Construction on a memorial plaza honoring Americans of Japanese ancestry who were wrongly imprisoned during World War II will break ground this Friday, at a site near the Tanforan shopping center where in 1942 nearly 8,000 were forced from their homes and held in a converted horse track.
The plaza will feature a bronze statue depicting two girls who were imprisoned at the site, inspired by a photograph taken at the time. Other installations will represent horse stalls similar to those in which families were forced to live.
“We want to remind everybody that something like this cannot happen again,” Steve Okamoto said, who helped lead the effort to establish the memorial. Okamoto, though just weeks old, was one of those kept at the facility in the early days of the war.
“My mother told me that the thing that she would never forget was the smell of the horse manure and urine,” he said.
While now home to a sprawling indoor mall, prior to 1964 a race track occupied the site adjacent to the train line and now the San Bruno BART station. Between April and October 1942, the track was used as a temporary detention center to hold Japanese Americans until they were transferred to more permanent concentration camps across the country.
Okamoto will be among speakers during Friday’s groundbreaking event. Other planned speakers include U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, San Mateo County Supervisor Dave Pine and San Bruno Mayor Rico Medina.
The memorial, Okamoto hopes, will serve to educate younger generations about the site’s painful history while honoring those who lived through it.
“One of the things about the Japanese and many Asian cultures is the reverence to our ancestors,” Okamoto said. “So if we are able to create a memorial to our parents, our grandparents, so that we will not forget them, it’s very gratifying.”
The Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial Committee, of which Okamoto is vice president, has worked to establish the memorial over the past decade. The committee has raised $1.2 million of the required $1.4 million to complete construction. The San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in 2016 granted the committee $250,000.
In all, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the war. The Tanforan site was one of multiple race tracks hastily converted to “assembly centers” following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The vast majority of those held were never charged with crimes, their detention based solely on their Japanese descent and fear that those who appeared to be Japanese would conspire with or aid the Japanese government. Despite people born in Japan being barred from becoming naturalized citizens at the time, many of those imprisoned, including Okamoto and his parents, were American citizens born in the United States.
Okamoto said his family was allowed to take only what they could carry, forced to make hasty arrangements regarding the family’s business and home. Many were forced to sell their belongings at a loss, and even upon being allowed to return home after the war ended, faced discrimination while trying to rebuild their lives.
The Tanforan committee, which contains other members who were held at the site, previously aided in an installation within the BART station, which features photos of those held at Tanforan taken by Dorothea Lange. The new bronze statue is based also on one of Lange’s photos.
The groundbreaking will be held at the BART station 11 a.m. Friday, Feb. 11.
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