California to apologize for internment of Japanese Americans

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Les Ouchida was born an American just outside California’s capital city, but his citizenship mattered little after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war. Based solely on their Japanese ancestry, the 5-year-old and his family were taken from their home in 1942 and imprisoned far away in Arkansas.

They were among 120,000 Japanese Americans held at 10 internment camps during World War II, their only fault being “we had the wrong last names and wrong faces,” said Ouchida, now 82 and living a short drive from where he grew up and was taken as a boy due to fear that Japanese Americans would side with Japan in the war.

On Thursday, California’s Legislature is expected to approve a resolution offering an apology to Ouchida and other internment victims for the state’s role in aiding the U.S. government’s policy and condemning actions that helped fan anti-Japanese discrimination.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order No. 9066 establishing the camps was signed on Feb. 19, 1942, and 2/19 now is marked by Japanese Americans as a Day of Remembrance.

Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi was born in Japan and is one the roughly 430,000 people of Japanese descent living in California, the largest population of any state. The Democrat who represents Manhattan Beach and other beach communities near Los Angeles introduced the resolution. “We like to talk a lot about how we lead the nation by example,” he said. “Unfortunately, in this case, California led the racist anti-Japanese American movement.”

A congressional commission in 1983 concluded that the detentions were a result of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Five years later, the U.S. government formally apologized and paid $20,000 in reparations to each victim.