‘F.B.I. Taken’ highlights America’s troubled past

Japanese American community leader Sadiji Shiogi is lead away by FBI the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Photo courtesy of Lacy Sato, The Oregonian and the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center

By Leah Ingram, Contributing Writer

The Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center is home to the remnants and artifacts of Japanese Americans who lived through the legal arrests and internment camps following the ratification of Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942. The halls of their museum on SW 2nd Avenue shows photographs, maps and life size replicas of the living arrangements at the internment camps, as well as a portion dedicated to the lesser known FBI arrests of Japanese community leaders mere hours after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Neil Simon partnered with the “FBI: Taken” exhibit in the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center to shed light on these obscure arrests and the following years of internment in the “special” camp in Santa Fe through his new documentary “Prisoners and Patriots: The Untold Story of Japanese American Internment in Santa Fe, New Mexico.”