Standing for our democracy in San Bruno

A Bay Area summer can be a chilly thing, windy with fog that could pass for drizzle. In this unpromising environment, faithful San Mateo county residents took their stand today, and do the same every Sunday afternoon, on El Camino Real at Tanforan shopping center. They set up adjacent to a bank of Tesla charging stations.

  

Organized by local Indivisible, they want passersby on the wide street to remember that something foul is happening in Washington.

 

They are not meekly pulling any punches.

The response from passing cars is friendly in this bedroom suburb.

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The Tanforan shopping center area was for years a horse racetrack and also a venue for early aviation. But during World War II, it became the site of one of those episodes in our history we hope not to repeat.

... Tanforan’s history is tainted by its use as an assembly center for Japanese Americans during World War II. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which incarcerated over 125,000 Japanese Americans in the United States. From April 23 to October 13th, 1942, the Tanforan Racetrack was used as a temporary detention center for Japanese Americans and had a peak population of 7,816. 

The San Bruno Public Library has compiled multiple interviews with people who lived in the assembly center... One of the interviewees was Frank Ogawa, a resident of Oakland when Executive Order 9066 was issued. “All we knew about Tanforan was that it was a racetrack,” he said. 

Ogawa continued, “We only had about 3-4 days’ notice to pack and sell everything to be ready to depart to Tanforan.” 

Japanese Americans living at Tanforan were forced to live in the horse stalls as they didn’t have any other form of shelter for them. “In this small horse stall were just 2 cots and a big canvas sack was on the bed, I didn’t know what that was for,” Ogawa said. “Later we found out that was gonna be our mattress.” The people living in the Tanforan Assembly Center had to fill their canvas with hay to have a mattress while living there. For many Japanese Americans, this was their first time at Tanforan and their only experience there.

Seems like a good place for today's residents to announce "never again!"