Speech #920248606

As a matter of fact. in this vicinity today there are more Americans of Japanese ancestry than were evacuated from the entire Pacific Coast 30 years ago. But. this was not always so. In a corner of a cemetery in the east side of Los Angeles in what is now a predominantly Chicano area is a large cluster of stone monuments that mark the final resting place of many IsseiJapanese immigrants who in the flush of youth some 100 years ago looked eastward to a country where they heard that a man could make his fortune if only he were willing to work hard enough. They came with a dream. as did all the immigrants to this "country of immigrants." as President Kennedy characterized this land. Symbolically. there was no Statue of Liberty standing in the port of Seattle or in San Francisco Harbor to welcome the "tired and the poor" from the Orient to these shores. The Japanese immigrants came to a land where earlier arrivals spoke a different tongue. where notions of white supremacy often took the form of violent antipathy to the yellow man. where discrimination against him often had the sanction of government upon it. And although they worked hard. they could not become citizens of the land if they so desired. nor could they own the land they tilled or even lease land to till and make a living. When war clouds broke out between Japan and the United States. all that they had worked a lifetime to build was overturned and all but destroyed as they found themselves and their children. who were citizens of the country by birth. summarily expelled from their homes and interned in concentration camps.