Around 30 community members gathered for a candlelight vigil Saturday evening at San Jose City Hall for “Day of Remembrance,” honoring Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and relocated to internment camps in 1942, shortly after the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Stories for Solidarity, a nonprofit group in San Jose, hosted the event to acknowledge the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, signed by 32nd President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.
The order warranted more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to be forcibility removed from their homes and incarcerated and stripped them of their civil rights, President Joe Biden said in a Friday statement.
Biden reaffirmed the federal government’s formal apology to Japanese Americans who were “irreparably harmed” after being removed from their communities and charged with a crime without due process, according to the same statement.
Mikomi, “Miko” Yoshikawa-Baker, San Jose State sociology senior and Stories for Solidarity’s founder, said the event was intended to allow a space for community members to share their experiences.
“People know the name but not the story, that's why we're Stories for Solidarity,” she said. We’re the ones who [have] to tell the story, whether it's five people or 50 people.”
Yoshikawa-Baker, said the event was especially important for the SJSU community because Yoshihiro Uchida Hall, named after 101-year-old alumnus and Judo coach Yoshihiro Uchida, was an SJSU student whose life experiences reflect those affected by the executive order.
“His story represents so many of the thousands of people who were interned on campus,” she said.
During the enforcement of Roosevelt’s executive order, the SJSU building now known as Yoshihiro Uchida Hall was used as a registration center, which processed more than 2,000 Japanese Americans before they were sent to internment camps, according to a Feb. 14, 2016 NBC Bay Area article.
Uchida was attending the university when he received a draft letter during World War II, in which he served as a medical technician, according to a Japanese American Museum of San Jose website.
While he served, Uchida’s parents and brothers were sent to an internment camp in Arizona, according to the same website.
When Uchida returned to SJSU, he served as the first U.S. Judo coach in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, according to the Museum website.
“He made that gym where Japanese people were incarcerated in the West Coast Olympic training center for Judo,” Yoshikawa-Baker said. “That's so powerful.”
Cordelia Larsen, event speaker and co-organizer whose pronouns are they/them, said their goal was to establish an emotional connection for community members reflecting on the past. Larsen said many of their family members, including their grandmother, were interned.
“My goal has always been to open up that emotional connection again, and to let our community grieve and to let us mourn and reconnect with the pain of the past,” they said. “Until we let ourselves as a community feel that, we're never going to move on and we're never going to be strong.”
Larsen said the 80th anniversary of Roosevelt’s executive order is “a lot to process,” and contains “many emotions.”
“It’s just a lot to wrap your head around that such a world-changing event for so many was simultaneously so long and so short ago,” they said.
Larsen said they feel much of the language around internment camps is “flowery” and “gentle” to hide its severity.
“It was a concentration camp. It was where they brought a single group, a single ethnicity together to keep them locked up and away from the general public,” they said. “No amount of gentle language or changes in vernacular can hide what it truly was.”
Several other speakers including community activist Kiyoshi Taylor emphasized the need for education regarding the event and other civil rights movements.
“Just compare and contrast, not just the Asian propaganda that they had going on to anti-Japanese sentiment, but look at the way they did the same thing to Jews back in World War II, to Black people during slavery in the civil rights movement - it's the same pattern,” he said.
So if we want to break it, step one is to educate each other on it.”
Event attendee Kit Schimandle said she agrees the education surrounding Day of Remembrance should be continued.
“I guess ultimately, so many of these horrible events that happen are coming from just this place of misunderstanding, that leads to fear,” she said. “If we could just understand each other, I think the world would be such a better place.”
Yoshikawa-Baker said although the event turnout was small, it was meaningful and “intentional” to help community members connect.
“I know everybody who came, I know their stories. I know why they came here,” she said. “That's how you make change, is just being a good human and caring about other humans.”
