. Others, citing the Lim Report’s documentation of Masaoka’s wartime role as a supporter of internment, don’t want him or his “Japanese American Creed” memorialized. While it is unclear how this struggle will be concluded, the fact that it has become a major issue in Japanese American publications shows how much people care about the way in which they’re remembered.

This is a wonderful development: When people care about the past, they are often concerned about the future as well.