In December 1941, my great-great grandfather, Sawaichi Fujita, a 58-year-old tinsmith who had lived in Hawaii for 36 years, was torn away from his family, marking the first of his 1,432 days incarcerated by the U.S. government. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of him and thousands of others based on their ancestry. When he finally returned home after World War II, my grandfather said he was never the same.
Soon after he was wrongfully jailed, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal of all people deemed a threat to national security. As a result, men, women and children of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States forcibly incarcerated more than 125,000 people of Japanese descent. In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians determined that their incarceration was caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
