Former Malibu resident remembers forced WWII internment
A memorial marker denoting the relocation of 1,000 local residents, including former Malibu resident Amy Ioki, to the Manzanar camp during World War II, will be placed at an intersection in Venice. Amy Ioki was a member of the only Japanese American family in Malibu-and just 16 years old-when the call came to assemble at the corner of Lincoln and Venice boulevards in Venice, Calif. It was April 1942, four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when the United States entered the World War II stage as one of the Allied Big Three. Ioki's family, the Takahashis, was ordered to board the bus en route to the Manzanar War Relocation Authority Camp. It didn't matter that the high school junior, her two older brothers and three sisters were U.S. born; their crime was simply being Japanese. “It was really like a concentration camp until they found out we were really harmless,” Ioki said. Ioki, now 85, is one of the few surviving Southern California Jap