The Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial Committee (TACMC) announced that the public unveiling of the Tanforan Memorial is scheduled for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 27, 2022. The ceremony will take place at the Memorial’s site located just outside the Tanforan BART station in San Bruno, California.

During World War II, the U.S. Army converted what was then the Tanforan Racetrack into one of 17 temporary detention centers at which persons of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated while more permanent detention centers in the inland United States were being built. For six months in 1942, the Tanforan Assembly Center held nearly 8,000 Bay Area Japanese, most of whom were U.S. citizens, without a trial or due process of law.

The Tanforan Memorial is the culmination of a decade of work by TACMC to create a permanent monument to honor those who were imprisoned at Tanforan and ensure that the injustice they suffered is not forgotten. Construction of the Memorial began in early 2022 after years of planning and fundraising. The Memorial will feature a replica horse stall in which internees were housed and a statue of the Mochida sisters, two young girls who were captured in a famous photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1942, which will be unveiled at the ribbon cutting.

TACMC invites all former internees from Tanforan and other World War II assembly centers and/or internment camps to participate in the ceremony. If you are, or know of, a former internee who would like to be a participant, please contact us by sending an email at tanforan.memorial@gmail.com by August 15, 2022. Please include the internee’s name, age, assembly center and/or internment camp at which they were detained, and any accommodations needed in the email message.