A few weekends ago on Saturday, August 27th afternoon, I attended in San Bruno, California (just south of San Fransisco), the Tanforan Memorial Ribbon Cutting and Statue Unveiling:
“During World War II, the U.S. Army converted what was then the Tanforan Racetrack into one of 17 temporary detention centers at which those of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated while more permanent detention centers in the inland United States were being built. For six months, in 1942, the Tanforan Assembly Center held nearly 8,000 Bay Area Japanese, most of whom were U.S. citizens, without a trial or due process of law.
The Tanforan Memorial is the culmination of a decade of work by the Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial Committee to create a permanent monument to honor those who were imprisoned there and ensure that the injustice they suffered is not forgotten. Construction of the memorial began in early 2022 after years of planning and fundraising. The memorial will feature a replica horse stall in which internees were housed and a statue of the Mochida sisters, two young girls who were captured in a famous photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1942, which will be unveiled at the ribbon-cutting.”
Despite the fact that local elected officials, including the Mayor of San Bruno, Congresswoman Jackie Jackie Speier and California State Senator Josh Becker were in attendance and gave some remarks, there was not much press coverage. I could only find the above NBC local coverage the day after the event.
The Tanforan internment camp was one of the largest temporary camps in the nation, and the largest (and I think only one) in the San Francisco Bay Area. This really should have gotten a lot more local coverage, if not national coverage, in my opinion.
I was in awe to see some Japanese Americans who were interned as children back as adults to attend the ceremony.
You can watch most of the event, here is the video I took:
- Excited
- Fascinated
- Amused
- Disgusted
- Sad
- Angry
