The Manzanita School’s eighth-grade class visited the California Museum in Sacramento to see the exhibit, “Uprooted: An American Story,” about Japanese Americans during World War II. Courtesy photo

 

GRIDLEY, CA (MPG) – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A famous quote by George Santayana sums up the message learned from Manzanita School’s eighth-grade class visit to the California Museum in Sacramento to see the exhibit “Uprooted: An American Story” about Japanese Americans during World War II. 

The class had just finished reading historical fiction about World War II, including books “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” “The Cay,” “The Book Thief,” “Farewell to Manzanar” and “Dear Miss Breed.” The books taught the students about the effects of the Holocaust in Europe and the Japanese internment.

Japanese internment happened during World War II when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which forcibly removed people of Japanese descent, many of whom were American citizens, and relocated 120,000 people from the West Coast of the United States into 10 concentration camps across the U.S. 

Families were moved to relocation centers before being forced into the newly-built internment camps. The relocation centers were not houses; they were merely horse stalls at fairgrounds and racetracks that had been modified to be barely habitable.  From the relocation centers, families were moved to one of 10 internment camps, two of which were built in desolate areas of California, Tule Lake, and Manzanar. These were also tar paper or clapboard structures built hastily to house hundreds of families behind barbwire fences.

While visiting the California Museum in Sacramento, the Manzanita School’s eighth-grade was split into two groups, the bears and the poppies, where guides recounted personal stories from Japanese who lived in the camps.

One of the docents, Marielle Tsukamoto, said she was put into a camp when she was five and her mother, Mary Tsukamoto, wrote a book called “We the People.” This book shares the hardships she and other internees endured in the camps. Marielle Tsukamoto spoke about the gun towers placed around the barbwire perimeters of the camps and how they were supposedly there for the safety of the Japanese. She said, however, many questioned if that was true because the guns were pointed into the camps at the Japanese. Marielle Tsukamoto also emphasized the importance of learning about this time to prevent history from repeating itself. 

The students also walked through a model of where the Japanese Americans stayed in the camps and learned about the struggles they had to endure. 

The exhibit also teaches about the valiant Japanese soldiers in World War II, specifically the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442 Infantry Regiment, the most highly-decorated battalion in American history.

The most important lesson that the eighth-graders learned was this history is personal to many families in our Gridley community.

Alice-Marie Boucher is a Manzanita School eighth-grader.