California plans to officially apologize, nearly eighty years later, for its role in one of the darkest chapters in American history: the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans in camps during the Second World War. Elected officials from this US Pacific coast state are due to vote on a resolution on Thursday expressing California's official apologies for its responsibility in these "unjust incarcerations" and for failing to "defend the civil rights and freedoms of Japanese Americans during this period ".
"This apology is particularly relevant at a time when Donald Trump is in power," said Al Muratsuchi, the elected Democrat behind this resolution. "I keep hearing the Japanese-American community moping about what's going on at our borders, where children are held in cages and separated from their families." "This strikes a chord with many survivors of the Japanese-American camps," he continues. "They see, in many ways, history repeating itself."
More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent to ten internment camps, mainly located in the western United States, following a decree to this effect by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor. The federal government apologized in 1988 for the forced internment, which lasted until 1945, and awarded compensation to the survivors.
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No, historians have not been denied access to certain archives of the Second World War
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