Enter San Bruno’s Tanforan shopping mall on El Camino Real, and a horse theme may catch your eye.
Drivers pull into Sea Biscuit Avenue before being greeted inside the mall by a “Racetrack Cafe” sign with colorful strands of a horse’s mane, a nod to its past life as a racetrack. Should you approach it from the San Bruno BART station, however, you get a chilling nod to that history: a recreation of the horse stalls that about 8,000 Japanese Americans were forced to live in back in 1942.
Bay Area residents may be familiar with the country’s dark, shameful history of imprisoning more than 120,000 Americans based purely on their Japanese ancestry during World War II — shameful enough for President Ronald Reagan to sign a formal apology and reparations act in 1988. But the local backdrop on which this occurred is little known, even among San Bruno residents. Some Japanese Americans were also briefly detained on Angel Island and at Sharp Park in Pacifica, while others were first forced to register at San Jose State University…