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Carol Highsmith, Guard Tower at Manzanar War Relocation
Center, 2013
Library of Congress
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On the bitter cold, wind-swept desert floor in 1969 there occurred an event of the profoundest and most singular importance. In retrospect, that morning and the whole of that day assume for me and for vast numbers of Japanese Americans the proportions of a mystical experience, the rebirth of a whole generation of Americans who were wronged by events that took place over a quarter century before.- Edison Tomimaro Uno, 1971, in Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans
In 1972 the California Historical Society opened a landmark photographic exhibition titled Executive Order 9066. At the time, the 1942 government order cited in the exhibition’s title, and the imprisonment of Japanese residents from the West Coast in so-called “internment camps” during World War II, was virtually unknown outside the Japanese community. Within the community, the subject was rarely spoken of—a source of shame and tragedy for the families involved. As the Densho Encyclopedia has observed, with the opening of the exhibition and the publication of its eponymously titled book—part of a resurgence of interest in the topic in the 1970s inside and outside the Japanese American community—the era of silence would end.