June Aochi Berk, now 92 years old, remembers the trepidation and fear she felt 80 years ago on Jan. 2, 1945. On that date, Berk and her family members were released by military order from the U.S. government detention facility in Rohwer, Arkansas, where they had been imprisoned for three years because of their Japanese heritage.
“We didn’t celebrate the end of our incarceration, because we were more concerned about our future. Since we had lost everything, we didn’t know what would become of us,” Berk recalls.
The Aochis were among the nearly 126,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been forcibly removed from their West Coast homes and held in desolate inland locations under Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942.
Roosevelt’s executive order and subsequent military orders excluding them from the West Coast were based on the presumption that people sharing the ethnic background of an enemy would be disloyal to the United States. The government rationalized their mass incarceration as a “military necessity,” without needing to bring charges against them individually.
No formal, comprehensive records
A key element of this tragic and disgraceful chapter of American history is that nobody ever kept track of all the people who had been subjected to the government’s wrongful actions.
To reckon with this injustice, the Irei Project: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration was launched in 2019. This community nonprofit project was originally incubated at the University of Southern California Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, with a goal to create the first-ever comprehensive list of the names of every individual incarcerated in America’s wartime internment and concentration camps.
Taking the project name “irei” from the Japanese phrase “to console the spirits of the dead,” the project was inspired by stone Buddhist monuments that the detainees built while incarcerated in Manzanar, California, and Camp Amache, Colorado, to memorialize those who had died while wrongfully detained.
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