Crystal City Pilgrimage Receives Takahashi Foundation Grant

The Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee (CCPC) has received a major grant of $158,000 from the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation.  The funds will be used for a Memorial Monument as well as a museum feasibility study at the site of America’s last WWII internment camp, the Crystal City Family Internment Camp.

“The Takahashi Foundation’s grant will be a tremendous help in preserving the stories of our internment,” said CCPC President Kazumu Julio Cesar Naganuma. “My family was forcibly taken from Peru, deprived of property and legal status, and interned with many other Japanese Latin Americans in the Crystal City internment camp. It was a terrible injustice that has yet to be properly acknowledged by our government.”

The Memorial Monument lists all of those who died during their internment in Crystal City. Along with Japanese Latin Americans, there were thousands of Issei from the U.S. who were interned, along with their families. Germans and Italians were also interned, along with their children, many of whom were U.S. citizens.

The Memorial Monument is placed at the site where two Japanese Peruvian girls, friends who were just 10 years old, tragically drowned in a swimming pool accident in 1944. Crystal City recently paved a road to the site, naming the road “Calle Aiko y Sachiko” to remember Aiko Oyakawa and Sachiko Tanabe.

To read the full CCPC Press Release on the Takahashi Foundation Grant, please click here.

For more information, contact the CCPC at info@crystalcitypilgrimage.org or visit at www.crystalcitypilgrimage.org