By Ida Mojadad, News editor July 9, 2025 - SFGATE
'It's an unbelievable story, to think that your neighbors, people you might know, have family members who were incarcerated and confined in the Bay Area in World War II'
Enter San Bruno’s Tanforan shopping mall on El Camino Real, and a horse theme may catch your eye.
Drivers pull into Sea Biscuit Avenue before being greeted inside the mall by a “Racetrack Cafe” sign with colorful strands of a horse’s mane, a nod to its past life as a racetrack. Should you approach it from the San Bruno BART station, however, you get a chilling nod to that history: a recreation of the horse stalls that about 8,000 Japanese Americans were forced to live in back in 1942.
Bay Area residents may be familiar with the country’s dark, shameful history of imprisoning more than 120,000 Americans based purely on their Japanese ancestry during World War II — shameful enough for President Ronald Reagan to sign a formal apology and reparations act in 1988. But the local backdrop on which this occurred is little known, even among San Bruno residents. Some Japanese Americans were also briefly detained on Angel Island and at Sharp Park in Pacifica, while others were first forced to register at San Jose State University.
“I think as time goes on, people forget about the important parts of history that go on in our own backyard,” said Dianne Fukami, the producer of the 1995 KCSM-TV documentary “Tanforan: From Racetrack to Assembly Center,” and whose father was imprisoned there. “It’s an unbelievable story, to think that your neighbors, people you might know, have family members who were incarcerated and confined in the Bay Area in World War II. If you know a Japanese American, it’s more than likely it happened to their family.”
The little-known history of Japanese American incarceration where a Bay Area mall now stands
Greg