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Showing posts from April, 2011

Former Malibu resident remembers forced WWII internment

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A memorial marker denoting the relocation of 1,000 local residents, including former Malibu resident Amy Ioki, to the Manzanar camp during World War II, will be placed at an intersection in Venice. Amy Ioki was a member of the only Japanese American family in Malibu-and just 16 years old-when the call  came to assemble at the corner of Lincoln and Venice boulevards in Venice, Calif.  It was April 1942, four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the United States entered the World War II stage as one of the Allied Big Three. Ioki's family, the Takahashis, was ordered to board the bus en route to the Manzanar War Relocation Authority Camp. It didn't matter that the high school junior, her two older brothers and three sisters were U.S. born; their crime was simply being Japanese. “It was really like a concentration camp until they found out we were really harmless,” Ioki said. Ioki, now 85, is one of the few surviving Southern California Jap

They Call Me Moses Masaoka

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Mike Masaru Masaoka  (October 15, 1915–June 26, 1991) was born in  Fresno, California . The family moved to  Salt Lake City  where Masaoka legally changed his first name to "Mike," and became a member of  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . He became a champion  debater  and graduated in 1937 from the  University of Utah  in economics and political science. At the age of 25, Masaoka was named National Secretary and Field Executive of the  Japanese American Citizens League  (JACL) just before the outbreak of World War II. Masaoka was a key player in JACL's decision to cooperate with the  Japanese American internment  during the war, seeing that resistance would be counterproductive and increase the tension between the  Nikkei  and the  FDR Administration . In his position as a national spokesman he urged cooperation and opposed legal challenges to the government, advised the government on how to run the camps (thus to reduce friction between th

Japanese American Youth Answer World War II’s Allegiance Question

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By Christine McFadden, Correspondent First published April 15, 2011 What would you do if you were forced to declare your allegiance to a country that betrays your constitutional rights? When faced with the government’s loyalty questionnaire while incarcerated in Jerome, Arkansas during World War II, Roy Nakano’s parents took a bold stand. Asked about their willingness to serve the United States and swear “unqualified allegiance” to America in question No. 28 of the infamous loyalty questionnaire, Nakano’s parents both answered that they were “undecided.” Both U.S. citizens born in Hawaii, they cited the “existing racial discrimination and prejudice” of the “unconstitutional compulsory evacuation,” as their reason, stating: “As long as I have citizenship, I wish to remain neutral.”  As a result, Nakano’s parents and their family were transferred to Tule Lake. Once there, they took their protest a step further and both renounced their U.S. citizenship.  “I would not have had

Harry Ueno: Hero to Japanese Americans in Internment Camps

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Harry Ueno stood up to corrupt officials during the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar during World War II.      Mr. Ueno, born in Hawaii, took a job on a merchant ship as a teenager and abandoned it when it docked on the American mainland. He settled in Los Angeles, where he married and reared three sons while selling produce. That life was interrupted in 1941 after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mr. Ueno and his family were taken to the Manzanar internment camp, at the base of Mount Whitney, which eventually housed 10,000 men, women and children. While working in the mess hall, Mr. Ueno realized that camp operators were selling sugar, which was intended for his fellow internees, on the wartime black market. He confronted them and was arrested for beating up JACL leader Fred Tayama.  An uprising ensued for Harry's release but then turned ugly as groups of men went looking for those who they thought were spies and began beatings across the camp. But at the police sta