Day of Remembrance a reminder of the past amid rise in anti-Asian attacks
The annual Day of Remembrance for Japanese Americans recognizes Feb. 19, 1942, the date President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced relocation of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps.
In Stockton, Japanese Americans were confined to the barracks at the temporary Japanese War Relocation Center at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds before being sent to permanent internment sites; in California, there were two, Manzanar and Tule Lake. Many Japanese Americans from the Lodi area were sent to a camp in Rohwer, Ark.
This month, San Joaquin Delta College’s L.H. Horton Jr. Gallery is hosting a virtual exhibit titled “Shadows from the Past: Sansei Artists and the American Concentration Camps.” The exhibit explores both the internment of Japanese-Americans and today’s anti-Asian sentiment.
“It’s the same kind of racism and xenophobia,” said Jerry Takigawa, a Montereybased, award-winning photographer, designer and artist whose artwork was included in the online exhibition, which can be viewed at gallery.deltacollege.edu.
Between March 19 and Aug. 5 of last year, 2,583 reports of anti-Asian incidents were submitted to the Stop AAPI Hate campaign, powered by the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council. Since that 20week analysis, cases have increased.
In Oakland, hundreds of people are volunteering to escort elderly Asian Americans after physical attacks against the Asian community have spiked across the state.
Though today’s xenophobic comments are mostly aimed at the Chinese community, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino and Korean individuals have been targeted. Some have lost their businesses, and others died of injuries after physical attacks.
“Racism is always there under the surface,” Takigawa said. “It’s kind of a continuum that pops up now and then, and it’s been given permission to be out there now.”
As anti-Japanese sentiment grew throughout the U.S. after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, statements by former President Donald Trump and public comments have helped fuel today’s antiAsian rhetoric.
The county fairgrounds held more than 6,000 Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066.
Because of Stockton’s “unusually large” Japanese American population — arguably one of the largest Japantowns at the time — “this order [9066] had a particularly tragic local impact,” reads a 1981 Stockton history book.
Japanese residents were forced to leave their belongings, properties and businesses behind before they were further moved away to permanent internment camps in Arkansas or Arizona.
By the fall of 1942, “all Japanese Americans had been evicted from California and relocated to one of ten concentration camps built to imprison them,” reports the National Parks Service.
Decades later, an extensive government review found no evidence of “military necessity” that supported the removal of Japanese Americans, reports a study on racial trauma. The review concluded that their incarceration was a “grave injustice fueled by racism and war hysteria.”