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California Museum Honors Japanese Americans, Nisei Veterans with Flag Ceremony

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.”
The California Museum hosted a 48-Star Flag Gifting Ceremony on May 17 as a part of its “Uprooted: An American Story” exhibit.

Created in 2021, the 48-Star Project involves multiple American flags with 48 stars traveling across the country to be signed by camp survivors and those born in the U.S. who participated in military efforts, also known as Nisei veterans. Gogo created the project after he began to learn more about the incarceration of Japanese Americans and about civil rights activist Fred Korematsu, who resisted internment arguing in his Supreme Court case that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was unconstitutional.
Although Gogo originally planned to just have one flag with 48 stars — the first of which Gogo purchased from eBay — representing the flag that would have flown during the war, he says. The project grew after he realized how many surviving Japanese Americans were still alive, Gogo added. Now there are 13 flags, many of which have been donated to museums including the Japanese American Museum in San Jose and the Fred T. Korematsu Institute in San Francisco.

The California Museum received the project’s fifth flag, which has been added to one of the museum’s signature exhibits focused on the history of Japanese immigration to the U.S., says California Museum Executive Director Amanda Meeker.
Meeker added that the updated exhibit will also include an interactive feature allowing visitors to have virtual conversations with camp survivors. Two of the survivors involved in this feature are Chuck Kobayashi and Kiyo Sato, who spoke at the event alongside Meeker, Gogo and criminal defense attorney Joshua Kaizuka.

Kobayashi, a former judge held at the Tule Lake Segregation Center as a child, says the exhibit and flag act as a reminder to uphold the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans like himself.
“The flag today, to me, symbolizes a living memorial for the times that we spent at camp,” Kobayashi says. “The flag itself is a vivid recollection of what had happened to all of us, a reminder that we would never again let something like this happen to anybody in this country.”
Although the exhibit focuses on a dark period of time, the atmosphere was joyous. Ten survivors, including Kobayashi and Sato, attended the event with their families before being invited on stage to unveil the donated flag and later sign the project’s 12th flag.

The lives of these survivors were honored and attendees celebrated the recent birthdays of Sato, who recently turned 102, and Christine Umeda, 85.
Sato is a Sacramento-based author and veteran who wrote about her family’s experience at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona. She was one of the 120,000 people who were incarcerated during WWII, sent to one of the ten major camps that were eventually shut down in 1946. Sato says the flag project and the exhibit can now be another educational resource to help preserve history.
“I think it’s a wonderful teaching tool, especially for young students,” Sato says. “Most people don’t remember that history and there are only a few of us. I know the importance of passing it on.”
Gogo stressed the importance for elders to pass down their stories to younger generations.

“It also becomes the responsibility of the next generation to continue to pass down the stories and the lessons from their elders so that we can try to avoid making the same mistakes that were made during that time frame,” Gogo says.
Meeker says she hopes visitors will walk away from the exhibit and the stories displayed there with the idea that they have power to make a positive change in their community.

Sato, who is planning on releasing a second book, says she hopes other survivors will write down and share their memories like she has to ensure that their history is known by more people.
“I am so very grateful that the 48-star flag will remind us that we will never again repeat Executive Order 9066 and that the exhibit here will continue to tell our story,” Sato says. “Let us not forget. Let us carry on.”
This story is part of the Solving Sacramento journalism collaborative. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Hmong Daily News, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Support stories like these here, and sign up for our monthly newsletter.
2025-05-21 20:38 SOLVING SACRAMENTO