Japanese Internment: we need fewer monuments and more memory
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.
