February 19, 2017: On this date 75 years ago President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal and evacuation and eventual internment in concentration camps of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast – My family spent three months initially at the Merced County Fair grounds in animal stalls, then from August of ’42 through the end of October of ’45 in the Amache concentration camp in Southeastern Colorado because we happened to look like the enemy….Two thirds of all prisoners were American citizens by birth, my mother being one of them – My father was an immigrant alien from Hiroshima and was considered an enemy alien and wasn’t able to become naturalized as an American because of anti-Japanese laws – in early November of ’45 we returned home to our family farm which had been purchased from us for $1.00 by three friends who held it in our name throughout the war, then sold it back to us for $1.00 at war’s end when we arrived home….In 1952 congress passed the Walter-McCarren Act repealing anti-Japanese legislation that prevented Japanese from becoming citizens and my father became the first Japanese immigrant in Merced County to become a naturalized American citizen….Executive Order 9066 was the beginning of one of the darkest moments in American history and a time of national shame, not to be remedied til the early 1980s when the Redress Movement obtained an official governmental apology for this unconstitutional action….It is well that we remember our history because the winds of racism are now blowing with fierce rage and the sentiments that permitted this to happen in 1942 are a real possibility once again…