When he was 7 or 8 years old, Jim Matsuoka remembers hating himself for being Japanese.

One of the guard towers used by the U.S. military to monitor the Japanese and Japanese American internees at Manzanar was reconstructed to preserve that moment in U.S. history. (photo by Luis Rivas)

Hundreds were gathered outside his elementary school during the winter listening to an administrator who was lecturing on the horrors of the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan. Matsuoka and his classmates were listening, shivering in the desert cold.

“She was talking about Pearl Harbor. You know, going through the gruesome details. And we’re not stupid. We know that we’re associated with people that did that. It’s like having a group of young Muslim students and continually bringing up 9/11,” Matsuoka said.

Matsuoka and his family were in a relocation camp more than 200 miles north of their home in Los Angeles. The peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range just behind the camp were perpetually capped with snow. It was cold during the winter in Manzanar.

The worst part came when the school administrator began to cry as she retold the story of Pearl Harbor, Matsuoka said.

“She’s sobbing and, you know, you feel like crap. Whatever I am, it must be a bunch of crap because we’re so bad that we have to be in prison — because everybody hates you, you know?” Matsuoka said.

Matsuoka, now 80, and approximately 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry were put into relocation camps for two-to-four years, 73 years ago after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942.

On Feb. 28 a Day of Remembrance will be held at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo in commemoration of the Japanese and Japanese Americans who were interned.

Roosevelt’s executive order authorized the internment of all people of Japanese ancestry in direct response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941 due to claims of espionage, sabotage, and in the name of national defense.

However, of the 10,046 people interned at Manzanar, no one was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage.

“It was essentially a prison camp with barbed wire encircling the camp, guard towers and armed soldiers. You couldn’t come and go without their permission. Actually, you couldn’t go anywhere really,” Matsuoka said. “On one [side] you have the Sierra Nevada mountain range and on the other, you have the Panamint Mountains — and on the other side of that, you had Death Valley. There weren’t too many ways you would go even if you wanted to.”

After the executive order, Japanese and Japanese Americans, regardless of their citizenship or residency status, were required to report to designated locations in cities with a Japanese population. From these locations, they were put on trains and sent to one of the 15 assembly centers, operated by the War-Time Civil Control Administration, which was a branch of the U.S. Army.

One such assembly center was at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia. The assembly centers were temporary until 10 official War Relocation Authority camps were built.

The atmosphere inside the camp was filled with fear and confusion, Mastuoka remembered. Approximately two-thirds of the internees at Manzanar were U.S. citizens and the rest had been living in the U.S. for decades, according to Manzanar National Historic Site representatives.

“There was quite a bit of confusion of what they wanted to do with us. When we went in there, the registrar of voters from the city of Los Angeles was still sending ballots into the camps to vote … On one hand, you had someone sending in votes like we’re still citizens and on the other hand, they’re ethnic cleansing us in another way. All we knew was that we were prisoners,” he said.

After the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, leading to Japan’s surrender, the relocation camps began closing. Manzanar officially closed on Nov. 21, 1945.

Matsuoka and his family, like all other Japanese and Japanese Americans in the camps, were given approximately $50 and Greyhound bus tickets. They went to live with a family friend in a trailer in Long Beach.

Then in 1980, Matsuoka co-founded the National Coalition for Redress/Reperations, now known as Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress (NCRR).

Years later, Matsuoka received his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Los Angeles and worked for the Educational Opportunity Program at California State University, Long Beach before briefly teaching Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Redress and reparations were successfully won in 1988 in the form of the Civil Liberties Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan, authorizing $20,000 to 82,210 camp survivors or their heirs, along with a formal presidential apology. However, NCRR’s work did not stop there.

“One of the founding principles of NCRR is to support groups who face injustices. What happened [to the Japanese] was really tragic. We know that it was critical for our community but the issue, our legacy, is about connecting issues of racist injustice to other communities,” said Kay Ochi NCRR co-chair and member since 1981.

Over the years, NCRR has hosted and created events in support of Arab Americans, Muslims, Sikhs, Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, who have been victims of discrimination and hostility.

This year NCRR is focusing its efforts on building awareness and support for the national movement against police brutality faced by African Americans. NCRR, in partnership with the Japanese American Citizens League, Pacific Southwest District (JCL) and the Manzanar Committee, is organizing the 2015 Day of Remembrance.

“This year, we’re concerned with the issues brought up with Ferguson, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and other unarmed black men, and the police use of lethal force. We have invited people from the black community to participate,” Ochi said.

In addition to commemorating the internment of Japanese and Japanese, Issei and Nisei, Americans, Day of Remembrance events serve to remind people of the impact caused by Executive Order 9066 as a “federal act of racism, legislated and created by the government,” Ochi said.

“It’s important to remember the history so that you can improve the present for so many people — many have said this — by trying to create social justice and equality for all different groups, especially ethnic groups,” Ochi said.

Like NCRR, JCL’s work is multi-cultural and intergenerational. Of the many lessons that can be taken from the internment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII, Traci Ishigo, program coordinator with JCL, wants people to think about the role of fear in society.

“We want people to think about how our government and society, out of racist ideology, fears the ‘other,’ fears certain communities of color, how there are policies or actions that really harm a community for many generations. We see that happened to the Japanese American community,” Ishigo said.

JCL’s year-round programming includes gender and sexual orientation initiatives and summer youth internships, which highlight Muslim, Arab, Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander and other communities.

“With everything going on this year…. so many black deaths at the hands of law enforcement and vigilantes, we wanted to reflect on how the state imposes itself around certain communities and what the ramifications are. I feel like there’s always a repetition of communities struggling against the state … it’d be wonderful if we can learn from Executive Order 9066 by showing solidarity with each other and see how [much] stronger we can be,” Ochi said.

Matsuoka always makes it a point to talk about one particular internee at Manzanar, Ralph Lazo, the only internee who wasn’t Japanese. Lazo was a Mexican-Irish-American who voluntarily accompanied his Japanese-American classmates in East Los Angeles from Belmont High School to Manzanar.

Lazo stayed at Manzanar until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944. After his service, he remained in contact with several of his friends and their families, and played an active role in the movement for redress and reparations. He died at the age of 67 in 1992.

Lazo stood up for the Japanese and Japanese Americans during a time in U.S. history when everyone else had turned their backs, Matsuoka said. This is something that Matsuoka wants people to take from the experience of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during their internment.

“The main lesson from all of this is that one person can make a difference, like Ralph Lazo,” he said.