For a long, quiet moment, a white-haired gentleman stood and gazed at the words engraved in a low granite wall. Few passersby noticed the memorial, tucked on a tiny patch of federal parkland near Union Station in Washington. But every time Grant Ichikawa returns to the spot and stands before the statue of two majestic birds caught in barbed wire, a half-century of memories floods back.
"This is a holy place for me. My whole life is here," Ichikawa, 93, a Japanese-American veteran of World War II and resident of Vienna, Virginia, said on a chilly afternoon last month. First, he pointed to a row of stone panels listing obscure towns across the West and South.
"Gila River — that's the camp where my family was interned," he said.