SAN DIEGO — Seventy years ago, more than 1,000 Japanese-Americans from Santa Monica and throughout the Westside began reporting to an assembly station at the corner of Venice and Lincoln boulevards to be taken away, prisoners of their own government during the national hysteria of World War II. They abandoned their coastal California houses and took only what they could carry, along with a government-issued tag.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Americans had become the face of the enemy, forced to pay the price for the crimes of their ancestry. They were “tagged” for relocation to one of 10 internment camps, where families languished in prison-like conditions while their adopted homeland went to war.
“There are so many parallels that Americans do not seem to recognize,” said Wendy Maruyama, a second-generation Japanese American and artist. “The aftermath of Pearl Harbor is parallel with the Muslim-Americans’ aftermath of 9/11. The prejudices against Mexican-Americans in the border cities and towns is compounded by Arizona’s anti-immigration measure.
“That history can repeat itself is all too real.”
To those ends, Maruyama created “The Tag Project,” a stark reminder of the sheer number of Japanese-Americans — 120,000 in all — who were forcibly removed from their West Coast homes and imprisoned in camps that sat 60 miles inland, on land that predominantly belonged to Native Americans. Part of a larger work entitled “Executive Order 9066,” named for the order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942 authorizing the military to relocate Japanese-Americans from “potential combat zones,” the installation is drawing rave reviews and shining a powerful new spotlight on a shameful period in U.S. history.
This Sunday, a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony will be held in San Diego to recognize the region’s veterans of the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which were comprised mostly of second generation Japanese-Americans and among the most decorated units in U.S. military history. President Obama awarded the surviving members the Congressional Gold Medal at a White House ceremony last November.
“The Tag Project” seeks to inform and educate generations of Americans about the mass evacuations in our region during World War II. Ten groupings of replica tags, like those issued by the U.S. government, are bundled by the thousands, dangling in groupings 11 feet tall and more than 3 feet wide. Every tag, all 120,000, is stamped with text instructing the recipient “to report ready to travel,” wording that appeared on the original tags, and filled in by hand with the name of an actual internment camp resident. No two are alike.
Maruyama enlisted the help of dozens of volunteers — friends, family, fellow artists — to help sign the individual tags and provide the installation with a “sense of human connection.”
Maruyama’s grandfather left behind a successful wholesale fish market in southern California and moved the family to Crowley, Colo., abandoning a fully furnished home bought just one year before in favor of a dilapidated shack with no running water or electricity for his extended family of 15.
The artist had never even heard of the internment until she was in junior high school, about the same age as her mother when the family fled.
“My reaction was shock, then anger,” Maruyama said this week, adding it makes her sad that so few young Americans learn of her ancestors’ hardships.
Maruyama, who also makes furniture and teaches art at San Diego State, plans to focus on this direction in her work for the next several years. She says she’s only scratching the surface of this aspect of history, and while it can be “bleak and depressing” in nature, there is a need to resolve some creative aspects of the work by making more pieces.
The installation will next travel to Boston, as Maruyama searches for a proper Los Angeles-area venue to stage “The Tag Project.” After initially contacting the Japanese-American National Museum, she reconsidered her approach, wanting to reach out to museums and venues not specific to the Japanese-American experience to reach the audience intended. Always the educator, she wants to raise awareness outside the community.
“I think I was more sensitive when I was living on the East Coast,” Maruyama said. “The awareness of the internment is nearly non-existent. So it is really going to be interesting when this show travels.”
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