Bush Signs Japanese Internment Sites Bill
By Margaret Foster | Online Only | Jan. 3, 2007
Last month President Bush signed into law a bill that will establish a new grant program to preserve the 10 camps and other sites where 120,000 Japanese Americans were confined during World War II.
President Bush signed the bill, HR-1492, on Dec. 21 after it had been passed and amended by the Senate in November and passed again by the House of Representatives on Dec. 5.
It designates up to $38 million for the grant program, which the National Park Service will administer. The matching program requires organizations to raise 75 percent of the grant amount.
"A lot of people have called me about it and are very happy that their part in history will be preserved, and they are hoping it will be a good history lesson for today so we don’t repeat that history," says Floyd Mori, interim national director of the Japanese American Citizens League, the San Francisco-based group that was part of the 28-member coalition which pushed for the bill. Mori's former roommate, Congressman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.), introduced the bill in 2005. "It's a chance to really preserve some very important Constitutional lessons for our country."
After President Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1942, thousands of Japanese Americans were relocated to the camps. In 1988, President Reagan signed a formal apology and paid reparations of $20,000 to each of the 60,000 camp veterans.
The two members of Congress who co-sponsored the bill were interred as children in two of the camps. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) was born in 1944 in an Arizona camp, and Mike Honda (R-Calif.) spent his early years at a Colorado camp.
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