Supporting Goals of Certain Communities in Recognizing National Day of Remembrance
SUPPORTING GOALS OF CERTAIN COMMUNITIES IN RECOGNIZING NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE -- (House of Representatives - March 03, 2004)
Mr. SENSENBRENNER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 56) supporting the goals of the Japanese American, German American, and Italian American communities in recognizing a National Day of Remembrance to increase public awareness of the events surrounding the restriction, exclusion, and internment of individuals and families during World War II.
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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, as has been mentioned, on February of 1942, then-President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order which authorized the Secretary of War to define military areas in which "the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions" are deemed "necessary" or "desirable."
By the spring of 1942, California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona were designated as military areas. And in May, Japanese Americans were ordered to "close their affairs promptly and make their own arrangements for disposal of personal and real property."
Official government fliers were posted around California instructing families to report to 12 assembly centers including the Tanforan Racetrack for San Francisco Japanese Americans to the Santa Anita Racetrack for Japanese Americans in the Santa Clara Valley. They could only bring the bare necessities, leaving behind homes, their lives, and most personal belongings. Santa Clara and San Francisco Japanese Americans were forced to live in horse stables for as long as 6 months until a permanent camp was built for them; 110,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated from their homes and incarcerated throughout the duration of the war.
By the fall of 1942, most of the Santa Clara Valley Japanese American internees were transported to a camp far away from home, the Heart Mountain Internment Camp Wyoming; and the San Francisco internees were sent to various camps, some as far away as Utah.
The horror did not end there. At the end of the war when Japanese Americans were finally released and went home, they found that they had no shelter, no food, money, much less a job. Some returned to find homes looted and destroyed. In my district, the San Jose Buddhist Church offered what it could, shelter and hot meals for most families. And a good piece of news, in Santa Clara County, the family of Bob Peckham, later to become Federal District Court Judge Bob Peckham, had taken title to the property of their Japanese American neighbors, and they were able to preserve much of the property and return it at the end of the internment.
All of this happened before I was born, but I remember hearing about it well before it hit the history books because my mother was a young woman in 1942, and she was building airplanes for Douglas Aircraft. My dad was in the Army.
And I remember her telling me going past the Tanforan Racetrack and how guilty and ashamed she was and how helpless she felt. She knew that her neighbors had been wrongly locked up in these horse stables. She knew what her government had done was wrong; but as a young girl, she really did not know what to do and how to change that. She was a lifelong Democrat. She cast her first Presidential vote for FDR, but she never agreed with what he did to her neighbors.
What has happened since then? We have adopted legislation to rescind. We have the Civil Liberties Act. We have apologies. And that is important to my neighbors and my parents' neighbors who were incarcerated people like Ed Kawazoe and Jimi Yamaichi and Ted and Raiko and certainly the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda) and Norm Mineta and others; but this resolution is also important because it allows all of the Americans, not just those whose rights were violated but those who were on the outside, to reflect and to understand that an apology can be given, a country can improve, and we will never allow such a thing to happen again.