COLORADO — February 19 is the anniversary of a day that forever changed the lives of over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans.
“Our country went through a number of racially divisive policies coming out of the administration, perhaps none more so than the policy involving the internment of Japanese Americans,” said Rep. Ken Buck (R).
Removing Japanese Americans from their homes to be sent to these camps left many with lasting memories.
“President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a 3-page executive order 9066 to put 120 thousand Japanese into concentration camps with barbed wire fencing, guard towers, with military men armed with rifles and machine guns and searchlights,” said internment camp survivor, Kenneth Kitajima.
Kitajima, along with seven-thousand of these Japanese Americans, were imprisoned in Southern Colorado at a camp in Granada that was known as Camp Amache. They were there from 1942 to 1945.
One survivor was just a child when she and her family was relocated to Camp Amache.
“I was two on February 1942. I was an enemy alien. Not because of what I did, but because of what I looked like,” said Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker.
This week, the United States Senate passed a bill to include the former Amache Japanese Internment Camp site in the National Park System.
“Today will be the climax. The best day of remembrance because we managed to get Amache passed to become a National Park Historic Site,” Tanigoshi Tinker said.
The idea behind this, is to continue to inform people in the United States of what happened 80 years ago.
“I have found that millions of US citizens, young school children and young adults and some old ones knew little or nothing about the true history of this shameful act,” said Kitajima.
And helping us learn from our mistakes so history doesn’t get a chance to repeat itself.
“While we hope everyone lives forever, we know that won’t happen and what happened at Amache is something that is going to live forever and as a result of that hopefully will never be repeated,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D).
