PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — It's the 80th anniversary of a dark day in American history.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 during World War II, which paved the way for the unlawful imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent, many of them U.S. citizens.
The signing is a piece of American history that 83-year old Hiro Nishikawa doesn't want anyone to forget.
Nishikawa, a longtime Delaware County and now Chester County resident, remembers getting chicken pox as a 4-year old.
But unlike other children his age, he was behind barbed wire. His family, along with 120,000 people of Japanese descent, were treated like enemies during World War II and imprisoned on American soil in internment camps.
"It was in dead of summer in Poston, Arizona Camp 1 where we were incarcerated," recalled Nishikawa. "There was no air conditioning. It was 115-118 degrees outside the barracks and I was miserable."
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A third generation Japanese American, Nishikawa was only three years old when he and his family were imprisoned in the Arizona camp.
"My memory and reflection is that everybody was stunned and baffled. They didn't know what was happening to them. They were only following government orders," he said.
Families had to give up everything, bringing only what they could carry into one of 10 concentration camps. They were released after the war was over, forced to start from scratch.
Nishikawa became a biochemist, raising a family in Haverford, Delaware County.
But he never forgot the civil liberties ripped from his family. Nishikawa later served as president of the Philadelphia Japanese American Citizens League. JACL, the nation's oldest and largest Asian American Pacific Islander civil rights organization, has fought to secure and safeguard the rights of Japanese Americans.
"To say that this is unfair, unlawful, unconstitutional ... we don't want this to happen again," he said.
JACL Philadelphia has launched a virtual exhibition about Japanese Americans resettling in Greater Philadelphia to mark the National Day of Remembrance, in association with the Da Vinci Art Alliance.
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