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Photo courtesy of the Aratanis
George and Sakaye Aratani
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Former internees make sure no one forgets
BY LETISIA MÁRQUEZ and
WENDY SODERBURG
UCLA Today
During World War II, 25-year-old George Aratani was trying his
best to run his late father’s California produce and shipping
businesses from the Gila River, Ariz., internment camp where he
was being held with other Japanese Americans. He remembers well
the shock of being forced to sell the businesses at an absurdly
low price a year later, in 1943.
“It was highway robbery, but we had to go along with it,”
Aratani recalled ruefully. “We lost everything.”
Sixty-one years later, Aratani and his wife, Sakaye, who was interned
in the Poston, Ariz., camp, are making sure that the difficulties
of that time are not forgotten. Through their gift, the UCLA Asian
American Studies Center (AASC) has established the George and Sakaye
Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Internment, Redress, and
Community, the first endowed academic chair in the nation to focus
on the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
The chair also will focus on the decades-long campaign to gain
redress and a national apology, which culminated with the passage
of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, and on historical and current trends
among Japanese Americans.
“The purpose of the chair is to ensure that the World War
II incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, as well as their
subsequent efforts, will always be remembered, taught and written
about for generations,” George Aratani said. “There
are many important lessons that Americans and other peoples can
learn so that similar tragedies never happen again.”
Aratani went on to become founder and chairman of Mikasa and Kenwood,
two internationally recognized corporations. Over the years, he
and Sakaye have endowed undergraduate scholarships, graduate fellowships
and undergraduate community internships in the AASC and the Center
for Japanese Studies.
“We are thrilled that this academic chair will support teaching,
research and public service dealing with historical and contemporary
trends and issues facing Japanese-American communities,” said
Don Nakanishi, director of the AASC. “Clearly, the aftermath
of 9/11 demonstrated the importance of learning and applying the
lessons from the Japanese-American experience to current and future
situations.”
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