Photo by Stan Honda
June Aochi Berk at the Santa Anita Racetrack.

A free public program, “Temporary Detention: A Guide to the Forced ‘Assembly Centers,’” will be presented Saturday, May 10, at 2 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, 100 N. Central Ave. in Little Tokyo.

It will feature the launch of www.forcedassemblycenters.com, a multimedia website that provides a focused look at the little-documented temporary so-called World War II “assembly/reception centers.”

Providing an overview of the interim centers will be Densho Content Director Brian Niiya, along with filmmaker Sharon Yamato and New York photographer Stan Honda, who were the website’s content creators.

Former detainees June Aochi Berk and Bacon Sakatani will offer insights into their detention at Santa Anita and Pomona, respectively.

Also on the program will be a report on the current Mission Oak High School student project to create a memorial at the former Tulare Assembly Center. Archaeologist Koji Lau-Ozawa, who is producing a film on their ongoing efforts, will provide an update.

The 15 euphemistically named “assembly centers” and single Owens Valley “reception center” operated by the U.S. Army’s Western Civil Control Administration provided immediate, hasty, and particularly harsh detention for approximately 92,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as the 10 permanent camps were being built.

Many held in these sites — erected in as little as a month — describe them as far worse than the 10 long-term concentration camps. In operation for only a period of months, these short-lived centers were rapidly put together only a month after Executive Order 9066 was issued, for the immediate incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast.

The project team traveled to each site to photograph what remains there today, including simple and more elaborate memorials built by local communities to mark nearly all of them.

The website also offers a “Plan Your Visit” section to offer maps and other aids to locate each site, some of which are currently now county fairgrounds, racetracks, and shopping centers.

The program will feature a clip from an upcoming film by JANM’s Evan Kodani on former detainee Berk, who was able to locate the exact horse stall that held her family at the Santa Anita Racetrack when she was just 10 years old.

The website also features short interviews with many former detainees, some conducted at the current site and others provided by Densho’s oral history collection. Because many incarcerees have passed, it was important to capture some of their first-hand impressions before these hastily constructed sites are forgotten.

Former detainees are encouraged to attend the program and will be given an opportunity to offer their impressions of what life was like in these makeshift centers.

The project was funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Project, with funding for the film made possible by the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation. The public program is being partially funded with an award from the Aratani CARE program.