Know Your Rights

Internment Camp Buddha

2010

The original art for this tattoo was made of cut paper by the customer's great grandfather, one of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans who's rights and property were taken by our federal government.

Executive Order 9066 from Feb. 1942 allowed military commanders to declare California, Oregon and Washington 'exclusion zones'. With a little help from the Census Bureau, Japanese-Americans were 'excluded' from the west coast and placed into desert prison camps for the remainder of the war.

The tattoo is a negative version of the original design but is otherwise unchanged.