‘We’re in danger of forgetting’: congressman’s warning 80 years after Japanese American incarceration

Congressman Mark Takano, whose family was forced into camps, calls for vigilance amid nefarious nostalgia'

Eighty years ago, as anti-Japanese fervor gripped the US, the parents and grandparents of the California congressman Mark Takano were among 120,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and sent to desolate camps scattered across the west.

They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Everything else was sold, stored or left behind. Confined by barbed wire fences and armed military guards, their only offense was looking like the enemy.