The Japanese Internment Memorial

Growing up in San Jose for over twenty years, I've never heard about the Japanese Internment Memorial in downtown until today.

The memorial was not what I expected it to be.

In my mind, I thought the memorial was going to list the names of families or just commemorate the soldiers who were in the army during the time.

Instead, the memorial illustrated the journey of the Japanese ancestry from their native homeland to the United States.

The memorial was so detailed, depicting the journey, from vignettes highlighting the Japanese immigrants entering the country, seeing the their native clothing literally changing to the American worker uniform of denim overalls, to seeing army men carrying out Executive Order 9066.

One vignette that stood out to me was a paper airplane that flew through the barbed wire.

It could've been any type of an airplane but it was paper.

To me, the paper represented how fragile and delicate how freedom is and how easily it could be taken away.

On this side of the memorial, the barbed wire was less loose compared to that of the barbed wire on the other side.

However, the paper airplane was still in the middle of the wire representing the lost sense of fragile freedom that Japanese Americans felt during the time.

The memorial went above my expectations, exploring much more than just the internment, but the Japanese culture itself.