Manzanar

We lived in San Jose for 12 years, two blocks from Japantown.  It was a real Japantown, not a tourist area like the one in San Francisco.  We went to the Obon festival every year, patronized the Aki bakery and at least four restaurants, and kept my old cars running because of the expertise of or neighborhood mechanics George Hanada and Fred Kido.  Our neighborhood bar was the Bamboo Club.  I loved it and was sorry when we moved.

Living there, of course, I knew people whose parents were in the camps.  I had friends who were in the camps.  Norman Mineta, my congressman, was himself incarcerated in the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming when he was a kid.

We have visited Manzanar in the Sierras.  It’s an incredibly bleak place, cold and dry.  U.S. citizens of Japanese descent were kept there for years.  We visited the Topaz Relocation Center museum in Delta, Utah, which has a replica of one of the barracks rooms.  Believe me, it is very small, more like a cell than an apartment.

I always thought that as terrible as that experience was for the Japanese, it meant that something like that would never happen again.  Something that terrible would never be repeated.  

But it has been.  In the case last month when the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban on Muslim countries, Justice Sotomayor pointed out the close parallels between the ban and Executive Order 9066.  Nonetheless, the ruling was 5-4 to uphold the ban.

And when the Japanese families were put into the camps, families were kept together.  Now we don’t even do that.  We separate children from their parents and evidently don’t even keep a record of where the children are.