Shame of California State says sorry or Japanese internments
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Les Ouchida was born an American just outside California’s capital city, but his citizenship mattered little after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the 5-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942 and imprisoned in Arkansas.
They were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans held at 10 internment camps during World War II, their only fault being “we had the wrong last names and wrong faces,” said Ouchida, now 82 and living a short drive from where he grew up and was taken as a boy due to fear that JapaneseAmericans would side with Japan in the war.
On Thursday, California’s
Legislature is expected to approve a resolution offering an apology to Ouchida and other internment victims for the state’s role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066 establishing the camps was signed Feb. 19, 1942. Feb. 19 is now is marked by the Day of Remembrance.
Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one of the roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California, the largest such population of any state. The Democrat who represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los Angeles introduced the resolution.
“We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by