Day of Remembrance
Photo courtesy of the Mizu Sugimura Collection, Densho. The first Day of Remembrance in Seattle, Washington on November 25, 1978.
By Meredith Oda
Eighty-one years ago, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This action resulted in the incarceration over 120,000 Japanese Americans in desolate camps throughout the interior of the United States for most of WWII. Two thirds of these Japanese Americans were US-born citizens; one third were migrants prevented from naturalizing as citizens. This was the biggest infringement of civil liberties in our country’s history, and it rested on the false justification of military necessity. General John D. DeWitt articulated the racist reasoning: “The Japanese race is an enemy race.” This included American-born citizens, in whom, he argued, “the racial strains are undiluted.”
Within months, people were forced to give up homes, jobs, careers, lifetimes of savings, treasured heirlooms, beloved pets, and, worse, any sense of belonging. As writer Monica Sone wrote, “I felt like a despised, two-headed freak, a Japanese and an American, neither of which seemed to be doing me any good." The loss and trauma continued for generations.
Photo Creative Commons. Exclusion Order posted at First and Front Streets directing removal of Japanese people.
The Japanese American incarceration is a story of harm and sorrow—the culmination of decades of exclusionary measures and laws designed to prevent Japanese migration, naturalization, and inclusion.
But as February 19, the Day of Remembrance, approaches, we should also remember this tragic history as a story of strength, survival, and resistance. I’m a historian, and one of the delights of my research is finding how people made lives and asserted their humanity when it was denied them. Gardeners coaxed beautiful gardens out of the desert camps. Archeologist Koji Lau-Ozawa has documented basements folks dug under barrack living-quarters to rest, gamble, share bootleg liquor, or indulge in other pastimes banned by administrators. Workers struck for fair wages or better job conditions, and Japanese Americans reclaimed their demonized culture with sumo matches, goh tournaments, or Japanese-language classes. Scores refused to register for the draft from behind barbed wire, decrying it as an infringement on their constitutional rights. Some even renounced their US citizenship, giving up on a country they believed rejected them. Famously, four individuals took their struggle all the way to the Supreme Court: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, and Mitsuye Endo.
While the damage did not end at the camps’ closure, neither did the community care. There are innumerable examples of survivors and their allies who helped those leaving camp find jobs, homes, and comfort. Organizations were created and continued, including by subsequent generations of activists who demanded redress for their community’s incalculable losses – and won it, with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
Nevada Humanities is hosting one of those activists: author and filmmaker Frank Abe. Abe will speak in Reno on February 16 at Memory and Resistance: Remembering Japanese American Incarceration to recount some of the meanings and work behind the first Day of Remembrance in 1978, an event organized to mobilize his community for redress action.
Whether you are able to make the event or not, February 19 is a day to remember both an abrogation of rights as well as people’s ability to resist, struggle, and survive.
Meredith Oda is a historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her first book, The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (Chicago, 2018), was a transpacific urban history of San Francisco, and she is currently working on a book about Japanese American WWII incarceration and resettlement. Meredith is also moderating the Nevada Humanities in person event, Memory and Resistance: Remembering Japanese American Incarceration, at the Downtown Reno Library at 6-8 pm PST on Wednesday, February 16, 2023.