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WASHINGTON — President Bush signed into law a $38 million grant program to preserve notorious internment camps where Japanese-Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II.
The money will be administered by the National Park Service to restore and pay for research at 10 camps, including the Minidoka Internment National Monument near Jerome in southern Idaho. The law is intended to help preserve the camps as reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.
The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans — U.S. citizens and residents — under an executive order signed by President Roosevelt in 1942, when America was reeling from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.
At the time there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan. Roosevelt's order prohibited them from living on the West Coast, in a position possibly to help an invasion force.
Thousands of families in California and parts of Washington state, Oregon and Arizona were pushed from their homes and into camps surrounded by armed guards. The sites named in the legislation are in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho.
The last of the camps closed in 1946.
At its peak in 1943, the Minidoka camp became one of the largest cities in Idaho, housing 9,397 people, primarily from Seattle and Portland, Ore. It closed Oct. 28, 1945, and was dismantled. The 73-acre park was created in early 2001 by President Clinton.
Today, it remains a ghost town in rolling wheat fields, with only a portable toilet for visitor facilities. The National Park Service management plan recommends creating an interpretive center in a warehouse still standing from the camp.
President Reagan signed a presidential apology to Japanese-Americans in 1988.
Co-sponsors of the bill included the two current members of Congress who spent time in the camps as children: Democratic Reps. Mike Honda and Doris Matsui of California. Matsui was born in the Poston camp in Arizona.
The law will give grants to nonfederal organizations for historical, research and restoration work at the sites named in the legislation, as well others selected by the head of the Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service.
source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/6420AP_ID_Internment_Camps.html 22dec2006
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