This Sunday, the Hop is hosting two screenings of George Takei's musical, Allegiance.
This Sunday is also the 75th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the internment of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent.
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Pledge Allegiance, by Judy Shintani<http://www.judyshintani.com/>. The flag was created using pieces of wood from the camp where the artist's father was interned as a teenager.
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On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The executive order authorized the military to designate exclusion areas from which "any and all persons" could be barred. In practice, the order was used to ban all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. In total, between 110,000 and 120,000 people were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in camps in the name of national security. About 80,000 of those interned were born in the United States with American citizenship.
Many Japanese Americans responded by trying to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. Twenty thousand served in the military during World War Two, while many more worked on the homefront. Japanese-Americans challenge the idea that they were any less American, but the Supreme Court upheld the exclusion and internment of citizens in the landmark 1944 case of Korematsu v. United States.
After the war, the government faced pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League<https://jacl.org/> for an investigation into the internment order. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation into whether there was justification for the internment, forming the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. The commission found that there had been little security threat and the order was mostly fueled by racial prejudice, ultimately recommending reparations, which were paid under President Ronald Reagan's Civil Liberties Act. The legislation issued an apology on behalf of the government and paid over $1.6 billion to over 80,000 Japanese Americans and their families.
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Tickets: https://hop.dartmouth.edu/online/allegiance
3pm showing will be followed by a discussion with Profs. Yvonne Kwan and Summer Kim Lee

Cosponsored by the Dartmouth Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus