28 April

Japanese-Americans and their supporters have criticized President Donald Trump's immigration policies as racist. Family members of former inmates and others gathered for the 50th anniversary of the beginning of annual visits to a World War Two internment camp.

Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps under an executive order signed by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942 following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. More than 2,000 people took part in Saturday's ceremony organized by a Japanese-American group at Manzanar Historic Site in the US state of California. A third-generation Japanese-American, Karen Korematsu, delivered a speech. She said people should not be indifferent, but must stand up to fight against injustice.

Her late father, Fred Korematsu, was arrested during the war for refusing to comply with the internment order. The US Supreme Court upheld his conviction. His conviction was overturned four decades later after a long-term fight against racial discrimination and challenges to the constitutionality of the order. Other speakers said nobody should be racially discriminated against ever again, and criticized Trump's strict immigration policy.

After the ceremony, participants laid flowers at the cenotaph and offered prayers for those who died in the camps.—NHK