Monument Dedicated at WWII Relocation Camp

POSTON, Ariz. — More than 1,400 people gathered on an Indian reservation in the desert Tuesday to dedicate a monument where the government built the largest of 10 camps used to intern 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The three-story-high, concrete obelisk was built on the former site of the Poston War Relocation Center, where nearly 20,000 Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children lived behind barbed wire from 1942 to 1945. Included were 1,851 Japanese-Americans from Orange County, most of them farmers.

“Fifty years ago, the failed leadership of our country condemned guiltless people into concentration camps,” said George Ikeda, 70, a former internee from Emmaus, Pa., who spoke at the ceremony.

The commemoration came 50 years after President Roosevelt signed an order Feb. 19, 1942, paving the way for the forcible evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast on the grounds that they were a threat to national security. It wasn’t until 1983 that a government commission determined that not a single documented act of espionage or sabotage was committed by a Japanese-American on the West Coast.

The ceremony came less than two weeks after President Bush signed legislation authorizing an additional $400 million to complete reparations payments to those interned and relocated during the war. Each person who spent time in the camps is due $20,000 from the government under a law passed in 1988.

Part of the 1 1/2-hour ceremony paid tribute to the men from Poston who served in the Army during the war. Among them was Bruce Nagasaki, 68, of San Diego, who went into the camp at age 17 and was inducted in 1944.

Nagasaki was asked why he joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in Europe and became the most decorated unit of the war.

“You figured maybe the next generation would be luckier,” he said. “Maybe they’d get more breaks than we did and be able to blend in better.”