"I heard they used my uniform for the exhibit," said 89-year-old Santa Maria resident Tetsuo Furukawa, referring to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History's new show — Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and WWII — which opened on Friday. It marks the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, ten weeks after the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor. The order emptied the West Coast of its residents of Japanese heritage.
"It was 1945, April 18th," said Furukawa, whose nickname is "Tets." And it is baseball that he's talking about, not the ferocious battles being waged on Pacific and European battlefields that year. Deported to the Gila River Relocation Camp in Arizona from his home in Guadalupe, Furukawa pitched for the camp's high school team. The game that day was against the Tucson High School Badgers, state champions for the past three years with a 52-win, no-loss record. "Their pitcher, Lowell Bailey, had an earned run average of 0.00," he said. "And we happened to beat them, 11-10, in 10 innings." The rematch was cancelled because of the uproar in Tucson over being beaten "by the Japs."
The Smithsonian show tells the story of the people sent to 10 U.S. prison camps — more than 110,000 of Japanese ancestry, about 74,000 of whom were U.S. citizens. Despite this treatment, nearly 18,000 Japanese Americans fought in the 442nd "Purple Heart" battalion, and about 6,000 more served with the Military Intelligence Service as translators, according to Densho, which preserves oral histories from that time. The camps were placed inland from the coasts, where authorities feared foreign agents were at work. Research in calmer times finds no Japanese Americans ever spied for Japan. The parallels to today's proposed "Muslim registry" are clear.
