Tears for it could happen again.... 19Feb1942

1907 a man emigrated from Japan
1923 he started a garden company
1927 he bought land where I took this photo
His business prospered until 1942 when he and his family were rounded up by the U.S. government and interned
4 years later after release he worked to rebuild his business

Eight years after his passing the city of Seattle declared his garden as an Historical Landmark. In 1987 the city of Seattle acquired the land and it is now a Japanese garden park.

A bit of history...
Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation
In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, dated February 19, 1942, gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens.