An era that also should live in infamy

This Sunday will mark the 70th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942.

EO 9066 set into motion the exclusion and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Among those detained behind barbed wire fences were my mother and father, and their families.

The day will pass quietly for most Minnesotans, most Americans. But for those of us whose lives have been touched by the watershed events of seven decades past, Feb. 19 is marked annually as a time for contemplation and a renewed commitment to social justice.

Two thousand miles from the West Coast, even Minnesota was a key player in the incarceration narrative. Historically, the Military Intelligence Service Language School was housed at Camp Savage and later at Fort Snelling from 1942 to 1946.

Six thousand Nisei (second-generation) interpreters served in Pacific and European theaters and were credited with shortening the Pacific war by as much as two years, saving millions of lives.

Additionally, a number of Minnesota schools, notably Hamline University, Macalester College and St. Thomas, in concert with the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council from 1942 to 1946, enrolled significant numbers of Nisei students who had been forcibly removed from their West Coast schools.

The Twin Cities chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, established here in 1946, has been the principal voice and advocate for Japanese-Americans in Minnesota. In 2009, the league initiated an oral history project aimed at preserving narratives of former internees. In 2011, the league sponsored a multigenerational Day of Remembrance event commemorating the incarceration.

The legacy of the incarceration remains most alive in past and present acts of resistance in the relentless struggle for justice. Perhaps most inspiring are the 85 Nisei men who comprised the Fair Play Committee at the Heart Mountain internment camp.

All declared their willingness to serve in the U.S. military -- but only if and when their full rights as U.S. citizens were restored. Seven leaders of the group were convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to time in federal penitentiaries.

These honorable, courageous resisters embodied an expansive vision of democracy, equality and justice.

The grass-roots redress movement of the 1960s to 1980s culminated in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which authorized a formal apology from the U.S. government and one-time monetary reparations of $20,000 for each surviving internee.

And in the wake of the horrific events of 9/11, Japanese-American civil rights organizations were among the first to call out the threat of harassment and retaliation against Muslim and Arab-American communities. Japanese-Americans have remained staunch allies of Muslim Americans.

In the end, the Japanese-American incarceration is more than a cautionary tale. It is an enduring narrative, illustrating a paradigm of governance that political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a "state of exception." Agamben observes that concentration camps have become the exemplar for post-9/11 governance.

These sites (think Guantanamo, or detention facilities where undocumented immigrants are denied due process) are where the rule of law is suspended and where "exceptions" are determined by military and administrative directives in the name of "homeland security."

And in the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without due process, Congress and President Obama have now effectively codified and institutionalized the most egregious transgression of constitutional rights since the incarceration.

Feb. 19 should be a day not only of commemorating the incarceration but a day of decolonizing and occupying (in the current parlance): Decolonizing our consciousness in the presence of xenophobic states of exception, and occupying the actual and virtual sites of injustice and oppression.

These should be our living testament to the power and promise of the Japanese-American incarceration legacy.

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Gordon Nakagawa is a visiting professor of communication studies at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and professor emeritus of communication studies and Asian-American studies at California State University, Northridge.