Blog #9 Japanese Internment Reflection

As our class marched down Second Street towards the Japanese internment memorial, I was excited to see what was in store. I was hoping for maybe a tour through an actual internment camp or tribute museum. I expected a mammoth of a monument that could easily be recognizable from afar. Consequently, I ended up standing in front of a rectangular block a bit smaller than a economy car, bronze in color, and covered with images of the Japanese internment in 1942. Surprisingly, the internment mural was only a little taller than me.
The relocation and internment of the Japanese population residing in the United States began after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As a result, President Franklin D. Roosevelt drafted and enacted Executive Order 9066, which was meant to keep U.S. citizens safe by the assurance from the national defense. Since the Japanese were seen as a potential threat, Japanese citizens in the U.S., even legal Japense-American citizens were forced to move from their homes and into organized internment camps. An estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forced to leave their homes and all of their belongings behind. At the same time, Japantown, located in the city of San Jose, had been already established but the majority of the 3,000 Japanese-Americans in San Jose were relocated to a desolate and cold region in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Nearly all 53 of the businesses situated in Japantown were closed due to the internment. According to an article from the San Jose Mercury Nes, Japanese-Americans and their children in San Jose were held in the gymnasium of San Jose State University before being relocated to various camps.
Ruth Asawa, the artist and sculptor behind the Japanese internment memorial our class viewed, was a 16-year-old living in Southern California when the FBI arrested her father and the military relocated Asawa and her family. Asawa and her family were placed in the horse stalls of the Santa Anita racetrack. In the mural, an image of the horses being removed from the stalls are depicted as well as the hundreds of people filing in, an image that stands out the most among the rest of the mural. Despite Asawa's experience of the internment camps, she researched diligently before making the memorial that sits on Second Street today. This included hearing the stories from residents in Santa Clara County. In addition, interned families contributed the design of their family crest, or mon, to be sculpted into Asawa's iconic memorial.
Asawa spent several years crafting this memorial and personally, I think all the time Asawa spent was worth it. Asawa's images and recreations of the internment tell the story of the Japanese immigrants. From their arrival in the U.S. to the end of the internment period, the stories of closed shops, burned belongings, and lost loved ones fill the mural, each image sheds insight upon the viewer as to what exactly took place. The barbed wire that sits atop Asawa’s mural on both sides gives the feeling of how the Japanese felt; being surrounded or caged in by barbed wire in the camps they resided in. In addition, there are large guard towers that sit near the center of the memorial. Moreover, the tight use of space within the mural depicts the cramped and unbearable living conditions seen through Asawa's portrayals of the Japanese in the memorial.
In addition to Asawa's mural, the internment memorial features a slew background information on the tragic war, Executive Order 9066, and the locations of the camps. Personally, I believe Asawa truly correlated the memorial to the city of San Jose by including the family crests of the residents interned from Santa Clara County. Although Ruth Asawa’s memorial was somewhat a disappointment in size and grandeur, it did not disappoint me in its character, meaning or value. Asawa's memorial holds an amazing amount of information and compelling images that tell the observer what exactly took place.
In the end, I find it hard to imagine the events of the Japanese internment of 1942 surfacing again in the near future. With all the progress that has been made towards gaining equal civil rights, I don’t see how an action of this magnitude would succeed again. It is unfortunate what took place in the U.S. and Asawa does a terrific job depicting what it was truly like to be a Japanese citizen during World War II.


Sources for this article:

http://www.ruthasawa.com/index.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/630390/posts

http://www.japantownsanjose.org/history.html