By Mark O’Brien
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America

LOS ANGELES, California — The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Wednesday to right a 70-year-old wrong.

Japanese Americans line up outside a mess hall at an internment camp in California in 1943. (Photo Courtesy of CNN)

The supervisors unanimously repealed a 1942 resolution that supported the internment of Japanese Americans at the start of World War II.

“We were imprisoned behind barbed wire fences when there were no charges, no trial,” former “Star Trek” actor George Takei told the Los Angeles Daily News.  He gave a moving presentation to the board supporting the repeal about his time in the camps when he was only five years old.

“It still stank of horse manure,” he said of the stables at Santa Anita Park, a thoroughbred racetrack, where he, his parents, and two siblings were housed.  “My mother said it was her most humiliating and degrading experience up to that point, but more were to follow.”

Takei’s family was among the 17,000 who lived at the camp for several months before they were shipped to internment camps in northern California and southeast Arkansas.

“Our only crime was looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said.

The board passed the resolution shortly after Japan’s surprise military attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  The bombing directly led to the American entry into World War II.  At the time, the board hoped its resolution would urge President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move forward with the internment camps because the board felt it was difficult “if not impossible to distinguish between loyal and disloyal Japanese aliens.

Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, placing roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans in camps for up to three years.  Nearly a third of them were in Los Angeles County.  Thousands of people with German or Italian ancestry were also placed in the camps.

“The internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry was, no doubt, a low point in American history,” said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who introduced the motion to rescind the old resolution.  “To ignore this and leave it as unfinished business is essentially to trivialize it, and we choose not to trivialize this travesty.”

Over the weekend, many Japanese Americans, who once were housed at Santa Anita Park, gathered there to reflect on the struggles and foster inspiration and healing.

“Every family that was put in the camps has a wide range of emotions,” event organizer Wendy Fujihara Anderson.  “My parents never talked about the camps.”

President Gerald Ford proclaimed in 1976 that Roosevelt’s executive order officially ended when the war did.  President George H. W. Bush issued an official apology in 1989.

Many who supported the board’s repeal said it was a long time coming, and a significant one at that.

“We (now) can face the future having extracted important lessons from our democracy,” Takei said.

 

For further information, please see:

CNN — L.A. County Board Repeals Support of WWII Japanese Internment — 6 June 2012

Contra Costa Times — Supervisors Repeal 1942 Act Supporting Japanese-American Internment — 6 June 2012

Los Angeles Times — County Supervisors Rescind 1942 Japanese American Internment Vote — 6 June 2012

Los Angeles Daily News — L.A. County Supervisors to Repeal 1942 Resolution Supporting Internment of Japanese Americans — 4 June 2012

San Gabriel Valley Tribune — Japanese Internment Recalled in Santa Anita; Heroes of Era Honored — 4 June 2012

ArcadiaPatch — Japanese-American Internment Camp Victims Remembered, Honored — 3 June 2012

Author: Impunity Watch Archive