Japanese Internment Memorial Essay

The everyday passerby could easily overlook the Japanese Internment Memorial.

Located at 2^nd and San Carlos, across from Camera 3 and Psycho Donuts, artwork blends in with nearly everything around it, aside from the blue sky on a warm spring day.

Having grandparents who lived in these camps used to just sound like the same old story every time.

It wasn’t until much later when I realized that they were informing me of history that they had lived through on the first account.

The memorial was a lot different than I had expected.

I don’t know what it is I was expecting to see but it wasn’t a giant mural made of bronze.

Right off the bat, I realized there were a lot of interesting details to the wall.

The front side was prewar life while the opposite side portrayed life for Japanese Americans during the war.

On the front side, many different vignettes stood out but one I chose to focus on was after families found out they were being relocated.

There was a little scene on the wall of lines of families waiting to get onto buses.

From everything I’ve heard from my grandparents, it seemed like one of the most accurate scenes in the artwork.

My grandma used to tell me that they were only allowed to take what they could carry; the rest was either sold or left behind.

In the picture you could see families lining up around these buses with stores in the background with signs that said things like, “Sale, One Day Only” or “Must Vacate”.

One of the other vignettes that stood out the most to me was on the opposite side.

The whole scene of families loading onto the trains surrounded by soldiers with guns contained the most detail of the whole memorial.

If you look closely you can see the emotion on a lot of the people’s faces.

Families are crying, saying goodbye to each other; many of them unaware of when they will see each other again.

A man near the front car is smoking a cigarette but something about his older face showed sorrow even though he does not appear to be crying.

The kids around the scene are wearing a look like they are confused.

I’m sure it was hard for the younger kids to fully grasp and understand what was going on.

Families down the entire line of train cars are reaching up through the windows and doors, desperately trying to say goodbye one last time to the people they love.

Lastly, there was a small scene of camp life showing prisoners playing baseball to pass the time.

This has more personal value to me than anything.

When my grandpa was in the camps, baseball was one of the only things he was passionate about; it was one of the only things he could be passionate about because he wasn’t able to live freely.

My grandfather developed a love for baseball that lasts on until this day.

I didn’t realize that baseball or sports in general were such an influence on everyday life in the internment camps.

However, it makes complete sense to want to do something to pass the time.

As I looked at the scene, batter up to the plate, I wonder if the catcher was my grandpa.

I don’t think the United States would make the same mistake again about making something so discriminatory public.

However, I think that things like this are still occurring, just in different ways.

The number of Muslims in prisons has been on the rise since 9/11, and blacks still have the highest prison percentage as well as return rate.

This isn’t solely because these groups of individuals deface the law most often. This is because we fear these individuals like we did the Japanese during the war.

It’s not fair but it’s also not public because in this day and age too many people would stand against it.