On February 20th, 2005, the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC) will presents the 2005 Day of Remembrance, “Democracy and Dissent,” at the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin at 5:30pm Details The program will include: speakers, cultural performances, a candlelight procession, and a reception.

In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded up thousands of Japanese immigrants who were detained without charges. Then, on February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps. The Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Incarceration of Civilians concluded that the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans were a result of “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

The 2005 Day of Remembrance will be the 25th annual program to commemorate E.O. 9066. In the past year a best-selling book argued that the government was right to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps and defended the arrests and detentions of Arab Americans and American Muslims since September 11, 2001. The Nihonmachi Outreach Committee believes that Japanese Americans, as recipients of redress, must continue to seek the just treatment of all Americans. Flyer