We Japanese Americans Must Not Forget Our Wartime Internment By George Takei

[Demeter]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/27/we-japanese-americans-wartime-internment

Seventy years ago, US soldiers bearing bayoneted rifles came marching up to the front door of our family's home in Los Angeles, ordering us out. Our crime was looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor a few months before. I'll never forget that day, nor the tears streaming down my mother's face as we were forcibly removed, herded off like animals, to a nearby race track. There, for weeks, we would live in a filthy horse stable while our "permanent" relocation camp was being constructed thousands of miles away in Arkansas, in a place called Rohwer.

I recently revisited Rohwer. Gone were the sentry towers, armed guards, barbed wire and crudely constructed barracks that defined our lives for many years. The swamp had been drained, the trees chopped down. Only miles and miles of cotton fields. The only thing remaining was the cemetery with two tall monuments.

Because I was a child, I didn't understand the depth of the degradation and deprivation my parents suffered, or how courageous and foresighted my mother had been to smuggle a sewing machine into camp, which permitted her to make modest curtains for our bare quarters. I didn't grasp what a blow the ordeal was to my father's role as provider, as he struggled to keep our family together. The family ate, bathed and did chores along with a whole community, pressed together in the confines of a makeshift camp, in the oppressive heat and mosquito-infested swamps of Arkansas.

Later my family would be shipped to a high-security camp in Tule Lake, California, constructed in a desolate, dry lake bed in the north of the state. Three layers of barbed-wire fences now confined us. Out of principle, my parents had refused to answer yes to a "loyalty" questionnaire the government had promulgated. It had asked whether they would serve in the US army and go wherever ordered, and whether they would swear allegiance to the US government and "forswear" loyalty to the Japanese emperor – as if any had ever sworn such loyalty in the first instance. Because the government had already taken so much from us, and broken its promise of "liberty and justice for all", how could my parents give them the satisfaction of a forced oath? I still remember the irony of holding my hand to my heart and pledging allegiance to the US flag in the tar-paper barrack schoolroom, even as armed guards watched over us and barbed wire kept us locked inside that prison, without charge, trial or due process...

[Bjorn Against]

1. I am not a Star Trek fan but I love George Takei

The guy not only has good political views, but he is incredibly funny as well. Anyone who has a Facebook account should become a fan of his because he posts so many great things, once in a while it is serious like this piece but most of what but most of what he posts is very humorous.

[4th law of robotics]

8. But apparently he was responsible for the Japanese internment, which is not cool

why yes I just read the title of the OP, why?

[Bjorn Against]

10. No, he was not responsible for it he was a victim of it

He was locked up in an internment camp as a young child, I applaud him for speaking out, sharing his experiences and exposing the injustice that happened in this country.

[4th law of robotics]

11. I was kidding

reread the title literally.

[Bjorn Against]

12. I guess I don't see what you see even when I read it literally

Even literal interpretations can differ sometimes when the wording is not very descriptive, but I read the headline as stating that the Japanese Americans should never forget the period in which they were forced to live in internment camps.

[4th law of robotics]

13. We Japanese Americans Must Not Forget Our Wartime Internment *By* George Takei

By in this case could mean he wrote the title (as it does) or that the internment was done by George Takei.

[sudopod]

14. Hey, look, someone being pedantic on the internet!

How novel!

[4th law of robotics]

15. Dude, it was a joke

relax.

[freshwest]

2. It was also part of land grab by their jealous neighbors, although there were stories of good ones

Who protected their homes and fields and gave them back to them when they returned, not all got their land back from those who used it as an excuse to rob them. There was a lot of land that changed hands in the Depression and WW2 that was done wrongly. Sounds familiar.

[KT2000]

3. Cats of Mirikitani

If anyone wants to see a wonderful movie about a man who was sent to Tule Lake, had his dreams of becoming an artist destroyed, and then ends up in what could only be describes as a miracle on 9/11 - see The Cats of Mirikitani.
One of the most amazing films you will ever see. It is a documentary.
Netflix has it as well as Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Cats-Mirikitani-Jimmy-Tsutomu/dp/B002ZMZBAA/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1335929984&sr=1-1

[Meiko]

4. The internment

of Japanese Americans was not one of best ideas that President Roosevelt had ever come up with. It's a real dark spot on the pages of American history. I have often wondered why President Roosevelt, a man of obvious genius would do such a thing. The outside pressure on him to take some type of action must have been over whelming.

Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens.

[link:http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154|

[exboyfil]

5. Remember in the context of the time

From Wikipedia:

In Europe, German minority organisations in Poland and Czechoslovakia formed the Selbstschutz and the Sudeten German Free Corps respectively which actively helped the Third Reich in conquering those nations. After 1945, this was cited as justification for the wholesale expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as return to these countries of territories which had been annexed by Germany.
****

It does not excuse what was done, but we were scared. Until Midway it looked as if the entire Pacific was in jeopardy. Japan was a formidable power with a successful track record in the 20th century. They had utterly humilated the Russians at the turn of the century, and they swept through the Pacific like a scythe. Obviously it did not help that they were ethnically distinct from European Americans (the undertone of racism). America is not perfect, and we have paid compensation to the surviving victims and apologized for our behavior. Our textbooks teach this incident as a shameful episode in which we did not live up to our ideals.

[CBGLuthier]

6. So why did we not round up all the germans?

Racism racism racism.

Fuck any defense or rationalization of it. It was racism.

[4th law of robotics]

7. Rounding up everyone in the US of German Ancestry would have been impossible

there were too many.

Japanese Americans were a smaller population so this was possible.

[exboyfil]

9. I said racism had a part in it

and we did round up current and former German nationals (and their U.S. born children) and put them in internment camps as well (11,000 total) versus 110,000 total Japanese (62% American citizens). I obviously wish we had never done it - it made us weaker as a nation and left a legacy of resentment that still festers.

As a percentage of the population Germans were a much greater percent, they were obviously not as ethnically identifiable, and on average those of German ancestry were in the U.S. longer (a significant population dating back to the founding of the country).

I never said it was right, and I don't like to bring up how the Japanese and Germans treated the civilians of other nations. You could count on one hand the number of individuals with roots to the U.S. that were in Japan at the start of the war- I haven't a clue how first and second generation individuals were treated (my guess would be they were all rounded up). Obviously the Japanese were brutal to captured American citizens (and Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc.). In general Japan did not let non-ethnic Japanese become citizens before the War (and it is still very difficult to become a citizen - ask the Zainichi how they were treated during World War II). I don't think a single Japanese detainee would want to exchange his lot with a Zainichi.

I recognize we aspire to be better. Our public school textbooks do not gloss over what happened. How many other nations step up to their mistakes in such a fashion? Canada also held their citizens of Japanese descent.

I think understanding why it happened and how to prevent such abuse of American citizens in the future goes a lot further than screaming racism and being done with it. How do you feel about Lincoln - he trampled on the civil rights of the copperheads. How about Wilson (who I consider one of our worst presidents because of his racism) who threw Germans into internment camps in World War I. Adams and his Alien and Sedition Act.

[Blue_Tires]

16. The funny part was when Coulter suggested (with a straight face)

that this was a GOOD thing, and we need to do it to American muslims to prevent another 9-11

[Archae]

17. Michelle Malkin wrote an entire book advocating this.