Congressman Mark Takano, whose family was forced into camps, calls for vigilance amid ‘nefarious nostalgia
"Eighty years ago, as anti-Japanese fervor gripped the US, the parents and grandparents of the California congressman Mark Takano were among 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and sent to desolate camps scattered across the west.
They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Everything else was sold, stored or left behind. Confined by barbed wire fences and armed military guards, their only offense was looking like the enemy.
“ 'They were incarcerated without any due process of law, never accused of a crime, never convicted of a crime but in an internment camp strictly because of their racial characteristics,” Takano told the Guardian.
"Two-thirds of those interned were American citizens, like Takano’s maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother. Many were American-born children, like his parents, far too young to pose a threat to national security, as was the spurious claim.
"What is remembered as one of the darkest chapters in American history was set in motion on 19 February 1942, 74 days after Japan attacked on Pearl Harbor, when Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
"On the 80th anniversary of Roosevelt’s order, an occasion marked by events from Hawaii to Idaho that will include many witnesses, Takano is worried.
“What I fear we’re in now is a moment of forgetting,” he said.". . .
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