Read the full article by Justine Chahal at RAM’s New Times Magazine and Sacramento News & Review
California Superior Court Judge Johnny Gogo stood in the California Museum, looking at the American flag he donated.
The flag is remarkably different from the ones seen flying from flag posts today. It is missing two stars, the symbolic representation of Alaska and Hawaii nonexistent. It is also covered in signatures, the iconic triage of colors now spotted with scrawls of black ink.
These signatures belong to some of the surviving Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed and incarcerated during World War II following President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 which authorized their internment in 1942.
Gogo has made it his mission to connect with these survivors and collect their signatures as part of the 48-Star Flag Project, an initiative he created to preserve Japanese American history.
“I wanted to track the survivors down and try to get them to be part of these outreach events so that we could help educate our community, help educate our younger generation about the wrongfulness of incarcerating our citizens without due process of law,” Gogo said, adding that they are “in the process of trying to locate and identify our surviving members.”