Reflection: 2025 Day of Remembrance
This statement was read aloud during the JACL Philadelphia Chapter’s 2025 Day of Remembrance event on Wednesday, February 26. It includes my summary reflections on traveling to more than a dozen WWII Japanese American Confinement Sites and other historic locations related to the wartime incarceration and forced removal of Japanese Americans.
Since 1978, Japanese American community organizations have observed February 19 as our Day of Remembrance, commemorating this somber anniversary nationwide. Created as a call-to-action for Japanese Americans to begin sharing our painful histories of immigrant scapegoating amid the larger landscape of white nationalism and anti-Asian racism, it was thought that if the general public knew our story, from our perspective, surely we would not repeat such mistakes in the future. Yet as I write this statement, we are witnessing current federal government policy that in the eyes of many Japanese Americans, closely resembles what our community went through after the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
The same Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that was used as a legal precedent to round up, and in some cases, deport our Issei immigrant generation community leaders, has been cited by the Trump administration in their attempt to justify the impending mass deportations of law-abiding immigrant residents of the United States. True in the 1940s, as it is today, there is no just reason why immigrant communities should be targeted as such.
Through an executive order titled, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” the Trump administration is also attempting to use scare tactics to prevent such entities from teaching historically accurate content by threatening to withhold federal grants and other funding critical to their survival. At universities across the country, we have already seen how the college administrators have preemptively erased from their websites much of the language related to DEI and other programs related to building equity for students and faculty of color.
Perhaps most relevant to Japanese Americans are the attempts to censor, and even possibly delete certain key documents related to the history of Japanese American Incarceration and Redress from the National Archives and other federal government institutions. Many of us working in the Japanese American public history space have good reason to worry that the Trump administration will pressure the National Archives to restrict, and possibly even remove, contents related to the Redress Movement – as they have already done to hundreds of resources on gender-affirming healthcare and other research topics related to LGBTQ+ communities.
In fact, the websites of several Japanese American Confinement Sites that are recognized as National Historic Sites and currently administered by the National Park Service, were made inaccessible for up to three days during the week of January 30. Although the government has since restored these sites, stating that their temporary removal was due to a clerical error, the message is clear: factual history related to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans is a threat to the white nationalist policy agenda of the Trump administration.
In light of these current events, I find myself reflecting on the many former Japanese American Confinement Sites that I have visited over the last year. During the past twelve months I stood on the grounds of five former War Relocation Authority prison camps (in addition to three others I visited in previous years), and spent time at the Crystal City Department of Justice prison camp. I also visited a handful of other related sites such as the Washington State Fairgrounds that were used as a temporary detention center before the WRA camps were completed, and sites of forced removal such as the former Japantown in Tacoma WA, and what’s left of Seattle Nihonmachi.
In Bainbridge Island, I stood on the ferry pier where the very first mass removal took place, marveling at the objective beauty of the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. The memorial and wooded pathway that surround it offered stark contrast to the life altering trauma that took place on the scenic walk leading to their point of departure from civilian life. While taking public historian Tamiko Nimura’s self-guided walking tour through the downtown Tacoma business district in an area that formerly housed a community of several thousand Japanese Americans, I was nearly brought to tears by the total absence of what once was, with the exception of a single lonely Buddhist temple. In Seattle’s Chinatown-International District, I pondered what may have become of the Japanese American residents of Nihonmachi who left their belongings stored in the basement of the Panama Hotel, still waiting to be collected three quarters of a century later, and visible through a window in the floor.
At the Puyallup Remembrance Gallery, I stood inside the reproduction of a horse stall, demonstrating the conditions that many incarcerees were forced to endure in those early months before the WRA camps were built. Cramped and dirty - barely large enough to fit two army cots with a potbelly coal stove between, and filled with the stench of horse manure from races that were run only a week before they arrived.
Traveling by car or bus the great distances between Denver – Amache, Little Rock – Jerome and Rohwer, San Jose – Tule Lake, and Billings – Heart Mountain, I marveled at the desolate landscapes that incarcerees may have glimpsed through shuttered windows while being transported by train for days on end to a destination unknown – from the assembly centers to permanent prison camps. Standing in the dry and arid high desert plains of Wyoming, Colorado, and the Northern California borderlands of Oregon – and also in the uncomfortably humid and mosquito-infested Mississippi Delta swamplands of Arkansas, I felt the weather conditions and stood on the ground where tens of thousands of innocent civilians were held indefinitely as their lives came to a grinding halt for an average length of 3.5 years in prison.
At Amache, I prayed at the cemetery memorial markers and unmarked graves dedicated to elders, still-born babies, incarcerees unknown, and others among the more than 2,000 people who perished in confinement due to poor quality medical care and insufficient food rations. At Rohwer, I paid my respects at the tank-shaped monument dedicated to the soldiers of the segregated all-Japanese American Regimental Combat Team who fought for, and in some cases died, to prove their loyalty to a country that despite their birthright, did not see them as full citizens.
At Tule Lake I stood in the jail cell inside of the stockade where over 200 protest leaders were held in a prison within a prison, trying to imagine how hopeless it must have seemed, yet in the face of such adversity these activist leaders who endured starvation conditions and, in some cases, physical torture, remained resilient. At one point their daily food rations were cut from a single tablespoon of rice to just one teaspoon of rice per person. In the words of Issei Tatsuo Inouye, “We ate snow to fill our bellies, while our bodies were filled by the Japanese spirit.”
Most recently I journeyed with my brother-in-law Kurt Ikeda to Crystal City, visiting the former site of the DOJ prison camp in Texas where his grandfather Ted Okushiba was incarcerated. Here many Issei spent their final months before repatriating to Japan during and after the war. We heard stories from the mostly Mexican American locals of the strange “Japones que habla Español” – the Spanish-speaking Japanese Peruvians and other Latin American Nikkei who were kidnapped and extradited from 13 countries in Central and South America as part of a planned Prisoner-of-War exchange with the Empire of Japan. Upon arrival to the United States, their travel documents were destroyed and they were made into stateless peoples. The Mexican laborers befriended these Latinx Nikkei, exchanging fresh oranges from the citrus orchard, a project operated through prison labor, for fresh tortillas, reaching their hands across the barbed wire fence to do so. Now, the descendants of both groups are working together to commemorate our shared histories of oppression and resilience.
In other regions of the country, the incarceration survivors and descendants are building fellowship with other historically marginalized communities. We are fostering genuine empathy as we recognize the patterns between our shared struggles, and solidarity against the injustices of our time. Amache and their youth ambassador project brings Japanese Americans, Cheyenne, and Arapaho youth together in our shared remembrance, focusing on the nearby site of the Sand Creek Massacre only 40 miles to the north of the former concentration camp in Colorado. Among the Black activists and organizers of Little Rock, we shared stories of the Japanese American Redress Movement and the current fight for Black Reparations. In Tacoma at the Liberation Obon organized by Tsuru for Solidarity in partnership with immigrant rights group La Resistencia, we shared our traditional cultures as we protested against immigrant detention at the Northwest Detention Center.
Throughout it all, I have heard the stories of hundreds of incarceration survivors. Many were children no older than my four-year-old son at some point during their wartime ordeal – and yet these experiences continue to impact them well into their 80s and 90s. While the survivors’ views vary on what the lasting legacy should be from this dark period, all agree that their stories must live on as part of our nation’s history. This is not because we think Japanese American history is more important than any other group, many of which have suffered far worse than we, but because it has so many parallels to the ways that immigrants and other vulnerable communities are being targeted by the federal government today.
During the first Trump administration, the terms #FakeNews and #AlternativeFacts rose to prominence among conservative pundits who sought to rewrite history. What they failed to acknowledge then, as they have now, is that among communities who have been historically marginalized, oppressed, and disenfranchised, as long as we remember these lived experiences - our narratives will outlast this current regime. Our memories are long, and we have waited lifetimes, if not generations, to tell our own American stories.
No matter how much the Trump administration pressures us to forget our past, we will continue to remember. We owe this much to our ancestors who endured such experiences. Okage sama de – we exist because of you. We also owe this to our own children and generations yet to come. Kodomo no tame ni – for the sake of the children. May they live in a better society, one that learns from its past mistakes – taking responsibility for, and repairing its past grievances.
As long as there are living descendants of these historical events, we as a community will not forget. On this day, our Day of Remembrance, we invite you to remember.