Tanforan Memorial
Remembrance in San Bruno, California
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which immediately suspended the Fifth Amendment rights of 117,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were American citizens. Here, in the San Francisco Bay Area, 8,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned at the Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno while awaiting processing for their final prison camp destination. This was done without charges or due process of law. The former horse racetrack was repurposed as a prison, and many of those detained were forced to live in the existing horse stalls before additional barracks were built. The Tanforan Racetrack is now long gone, replaced by the San Bruno BART Station and The Shops at Tanforan.
The non-profit Tanforan Assembly Center Memorial Committee (TACMC) was formed in March of 2012 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the opening of the former Tanforan Assembly Center. The Committee members approached the BART Board of Directors and staff regarding a site memorial to tell their story, and BART enthusiastically offered not just support but land with which to build the space of remembrance. The public memorial was created so that the history and lessons of Tanforan would be accessible to the masses.
In 2014, TACMC engaged RHAA to design the memorial. RHAA - a landscape architecture firm based in Mill Valley, California - has strong connections to the Tanforan Assembly Center, due to two of their founding partners being imprisoned during the war, and committed to providing complete pro bono services from concept to contract documents and construction administration. The entire process took eight years, with public and private donations and a grant provided by the National Park Service Confinement Sites Program.
Design Elements
The Mochida Sisters bronze sculpture, which is cast in the image of Dorothea Lange's photo taken of two young sisters preparing to leave for Tanforan, now stands near the entrance. An abstracted replica of the Tanforan horse stalls helps to define the space in which entire families lived while also serving as the framework for interpretive boards that communicate the experience of the stalls and the history of Tanforan. All 8,000 names of persons held at Tanforan are engraved on free-standing panels. A single Japanese Cherry tree provides a balance to the sculpture and the horse stall features, while symbolizing several traditional ideas in Japanese culture. At the memorial, specifically, it represents the idea of rebirth each spring. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the memorial was held on August 27, 2022.
As seen in LASN magazine, August 2025.
