In front of the Federal courthouse on First Street, across from a parking garage that services a small comedy club, just two blocks from San Jose State, and less than a block from the light rail station, there stands a monument.

It is not, by monument standards, particularly monolithic. A long rectangle of bronze, roughly the height of a man and the length of three with their arms outstretched, it’s dull brown surface isn’t eye-catching. It’s covered in relief carvings, but someone can easily walk past it without seeing them, such is the lack of contrast.

In a way that’s somewhat poetic. The monument is meant to commemorate the forced deportation to camps of some 110,000 Americans to camps during WWII because of their ethnicity. It wasn’t until 1988 , some forty years later, that this event was formally acknowledged. Now, although it’s no secret that the Japanese American Internment happened, I remember it being covered in about two paragraphs in my high school history class. Two paragraphs on one of the worst civil rights abuses ever perpetrated by this country, amid countless paragraphs of breathless praise for the war effort, for America’s defense of democracy in the face of tyranny.

How fitting then, that a mostly ignored tragedy should have a mostly ignored monument.

Two years ago, while working on an assignment for class, I had the opportunity to interview two people who experienced the internment first hand. When I met them the Okunos were a pleasant, older couple who thanked me for wanting to listen to their story. More than 50 years earlier, they were children who’d been torn from everything they’d ever known and sent away. He was sent to Tule Lake Detention Facility, she to Heart Mountain. Their voices were calm as they discussed it, but in the corner of Mr. Okuno’s eye, a single tear started to gather.

Neglect was a large part of what they described to me. What the Japanese who were interned experienced was not exactly cruelty. Rather they were ignored — sent off to remote areas so the white people could forget about them, could feel safe again not having to think about a supposed enemy next door to them. In that way it was almost more insidious than direct cruelty would have been. Many of those interned had been born in the United States, had never set foot in Japan. They considered themselves Americans, just like everyone they knew. Yet here was their country telling them in no uncertain terms that they weren’t like everyone else, and everyone else wanted nothing to do with them. So where did that leave them? What did that make them? At least direct malice can give you some kind of identity.

It’s the journalist’s privilege and his curse to pick at old wounds. Then, as now, it’s difficult for me to do. Then, I listened to them describe an event that robbed them of their identities with a mixture of awe and regret. I listened with my hands folded, with my teeth chewing my lip. I bit back the question I wanted to ask, needed to ask for the whole interview.

Finally:

“Do you think this could happen again?”