Japanese American Confinement Education Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 1931, the Japanese American Confinement Education Act, as well as H.R. 6434, the Japanese American World War II History Network Act, which we will consider later today.

I am honored and humbled to cosponsor these measures, and I sincerely thank my colleagues from California, Representatives Matsui and Obernolte, for their work in crafting both pieces of legislation to ensure that the inexcusable injustices faced by our Nation's Japanese American community during World War II are never forgotten.

The memory of World War II evokes one of the darkest periods of our history as a country, the mass internment of Japanese Americans. Over the course of the war, our Federal Government forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens, in barbed wire enclosed camps.

H.R. 1931 and H.R. 6434 both strengthen our ability, if not necessity, to tell what happened in these confinement sites, and to ensure that future generations learned what happened so it never occurs again.

I urge my colleagues to honor and remember the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated at still-infamous sites like Manzanar, Tule Lake, where my wife's uncle and aunt, simple truck farmers from Sacramento, were interned, Heart Mountain, and the Honouliuli Internment Camp in Honolulu by voting ``yes'' on both H.R. 1931 and H.R. 6434.

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