Meet Living Survivor of Japanese American Concentration Camps, Kenji Ima!

67 Central Avenue,Ossining NY 10562

03 December, 2022

Description

Kenji Ima was born in Seattle, Washington in 1937. When he was four years old, he and his family were sent to a prison camp in Idaho for three years. From his personal story to its wider significance, Kenji continues to reflect on those years and the legacy of the camps. How can lessons from the past help us take better care of all Americans today? Why were Americans of Japanese descent forced into prison camps during WW2? Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted the military to circumvent the constitutional safeguards of American citizens in the name of national defense. The order set into motion the exclusion from certain areas, and the evacuation and mass incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, most of whom were U.S. citizens or legal permanent resident aliens. These Japanese Americans, half of whom were children, were incarcerated for up to 4 years, without due process of law or any factual basis, in bleak, remote camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. They were forced to evacuate their homes and leave their jobs; in some cases family members were separated and put into different camps. President Roosevelt himself called the 10 facilities "concentration camps”. At the time, Executive Order 9066 was justified as a "military necessity" to protect against domestic espionage and sabotage. However, it was later documented that "our government had in its possession proof that not one Japanese American, citizen or not, had engaged in espionage, not one had committed any act of sabotage." (Michi Weglin, 1976). Rather, the causes for this unprecedented action in American history, according to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Interment of Civilians "were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of leadership." More about Japanese Americans during WW2: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/02/17/75th-anniversary-japanese-internment About Minidoka: https://libguides.csi.edu/JapaneseAmericans/Minidoka https://www.nps.gov/miin/index.htm