I always thought my grandpa’s name was Frank. Recently, I learned Frank was his middle name. His first name is Fusaichi.
My siblings and I never really heard stories about the time our dad was detained at Santa Anita Race Track Assembly Center — a WWII internment camp in Southern California, where thousands of people were housed in horse stalls with inadequate access to food and medical supplies. Or his time at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, today a national historic site described by the National Parks Service as a “remote military-style” camp in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where as many as 10,000 Japanese Americans at a time were detained in overcrowded barracks surrounded by barbed wire.
During our drive to the Japanese Culture Center of Hawaiʻi in Honolulu Thursday to take part in a traveling memorial to the wartime mass detention, my father said he doesn’t remember much about it since it was hanabata time — childhood — or he wanted to forget about it.
Ireichō recently made a four-day stop at the Japanese Culture Center in Honolulu. The book itself is a monument with the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated by the American government during World War II. Ireichō tours throughout the United States, and at each stop, reservations are booked to capacity with survivors and their ʻohana wanting to add a hanko, a stamp…