On the northwest corner of the Lincoln and Venice Blvd. intersection is an approximately nine foot tall, black monument with white writing inscribed on its front-facing side. It only stands out as much as it does because the very white fencing of Beach Cities Car Wash is directly behind it.
In quite possibly the last place that you’d expect, the modest monolith is a tribute to the thousand-plus men, women and children of Japanese ancestry who gathered at this exact location in April 1942. Permitted to bring only what they could physically carry, they were made to board buses that transported them directly to the concentration camp at Manzanar in Inyo County, Northern California. Most remained involuntarily incarcerated for more than three years without any regard to due process.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, xenophobic paranoia was peaking and in February 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, which empowered the US Army to declare areas of Washington, Oregon and California as "militarily sensitive." The order forced the removal of 120,000 Japanese and American citizens of Japanese ancestry from the west coast to be imprisoned in temporary assembly centers at fairgrounds and race tracks. Months later, they were taken to American concentration camps under the war relocation authority.
This Thursday is the first in-person commemoration of the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument since the pre-pandemic days of 2019. The monument itself was constructed and erected in 2017 and every year –with the exception of global outbreaks of deadly diseases — the members of, and volunteers for, the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument (VJAMM) Committee gather to pay their respects and hold a fundraising event of some description.
Despite the location not being in the most crowd-friendly of places, the annual event still draws a crowd. "We can’t choose where it happened," said Phyllis Hayashibara, charter member of the Venice Japanese American Memorial Monument Committee. "And we’ve ordered 75 folding chairs," she says. "We had more than 200 people sitting and standing on the corner in 2017. It’s important that we hold the commemoration there."
The commemoration and speeches will run from 11am to 12pm at the site of the memorial and include a keynote by former California Assemblyman Warren Furutani. Then, from 4pm to 9pm, the Hama Sushi Restaurant (at 213 Windward Ave, Venice) will generously donate 10 percent of all dinner sales to the VJAMM Committee for educational outreach, VJAMM maintenance and funding the annual Arnold Maeda Manzanar Pilgrimage Grant.
"There won’t be any speeches during dinner or anything like that," says Hayashibara, "We just want people to have focus on the good food."
The monument itself took more than seven years of planning and fundraising. It’s 9’6" tall, weighs in at 12,500lbs and is made of black granite. The four faces of the monument are engraved with different messages: one side has a map from the intersection to the Manzanar National Historic Site and the other faces include names of major donors, an explanation of the history and context of what happened and quotations from five individuals who were incarcerated at Manzanar.
"This monument reminds us how important it is to remain vigilant about defending our constitutional rights," says Hayashibara. "No government should ever again have the power to perpetrate an injustice against any group based solely on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion."
