He’s 94 years old and still clearly remembers. Tokuji Yoshihashi remembers Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and wondering what would happen to Americans like him who looked like the enemy. He soon found out.
He’s 94 years old and still clearly remembers. Tokuji Yoshihashi remembers Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and wondering what would happen to Americans like him who looked like the enemy. He soon found out.
Exactly 75 years ago Sunday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the incarceration of Yoshihashi and 120,000 other Japanese Americans in desolate camps scattered across deserts and swampland. Yoshihashi remembers his anxiety at being locked up and the shock of seeing the barbed wire and armed military guards at his camp in Gila River, Ariz.
He left camp in 1944 to fight for the country he still loved as a member of the U. S. Army’s celebrated 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of second-generation Japanese Americans known as Nisei. The battles were brutal — one comrade threw himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers in the 1945 fight to break the German Gothic Line in Italy.
But Yoshihashi still remembers, with pride, President Harry S. Truman’s words to his fighting unit: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice — and you won.”
Today, however, the aging veteran wonders what his service to safeguard American freedoms and civil rights means at a time of President Trump and his executive order banning the entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries.
“I hope they’re not being wasted,” Yoshihashi said of the veterans’ sacrifices during a recent interview in his San Gabriel home. “That order to ban all the Muslims … I don’t think that’s right.”
The uneasy parallels between two presidents and two executive orders singling out a class of people were repeatedly invoked Saturday at a packed Little Tokyo forum about the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066.
“As Japanese Americans who were directly affected by incarceration, we have a particular moral obligation to remind people that measures like the Muslim ban are not just unconstitutional, they are un-American,” former U. S. Rep. Norman Mineta said in a statement delivered to the forum. “They … undermine the very thing that sets our country apart: our enduring commitment to freedom and justice for all.”
The forum featured poems, songs and performances, along with remarks from African American, Jewish, Muslim and Latina speakers who connected the Japanese American experience with discrimination against their communities and vowed to fight intolerance together.
The Japanese American National Museum, which hosted the forum with other community groups, opened an exhibit Saturday on Roosevelt’s order and its aftermath, featuring the first display on the West Coast of the actual document bearing the president’s signature.
The exhibit also features copies of the government orders for “all persons of Japanese ancestry” to leave their neighborhoods along the West Coast and in Arizona, a timeline charting the community’s experiences from Pearl Harbor to the closing of the last camp in 1946 and modern art installations — including an arresting sculpture of the name tags of those interned.
The forum and exhibit drew more than 2,000 visitors Saturday — a turnout that stunned museum officials, who set up multiple overflow rooms and still had to turn people away.
