The Mass Incarceration Of Japanese Americans In WW2 | Silent Sacrifice Part 2 | Timeline

My name's Dan Snow and I want to tell you about History Hit TV. It's like the Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians. We've got an exclusive offer available to fans of Timeline. If you go to History Hit TV you can either follow the information below this video or just google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline you get go and check it out. In the meantime, enjoy this video. In part one of Silent Sacrifice, discrimination against Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in the 1920s and 30s leads to war hysteria after the attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II. There were about three men in the car and they got out and started to curse at us and called us all kinds of names. The United States government and military devise a plan to round up nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the west coast. Most U.S. citizens and incarcerate them into temporary camps while the permanent war relocation centers are built in the interior of the country. In central California's San Joaquin Valley, these temporary assembly centers are about to be filled with people that have done nothing wrong except have Japanese blood in their veins. Enough wrong for a fearful population and government to commit the single largest violation of civil liberties in the history of the United States. This is part two of Silent Sacrifice. Funding for Silent Sacrifice was made possible by grants from Japanese American Confinement Sites Program of the National Park Service and California Civil Liberties Public Education Program. Major production funding provided by the Larry and Alice Kitahara Foundation, Nisei Farmers League, and Sunmade Growers. Sunmade, snack as nature intended. As well as through the generous support of these individual and business donors. Thank you. Now the actual migration got underway. The army provided fleets of vans to transport household belongings and buses to move the people to assembly centers. The evacuees cooperated wholeheartedly. The many loyal among them felt that this was a sacrifice they could make in behalf of America's war effort. The government called the Japanese Americans consent to the assembly centers evacuees even though they were forcibly removed from their homes and made prisoners. Most of the 4,700 people that came to Pinedale were from Washington, Oregon, or like Kiyosato from Sacramento, California. On the day of evacuation, my father would take our blankets and spread it out in the living room floor. And then he started hiding things. And I watched and was a little bit fearful because searches were so stringent. But my father had carefully selected all the things that he thought he had to take. And all the 30 years or more that I've been talking to students, none of them ever guessed what they were. Hammer, nails, roll of wire, a gallon jug, a bucket. My goodness, I mean who would think of taking a bucket? And every single thing that my father hid was so necessary. Everybody borrowed it. He shared his nails. You know, just think you're in an empty barracks room. Nothing is there. No place to hang things. Just you have a cot to sleep on. You know? And then you give them a nail and a hammer and you hang your clothes. You hang your wet towels. You have a place to do things like that. Little things like that bring so much, what is it, hope? You know? In total, 13 of the 17 assembly centers built in the West were in California. Like Fresno and Tulare, the Merced County Fairgrounds was selected as the site for the Merced Assembly Center. 4,669 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated here between May and September of 1942. Over 200 tar paper barracks were built to house families along with 11 mess halls, 40 shower areas, and 30 buildings for toilets. 160 soldiers guarded the prisoners whose only crime was having Japanese DNA in their veins. But that didn't change the spirit of wrongfully incarcerated here. For detainees like Sherman Kishi, loyalty to America wasn't diminished in spite of wrongful imprisonment. I was 16 years old in 1942, but on the day that we came into the assembly center, it was my 17th birthday, May the 13th, 1942. There were blocks that were established, and we were in Block A, and I had a friend that was the manager of Block A, the so-called manager of Block A, and he accepted me as his runner at that age, and so I took a lot of censuses and things within the camp itself during that period of time, but that didn't take that much time. The rest of the time, we just didn't do a heck of a lot. We had friends here that we were with together with, and so we just spent time just fooling around basically, although we did play baseball. There was baseball that happened right here where this grandstand is. It was a wooden grandstand at that time, and they formed a baseball field right out front of it. Well, I'm not that familiar with Merced Relocation Center. My father didn't like to talk about that very much. His impression was, yeah, we stayed in stables, and it was really bad. It was cold. We didn't have food. Food was bad. They weren't able to bring anything that they needed because they were allowed just two bags. It was pretty tough. I mean, he wasn't happy there. By the summer of 1942, the assembly centers on the west coast were full. The majority of the Japanese-American population in these camps settled in for the long haul and made the best of a bad situation. Beyond the barbed wire, most of America was still in favor of locking up those of Japanese ancestry. World War II and the battle in the Pacific were raging as the United States pushed closer to Japan. But not everyone was in favor of what was happening to Japanese-Americans in the summer of 1942. Mine Matsumoto grew up in Clovis, California, and her family was loved and respected in this small town with strong western roots and a cowboy way of life. Mine was a senior at Clovis High School when Executive Order 9066 was signed, and the subsequent curfew placed on all people of Japanese descent meant that Mine, a girl that had grown up in the Clovis school system, couldn't be a part of an important ceremony no teenager should miss. We didn't go to the graduation ceremony. We had our own graduation in the principal's office. Well, you know, the Japanese people have this saying, that means, you can't help it. That's how we were raised. I'm sure I was very hurt because I was making my dress for the graduation. We didn't graduate in caps and gowns. But as I say, you know, it just couldn't be helped. Not long after the quiet graduation in the principal's office, it was time for Japanese-American families of Clovis to leave for the war relocation center at Poston, Arizona. Unlike the Japanese in Fresno or Merced, people of Japanese ancestry in Clovis didn't report to an assembly center. They boarded a train headed straight for the desert prison that would now be their home. But unlike the sentiment found in most of the United States towards Japanese-Americans, the people of Clovis made it known how they felt about the injustice of internment. The church ladies from the Methodist church and the Baptist church had punch and cookies for us. And there were two girls, they were like sophomores, Betty Pendergrass and Cassie Wheeler. And they were there saying goodbye to all their friends. And both of them were just, we weren't crying, we might have been crying, but they were just crying and saying goodbye to all the friends. And I know that there were other people there saying goodbye to us. They gave us all a letter from the community. It just said how sorry they were that we were leaving and that they'll wait for us to come back. But I remember my dad telling us, don't ever expect to come back to California. Pinedale was so totally, totally different. I remember, I still remember so clearly walking through that gate. And there were guard towers, guard towers with two guards and a machine gun at each guard tower. And as we went through there, you know, I was holding, all crowds of people had gotten off the bus. And we were all going through there. And I look up, try to glance up to see what they were doing up there. And I thought, there they were, guarding these dangerous criminals down below. In Tulare, California, 45 miles south of Fresno, the assembly center here housed 4,800 Japanese Americans and immigrants from Southern California and the nearby California coast. In September of 1942, the population of the Tulare Assembly Center was sent to the war relocation camp in Gila River, Arizona, a hot, sprawling place in the desert south of Phoenix. For a short time after, the Tulare fairground site was used as a military training area, then converted into a Nazi prisoner of war camp until 1946. Between December 11, 1944 and January 24, 1946, 245 Nazi prisoners were kept here and worked agricultural jobs on nearby farms. As summer came to an end in California's San Joaquin Valley in 1942, the War Relocation Authority was completing construction of the 10 permanent relocation centers in the United States. The government used terms like evacuation and relocation to publicly describe what was happening to these Americans. Just as families were settling in and learning to deal with life inside the assembly centers, they had to face yet another severe blow. With construction complete on the permanent sites by the WRA, internees were abruptly gathered up, put onto trains, and sent to one of 10 relocation centers across the country. Prolonging the misery of wrongful imprisonment and the uncertainty of what would be left of their lives when and if this would ever end. I always remember the story that my mother shared with me that she was sitting next to her mother and my grandmother on the train that had blinders on both sides so she pulled the blinder up a little bit so she could take a peek out of the bottom of the train window and she could see these signs from the local races and bigots saying, you know, get out of California, never come back to Fresno. And so my mother asked her mom, you know, mom what's going to happen to us? You know, they had to take a four day train ride to Jerome, Arkansas and on the way she was very scared. She didn't know what was going to happen. She was, are we going to have to go through what the Jewish people have to go through in Germany? And she goes no. She goes this is the greatest country in the world. All immigrants have to pay a price. This is the price that we have to pay as Japanese Americans. So we'll go to these camps, we'll prove how loyal we are, and we'll come back home. I remember this train ride to Jerome and I remember we had to pull down the shades whenever we entered a town area where people lived. I know we couldn't peek out. No, we couldn't. But I saw, I saw Calexico. And then when you had to make a pit stop, they'd stop and out in the middle of no place and we'd find a bush somewhere and go from the camp, going, traveling from Assembly Center to Jerome. Didn't they have the bathroom they call a latrine? I don't remember a bathroom. In the, in the train? Maybe they did. I don't remember it. Oh, with the children must have been hard. I don't remember a bathroom. I couldn't have held it for two days. Oh no, they'd stop on the middle of no place. By December of 1942, the War Relocation Authority had done its job, removed nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans out of the west coast and imprisoned them into 10 camps in California, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. For the United States of America, fear had become stronger than justice. The wrongful incarceration of thousands of legal U.S. citizens had become the largest violation of civil liberties in our nation's history. Ghostly remains of buildings are all that's left to prove that this really happened in our history, but there is one relocation camp that was preserved to honor the memory of all who suffered. Well, I think one of the things that's important about remembering what happened during World War II to Japanese Americans is that two-thirds of the 120,000 people that were confined during World War II were American citizens. And for me, at the end of the day, Manzanar is really about the fragility of our constitutional rights. If it could happen to Japanese Americans in 1942, it could happen to any of us. So one of the things that makes Manzanar special is that it was the first site that was included in the National Park System. So as a National Historic Site, it represents the experiences of incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. But one of the things that was important when the site was created in 1992 was that there really was no development here. There were remnant foundations for the barracks. There were concrete slabs where buildings had existed. And the building behind us, the auditorium, was still intact, as were two rock sentry posts at the historic entrance and the cemetery monument at the west end of the camp. One of the things that stakeholders told us was that they really wanted us to create some buildings so that there could be a sense of what the living conditions were like. So we'll be seeing some of the reconstructed barracks. Those barracks are constructed on the same location that the original barracks were constructed on. In December, we finished the construction of a women's latrine building on the concrete pad that it originally existed on. That building really provides for a very provocative experience for visitors because when you see that building, it shows the humiliation that people endured and the lack of privacy that many people were uncomfortable with, rightly so. In 1943, life within the camps had become established and in the true spirit of Gaman, prisoners had adapted to make the best of it. Various sports were a major coping mechanism for internees, but camp baseball leagues held a deeper connection to Japanese Americans forced behind barbed wire. But playing America's pastime wasn't enough to prove one's loyalty to the United States in a Japanese internment camp in 1943. The War Relocation Authority created a bureaucratic way of testing the loyalty of all adults and teens in the WRA camps. The first test of loyalty form was aimed at all draft-aged Nisei males. The last two questions, number 27 and 28, where a yes answer proved unwavering loyalty to the United States, created a firestorm of confusion and resentment. That confusion led to some detainees answering no to both questions and created a term that would dramatically impact those who it was used to describe, the no-no boys. The no-no boys came from their answering of question number 27, which is are you willing to serve in the military? And 28 is a question as to whether you forswear allegiance to Japan and reaffirm your allegiance to this country. And a lot of people didn't know how to answer that question. Like my father, he was born here in American citizenship. He had no allegiance to Japan to forswear. And then he is loyal to this country, but how do you answer it if you never had a loyalty to Japan to start with? And so he puts, I don't know. And then he scratches it out and puts yes on there, but the damage had already been done. No-no boys were denied early clearance from the camps in 1943 as the WRA began to allow internees who passed the loyalty questionnaire to leave the relocation centers early, as long as they didn't go back to the West Coast. In some cases, no-no boys were separated from their families and sent to the relocation camp at Tule Lake, California, a place where the government detained Japanese Americans they feared could be troublesome. After denying his early leave clearance request on the no-no basis, Robert's father, Masato Shintaku, was sent a new form to fill out again. And they wanted him to reaffirm his loyalty to this country. And he refused. He refused on the grounds that he's an American citizen and only people of Japanese ancestry were required to answer this question. And what he told them was, if every American over the age of 18 was required to answer this question, he'd gladly answer it. But they were being prejudicial in the way that they did this. Therefore, he didn't feel that he should have to answer it if every other American didn't have to answer it. Prior to the war, Masato was a successful businessman with a thriving grocery store in Salinas, California. He and his family were proud to be Americans. After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in, what, February 1942, then he decided he needed to close the store. And so they closed the store. And anyway, when he was in camp, then he lost everything. Stories of loss for the nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans during relocation were many. Homes and farms were no longer there when they returned from camp. Racism was still rampant for Japanese families returning to their communities. But the loss of a child sent to war is always the most difficult to overcome. And at a time where Japanese Americans wrongfully incarcerated had every reason to resist their country and their government, one of the greatest stories of World War II was born. Early in 1943, as the war raged in the Pacific and in Europe, the need for more men to join the fight was real. Despite martial law in Hawaii and mainland Japanese American men being sent to internment camps, their desire to fight for their country never waned, and many answered the call when they had every reason not to. On February 1, 1943, the U.S. government reversed its decision banning Japanese Americans from serving in the armed forces, and the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team was created, made up almost entirely of Japanese American men from Hawaii and the West Coast. Important and decisive battles. And each time these men of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Combat Team have been right out in front. At the same time, these men are also aware of the great prejudice against them because of the war in the Pacific. They know that there are people back home who make no distinction between them and the Japs we have fought at Tarawa, Saipan, and the Philippines. And that's why these men originally volunteered, and why for 11 long months now, they've been in continuous combat. They've wanted to prove to other Americans how wrong it is to judge a man by the pigment of his skin or the shape of his eyes. The 442nd became a legendary fighting force in Europe, and in the ultimate definition of irony, an artillery battalion of the 442 liberated Jewish prisoners in a Nazi death camp as their own families were being held in camps back home by the government they were fighting for. After World War II had come to an end, the 442nd Infantry Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. 75 years after Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Roosevelt, Saburo and his wife Marion are on a journey to break the silence that has shrouded this chapter in American history. Marion and Saburo met and were married after the war had ended, but like many Nisei, shared a painful past. I remember the music. There was a radio program called the Hit Parade, and they always used to play the top 10 hits of the week, and week after week the same song would be popular, and I believe one of the songs that hit the Hit Parade was Don't Fence Me In. Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above. I was gazing out the window when this song was playing, and this song came on the Hit Parade, and I'm looking out the window, and I'm in prison, and I said boy what I would give to be out of here. I'll work so hard just to be free. The silence many Japanese Americans held for decades after the war wasn't always about the relocation itself. There were dark days and nights inside the barbed wire of the camps, and too many times the crimes of men went unreported and left generations of suffering. There were girls being raped, and there was girls getting pregnant, but you'll never hear stories, these stories, because of the shame involved in our culture. We don't bring shame upon our family and our community, so this was kept under hush-hush, and nobody spoke about it. I tell my story of being molested, not raped, but molested by an East Sea man. I was just 10 years old and sleeping. My sister and I were invited to spend a night with a friend, her friend, my friend, and these beds were all side by side, and this man, he just leaned over his wife and just, you know, did what he did, and just traumatized me, and you know, I couldn't scream, I couldn't, I was just, nothing would come out of my mouth. I was so traumatized. I saw his face before me for many, many years. Matter of fact, it was at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage that all of a sudden I didn't see his face anymore, and that was, I attribute that to my being able to share my pain. I was able to tell people what happened to me, and so it was not festering within my body anymore. It was out there, so now that it was out there, it didn't, I didn't see his face anymore, and that was a miracle. The indignities of life in the prison camps sometimes continued even in death. The sheer lack of human compassion from those running the war relocation centers at times was staggering. My grandmother passes away, and they knew that even at the Little Rock Hospital she was going to make it, so they sent her back to Jerome to be with her family, and she passed away in the camp at Jerome, Arkansas, and it was, we have a photo of her coffin, and all the internees. Well, in our culture, in the Buddhist culture, with most Japanese Americans, we cremate, you know, our loved ones, and so they didn't have a cemetery in Little Rock, Arkansas, so they sent her body to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and about two months later in a Folgers coffee can comes this, to her barrack, comes her mother's ashes, and so my mom lifted up the lid of the Folgers coffee can, and on top of her mother's ashes was a piece of paper, so she thought it was her name, and so she opened up the paper, and all there was on the paper was the words Jap woman, and it really crushed my mom to see her mother being reduced to this label, and but at the same time what came flooding back to my mom was this wonderful speech from my grandmother when they were going to Arkansas that this is the greatest country in the world, all immigrants have to pay a price, we'll prove how loyal we are and come back, and her mother, the inhumanities of her death didn't even stop there. I mean, they had to labor her with this racist label of just being a Jap woman. On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allied forces, and the war in Europe ended, but Japan remained defiant to surrender, even after the United States promised prompt and utter destruction if they did not agree to the terms of the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945. Japan ignored the ultimatum. Eleven days later, America made good on its word. At 8.15 in the morning, the United States Air Force B-29 bomber Enola Gay released a bomb codenamed the Little Boy, containing 141 pounds of uranium. It took 44 seconds for Little Boy to fall from the release altitude of 31,000 feet to its detonation point 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, Japan. I think from a general standpoint, a lot of Japanese Americans and Nikkei here in this valley are very skeptical and in wonderment of why Hiroshima was chosen for the bomb site, knowing that so many Japanese Americans from this valley, roots are from Hiroshima, not just California, but Oregon and Washington as well. So that's one aspect that, you know, I always wondered why the military, why our government chose, you know, Hiroshima. So I really feel that the Nisei must have been at the crossroads of emotions to have to deal with having to see Hiroshima absolutely incinerated, knowing that their friends, their family members, cousins, were still part of that devastation of the atomic bomb blast. Three days later, after Japan again refused surrender, the U.S. B-29 bomber Boxcar released a plutonium bomb codenamed Fat Man over the skies of Nagasaki, Japan. The bomb detonated 1,600 feet above the city, creating a two-mile-wide, 4,000-degree fireball with 600-mile-per-hour winds vaporizing the city center. The bombings killed 130,000 people, most civilians. They remain the only use of nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. After World War II ended and the camps began to close, life for Japanese Americans returning home wasn't easy. See, my dad never did recover financially. We went to Texas with nothing. We moved from San Benito to Uvalde, Texas. I remember like in April of 56, the total income we had, because I remember hearing my parents talk, the total income we made in April of 56 was $10. There were a family of eight then, eight of us. I don't know how they made it. There was city councils said that they didn't want Japanese back. Most of the city councils did. That included, I think, Atwater and Livingston and Turlock. We went to a grocery store one time, and my poor father, there was a white guy that came in and just gave him a hard time, you know, cussing him out. He actually came home? Yeah. And I wanted to get some groceries, but my father said, we better go. We better go. So he shuffled us out and we all left. It creates a lot of anger. I was very angry about all this. But the interesting thing about it is, is my father, he really didn't like that type of attitude. He was very animate about me about, well, it didn't happen to you. You have nothing to do. You shouldn't be angry. He says, it happened to my generation. And we got over it and we put it behind us. You can't dwell in the past. These are the kinds of things that set you back. As the years passed, life for the thousands wrongfully imprisoned moved on. The Nisei generation began to have children of their own. The work of groups like the JACL pressed on. In Central California, new organizations were formed, like the Nisei Farmers League, protecting the rights and properties of Japanese American growers. But through all this progress, a silence about what had happened during the war remained. Stories of the incarceration experience were not openly shared within the Japanese community or even within families. And I've never been able to get any information out of my dad. Did you try? I did. I remember. How old were you when you started trying? In my 20s. Why is it hard for you right now? What's hurting you inside right now? Knowing what your dad went through? Yeah, but see, I think I asked him twice. And both times, the only answer I got was a very pained look. So the second time, I realized it's not a question I should be asking. The legal aspects to what happened in 1942 to Japanese Americans were challenged almost immediately by people like Fred Korematsu, who took his argument that incarceration was But it took 46 years for the United States government to finally do the right thing. A U.S. district court in California vacated Korematsu's conviction in 1984. And then, in 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which led to an official apology from the United States to Japanese Americans and immigrants that were imprisoned during World War II. We learned some lessons from history. We do not want them to be repeated. Those lessons resonate today after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and in the current discussions and debate in this nation over immigration, over the war on terrorism, and how to deal with immigrants, it becomes vitally important that we remember those lessons we should learn from the internment of Japanese Americans and apply those principles today. For many Japanese Americans, the Civil Liberties Act lifted the weight of shame that hung on the experiences of their incarceration. That shame, which caused generations of silence about what happened, began to fade away. And with it, the stories of pain, survival, hope, and forgiveness began to emerge. For Saburo and Marion Masada, speaking publicly across the country about their experiences has helped them make peace with the pain, while educating those who have never truly heard this story. But now they are on a journey that has literally taken a lifetime to complete. This is McGee, a small town in southeastern Arkansas, close to the site of the Jerome Relocation Center Saburo was sent to as a boy. It's a typical small farming town in America's heartland, but with a strong connection to the Japanese American experience of World War II. At the train depot in McGee, a museum preserving the history of the Jerome and Roar relocation camps nearby holds a remarkable collection of photographs, documents, artwork, and personal effects of those confined in both camps. Most of the people sent here, like Saburo, were from Fresno and California's Central Valley. This is Block 43, that's where we were. The Hawaiians were in this block, and they came barefooted, they didn't realize that Arkansas was not Hawaii. At the time of internment, 17,000 people of Japanese ancestry were held in the Jerome and Roar camps. The camp at Jerome, where Saburo and his family first came after leaving the Fresno Fairgrounds Assembly Center, was converted into a Nazi POW camp in June of 1944. The nearly 8,000 living here had to pack up their belongings and move once again to either the nearby camp at Roar or back to Arizona to the Gila River Relocation Center south of Phoenix. Collections like this tell the stories of the incarceration in very personal ways, from artwork made during confinement to images that document the struggle and hope to overcome life behind barbed wire. As Saburo and Marion discover, a single photograph is like a time machine, taking us back to moments that never really fade from our minds. Here, a photo hangs on the wall, taken the day after Saburo's father's funeral, who died in the Jerome camp not long after arriving from Fresno. See Marion, this is a picture of my father's funeral. It turned extremely cold when we arrived, and 21 days after we arrived, I think it was snowing too, but he caught pneumonia and he died. And the day he died, the potbelly wood stove showed up in our barrack. My mother and her seven children, right there behind the casket. All those flowers were artificial flowers made by the camp people. This is about 43, where our barrack was. There were seven of us and my mother. A few miles south of town, past sprawling soy and cotton fields, a two-lane to country road leads to the site of the Jerome relocation camp, where Saburo and his family were imprisoned. The drive here begins to unlock memories buried for a lifetime. I do remember it got real cold. I remember the first meal we had, and in fact it's the only meal I remember eating all three years. Breakfast, lunch, supper, the only meal I remember was the first supper we had when we arrived, and it was mutton stew. And I could still see the yellow grease floating on top. And all of us got diarrhea, and so I'll never forget mutton stew. Today, at the site of the Jerome relocation camp, a monument stands in a farmer's field memorializing what happened here long ago. For those who experienced incarceration at Jerome, this is a sacred place to remember the past and pay respect to those, like Saburo's father, that never made it home. Lord, bless this memorial and help people to know that this should never happen to happen again. Bob, sorry, Bob, you're being here, and you died away from home. And we're sorry that we didn't get to celebrate and grieve your life like we would have if we were back in Fresno. But thank you for your sacrifice and all that you did for our family. Amen. In June of 1944, as Jerome was converted into a German POW camp, this rare color film footage captured the closing of the Jerome camp. It also captured images of a tall brick smokestack that vented the boiler in Jerome's hospital building. Today, that smokestack still stands in a field near the memorial, a sobering reminder of what happened here, and a beacon for those searching for a way to heal and move on. I told John Ellington, can they really preserve it? He said, sure, we'll save it. So fortunate that they didn't knock it down. Yeah, isn't that something? This is the last piece of evidence that there was a camp here. Twenty miles north of Jerome, Arkansas, a small cemetery stands at the site of the where Saburo remained until the war was over. In addition to the 23 graves of people that died while imprisoned here between 1943 and 1945, this small grove of trees between cotton fields memorializes the men of the 100th Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Unit. This monument, we like because it tells about our immigrant parents who were here for almost over 50 years until they were finally permitted to become American citizens. But it's their courage and vision that made it possible for us to be here in America and to be able to survive what we had to go through during World War II by their spirit of loyalty and devotion to our country. You know, just standing here, all the pains and struggles and difficulties that we as the children suffered, you know, I was molested in camp by Nisei and it traumatized me so much. And it confused my image of what a man was. And when I married you, you had a hard time at first. And I struggled for eight years trying to work things out for myself. But it's been a long struggle. But still, it was your love and your love that kept me going. And even though sometimes I felt like leaving the marriage sometimes, you know, it's just a feeling that I had. But I always looked at you and always said, but he loves me. And so that's what kept me going. And look at us, we're married 61 years and we're able to make this trip. It's so special. It's so special. And we're just two little country bumpkins. You're from Little Carothers and I'm from Little Salinas. And we're not important people by any, we're not judges or lawyers or doctors or famous people, but we're just, we're just, we identify you and I with the common people. We're survivors. We survived it. And if the young people see that we have survived the hatred and being spit upon and called names and being treated like nobody, we can survive. And this is, this is to encourage and help the future generations that, that if they hang in there and not bring shame on their families, they can make it and come out strong and give tribute to all these lives that have gone before us. Time can be unforgiving. The places where lives were changed remain. But one day, only the ghosts of those who suffered will whisper in the winds here. The stories of those who lived through the incarceration must go on. Honoring what happened, no matter how painful, is the only way to heal and prevent this kind of injustice from happening again. The Japanese American experience of World War II left a scar on generations and in the soul of a nation. History is a journey never completely behind us. It can light the path we walk tomorrow.