Alice Tanaka Hikido clearly remembers the
bewilderment and sense of violation she felt 74 years ago when FBI
agents rifled through her family's Juneau home, then arrested her father
before he was sent to Japanese internment camps, including a
little-known camp in pre-statehood Alaska.
The 83-year-old
Campbell, California, woman recently attended a ceremony where
participants unveiled a study of the short-lived internment camp at what
is now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
Archaeologists
working on the research used old records to pinpoint the camp location
in an area now partially covered by a parking lot. The Army study is
expected to be finalized later this year.
"As I look back, I
had no idea as a child that the U.S. and Japan were having
difficulties," Hikido said. "It was a tremendous surprise to me."
Hikido
herself was interned at Idaho's Minidoka camp with her mother, younger
sister and two brothers a few months after her father's arrest during
one of the nation's darkest chapters — the forced incarceration of tens
of thousands people of Japanese ancestry, including Americans, during
World War II.
Her father eventually joined his family in
Idaho in 1944. They spent more than a year there together before the war
ended and they returned to Juneau.
Her father, Shonosuke
Tanaka, was among 15 Japanese nationals and two German nationals who
were rounded up in the Territory of Alaska almost immediately after the
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
That number would grow to
104 foreign nationals, mostly Japanese, who were arrested in Alaska as
alien enemies. An estimated 145 others, including some Alaska Natives
who took Japanese names in marriage, also would be sent to internment
camps outside the territory under Executive Order 9066, which launched
the exile of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans.
http://www.adn.com/article/20160226/site-little-known-wwii-internment-camp-near-anchorage-found-base
"... It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings."....I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"
Saturday, February 27, 2016
THE LITTLE KNOWN ALASKA INTERNMENT CAMP DURING WW2 AFTER THE IMPERIAL JAPAN ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR 104 JAPANESE AND GERMAN NATIONALS INTERNED IN ANCHORAGE WHERE TO FOLLOW EVENTUALLY 120,000 JAPANESE AMERICANS INTERNED IN THE WESTERN STATES UNDER THE POTUS FDR EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment