The museum will also shed light on a lesser-known part of this story: that of the 60,000 immigrants from Japan who entered the United States through Angel Island. Many of them, like the Chinese, were subjected to humiliating medical exams. After their release, they faced systematic discrimination in California and other areas where they lived and worked, and many fought against these conditions.

As part of the effort to restore the historic site, organizers are appealing to Japanese-Americans to provide information about these experiences.

Japanese immigrating throughout the Americas, from Canada to Cuba to Brazil, faced similar treatment at the time.

“Our hope is to recover some of the memories and stories from the descendants” of those who passed through Angel Island, Judy Yung told the San Francisco Chronicle in a September 14 article on the project. Yung, a professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is co-authoring a book on the immigration center with University of Minnesota professor Erika Lee. The book is scheduled to be published in 2010, coinciding with the completion of the full Angel Island complex, part of which will open to the public next summer.

While Angel Island was closed in 1940, Japanese-Americans, like other Asians, continued to be treated as second-class citizens in the United States. During World War II, Washington locked up 112,000 people of Japanese descent in concentration camps. The one area where Japanese-Americans were not subjected to mass incarceration was Hawaii. Some 38 percent of Hawaii's population was Japanese, making such a move too economically and politically costly to the U.S. rulers, though 1,500 were interned by the end of the war.  
 
Same treatment throughout Americas
In Canada, 23,000 Japanese living in British Columbia were also detained. Shipped to inland camps, they were not permitted to return to their homes until 1949, four years after the war.

Latin American governments did the same. Nearly 2,300 Japanese from 13 Latin American countries were arrested, stripped of their property, and kidnapped to the United States, where they were thrown into concentration camps set up by the Roosevelt administration. About 1,800 of them were citizens of Peru, whose government refused them reentry after the war.

The governments of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Cuba set up their own prison camps for Japanese residents of those countries. In Cuba, after Washington’s December 1941 declaration of war against Japan, some 300 adult males from the small Japanese community were rounded up and imprisoned at the Model Prison on the Isle of Pines (now the Isle of Youth). The regime of Fulgencio Batista, a U.S. ally, did so even before the Japanese-Americans were detained in the United States.  
 
Stalinists backed jailing Japanese
In the United States, Canada, and Latin America, the Communist parties, following the Stalinists’ Popular Front policy of supporting the “democratic” imperialist powers against the “Axis” imperialist governments, supported the imprisonment of the Japanese in the concentration camps. In Cuba the Communist Party, then called the Revolutionary Communist Union Party (PURC), was part of Batista’s 1940 electoral coalition. It joined his “national unity government” in 1943-44. Two PURC leaders, first Juan Marinello and then Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, were ministers without portfolio in Batista’s cabinet. The Japanese Cubans were detained on the Isle of Pines from 1942 to 1946.

The July 13, 1940, issue of the CP paper Hoy defended its support for Batista’s government, calling him “one hundred percent Cuban, a jealous guardian of the freedom of the fatherland.” In 1943 CP general secretary Blas Roca wrote, “In the National Unity [government coalition] there is room for all social classes, from the workers to the bourgeois, from the peasants to the latifundistas [big landowners].” That government ended when Batista’s candidate lost the 1944 presidential elections.

In the 1950s most Japanese-Cubans supported the revolutionary struggle against the Batista dictatorship led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, whose central leader was Fidel Castro.

Anti-Asian discrimination was uprooted with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Today the Japanese community in Cuba, numbering 1,300, celebrates the “obon” festival every August on the Isle of Youth, where many Japanese remained after their release from prison. As part of this cultural event they commemorate those who were locked up during World War II.

And last year a monument was unveiled in Havana in honor of the Japanese killed in the 1945 U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
 
 
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