One is the proud account of the exploits of Japanese Americans who fought for the United States in World War Two.

The other tells a shameful story.

Ten names appear on a wall. These were the locations of internment camps - which the most strident of critics call the American equivalent of concentration camps.

Designed by Davis Buckley and Nina Akamu, this monument at the memorial depicts two Japanese cranes caught in barbed wire. It symbolizes the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans in camps in the U.S. Southwest during World War II.

Some 120,000 Japanese-Americans - American citizens all - were confined in them during the same war.

The memorial foundation’s executive director, Cherry Tsutsumida, a longtime Federal health worker, was among the little children hustled with their families into such an internment camp in the Arizona desert.

“Even though my father was just a farmer, they assumed that he had all the characteristics of ‘those sneaky Japs’ in Japan,” she said. "And as a result, those of us who were his children carried the cape of being ‘disloyal Americans,’ whatever that meant. Some of our Chinese friends also began to wear little tags that said, ‘We are not a Jap,’ which again reinforced our isolation and our feeling of being guilty of something that we did not understand.”

In an unprecedented gesture, the U.S. Congress voted in 1988 to issue an apology and pay $20,000 dollars in reparations to each relocation camp internee still alive. Supporters of the Japanese-American Memorial say that it serves as a reminder to a free nation to never again permit the denial of individual rights of law-abiding citizens.