Day of Remembrance is rarely commemorated outside the Japanese American community, so I want to thank Kevin Fellezs for acknowledging this day and celebrating it as part of this symposium. Honoring February 19 is a reminder of the injustice incurred by the signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Allegedly for national security, the order authorized the US army to forcibly remove Japanese American civilians from the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii during World War II. The policy unjustly separated and imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans, stripping them of their civil rights and cascading in the loss of jobs, businesses, homes, and farms. Racially motivated suspicions of “fifth column” sabotage by Japanese Americans were a fiction, and no one of this demographic was ever charged.
For readers not familiar with them, the following terms used throughout this essay are generational designations of Japanese...
