Monthly Feature: A Valuable Lesson Learned From Local Hardships

The entrance sign to the Manzanr Internment Camp, where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were detained. – Photo by Roshan Perera

By Roshan Perera

Asian-Pacific American heritage month celebrates the culture and heritage of Asian Americans, as well as recognizing the contributions that they have made to better our community and nation. However, it is also important to recognize the hardships and struggles they have gone through to learn valuable lessons from their difficulty. One example of outright racial prejudice and xenophobia was the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered to have all people of Japanese origin and ancestry excluded from the “Naval Defensive Sea Area” that ran along the United States’ west coast –  stretching roughly 100 miles inland.

Any person of Japanese descent was given anywhere from three days to two weeks to pack up their belongings into a suitcase, and abandon or sell their house and land. Some were not fortunate enough to be afforded this “courtesy” and had their homes condemned by the government.

The residents of Terminal Island, east of San Pedro, that were predominantly Japanese, were given 48 hours to prepare for internment. Their homes and businesses where then subsequently razed, looted, or sold off at severely under-cut prices.

The first step for these residents was to be sent to Santa Anita Park. Today, the park is more famous for its racing heritage than its legacy as the largest Japanese internment assembly center, but from March 1942 until September 1942, the stables housed people instead of horses.

A picture of daily life in the Japanese internment camp at Santa Anita Park. – Photo Courtesy of University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Libraries Special Collections

19,000 Japanese-Americans spent the first part of their internment here before being sent away to locations outside the Japanese exclusion area. Though it was called an “assembly center” it was still surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, patrolled by military police, and at night, had searchlights sweeping the premises.

After spending six months at this internment center, families were then shipped off to the Manzanar Internment Camp. The idyllic surrounding of the Sierra Nevada foothills attempted to belie the fact that Japanese-American citizens were forcibly coerced from their homes, made to abandon their established lives, detained without charge or trial, and then given a meager pay-off and bus ticket home when the exclusion order was rescinded in 1945, at the conclusion of the war.

Surprisingly, many Japanese-Americans who were put through this ordeal harbor no resentment towards their experience and the San Gabriel Valley is home to many who returned to rebuild their lives – people like Charles Nomura (1915-2010) who was born in Arcadia and returned to Pasadena to work in aerospace electronics until he was 85; or Toyo Miyatake, who smuggled a camera lens into Manzanar to document the plight of the internees. Miyatake established a photography studio that is now managed by his grandson in San Gabriel.

The hardships faced by this group serves as a reminder to us that the United States is a place of great opportunity for everyone, that we have the ability to build better lives for ourselves and our community, and that we should not let racial prejudice and xenophobia influence our policy-making.

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