Never Again is Now!: Disrupting Silence and Memorializing Japanese American Incarceration at San José State University is a student-led and artistic movement to remember Japanese American history and call for the recognition and acknowledgement of San José State University’s role in the incarceration of Japanese Americans as a result of Executive Order 9066 during World War II.
SJSU’s Spartan Complex Boy’s Gym served as a processing center where 2,487 Nikkeijin were ordered to appear before being forcibly sent to incarceration camps. 125 Japanese American students were forced to leave SJS College, now known as San José State University in 1942 due to EO 9066, and many never returned to complete their degrees. Years later, the Gym was renamed in honor of Yoshihiro Uchida. Uchida Sensei is a SJSU graduate, Nisei Judo Head Coach, and served in the military while his family was incarcerated in a U.S. concentration camp.
In April 2023, after years of advocacy by student leaders, and with the help and advocacy of our Japantown community leaders, SJSU Asian American Studies professors, and student leaders, we passed a Sense of Senate Resolution. In this Sense of Senate, it formally acknowledges SJSU’s role in the forced removal and incarceration of local Japanese Americans during Executive Order 9066. This proclamation also documents and memorializes individuals at SJSU that faced discrimination, incarceration, and hardship during this time, who leave a legacy of change for future generations in San Jose and beyond.
You can view the resolution here: https://www.sjsu.edu/senate/docs/SS-S23-4.pdf
For the mural project, we have a central committee composed of SJSU students, faculty, staff, alumni, and Japantown community members. Our purpose as a committee is to ensure the stories and voices of community and faculty members affected during February 1942 to the present—are properly amplified, preserved, and heard by past, present, and future Spartans and the San Jose community through this permanent mural.
Our vision for the mural tells this story of resistance to oppression, unity and dismantling institutional racism, the drive for reparatory justice, accepting accountability, and disrupting silence. The reckoning and centering of this history connects the Japanese American incarceration to a much larger movement of allyship and resistance against systems, discrimination, and oppression of historically marginalized communities. It empowers us, as present and future leaders of our generation, to disrupt the silence, speak out against the norm of complacency, and fight injustice.
As we continue to reclaim this space and our history at SJSU, we uplift and empower the experiences of our elders and people of Japanese American descent on the very land where our communities were stripped of their civil liberties and targeted eighty-one years ago. We continue to work to never forget, amplify the voices of our history-- while making history, and speak truth to power.