[News] Internment of Japanese Americans: The Day of Remembrance

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http://www.aljazeerah.info/16%20o/Internment%20of%20Japanese%20Americans%20The%20Day%20of%20Remembrance%20By%20Abdus%20Sattar%20Ghazali.htm 


Internment of Japanese Americans: The Day of Remembrance

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Al-Jazeerah, February 16, 2005



February 19th marks the Day of Remembrance, when in 1942 President Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066 that led to the 
incarceration of over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in concentration 
camps during World War II. Over the years, the Day of Remembrance has come 
to represent a special time for the Japanese American community and others 
to honor past internees, remember this history of collective guilt victims 
and educate the public so that it does not recur for any other community.

In the post 9/11 era, the Day of Remembrance has also become a time to 
express solidarity with the Arab and Muslim communities now became victims 
of guilt by association similar to what Japanese Americans experienced over 
60 years ago.

The treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II is an abhorrent 
chapter in the history of the United States.

Throughout World War II, much of the West Coast, particularly California, 
had a long history of anti-Asian sentiment, culminating in the denial of 
citizenship to Asians upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Ozawa v. US in 
1922 and the Immigration Act of 1924 which created a permanent quota system.

Not surprisingly, many Americans reacted with fear and anger when Japan 
attacked the Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. False reports of spying and 
sabotage by Japanese Americans in Hawaii and on the West Coast were 
combined with already existing racial prejudices to inflame feelings of 
hatred against all people of Japanese! ancestry i.e. Issei, the first 
Japanese immigrant generation and Nisei, the second generation.

Similar to the rounding up of Muslim and Arab males after the 9/11 attacks, 
within 48 hours of Pearl Harbor, 1,291 Japanese American men are arrested, 
most of whom would be incarcerated for the entire four-year duration of the 
war and separated from their families.

General John L. DeWitt was responsible for the defense of the West Coast 
whose famous quotes include: “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether 
he is an American citizen or not. I don’t want any of them . . . In his 
1942 report calling for the evacuation of all Japanese Americans on the 
West Coast, Gen. DeWitt wrote: "Racial affiliations are not severed by 
migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second - and 
third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United 
States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are 
undiluted."

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt, acting on Gen. Dewitt’s 
recommendation, signed the Executive Order 9066 that authorized the 
military to exclude persons of Japanese ancestry from designated military 
areas. By June 1942, more than 110,000 Japanese persons, more than 70 
percent of them American citizens, had been forced from their homes into 
temporary “assembly centers”. These “assembly centers” were ramshackle 
affairs built at racetracks and fairgrounds. From there, the Japanese were 
moved to ten internment camps scattered in the more inhospitable desert 
regions of the West where many of them would live until the end of the war.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in a February 1942 memo to Attorney General 
Francis Biddle, wrote, that the decision to evacuate the Japanese Americans 
was based primarily on public and political pressures rather than factual 
data.

Fred Korematsu, a 22-year old loyal Japanese-American citizen, who violated 
Roosevelt’s executive order by not reporting to an assembly center, 
challenged the constitutionality of the internment of an entire ethnic 
population class. In the landmark case the Supreme Court in 1944 held that 
Korematsu’s constitutional freedoms were not violated and found him guilty. 
More than 41 years after his internment, Korematsu’s criminal conviction 
was overturned and vacated in 1983 by U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn 
Patel of San Francisco.

The Japanese-Americans allowed to return to their homes only at the end of 
the war. However, it was not until 1952 that the McCarran Immigration and 
Naturalization Act finally allowed Japanese naturalization.

It was not until Feb. 19, 1976, the thirty-fourth anniversary of 
Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, that President Gerald Ford, through 
Presidential Proclamation 4417, declared that the Japanese American 
internment was a national mistake and described the February 19th 
anniversary a sad day in American history.

While issuing the proclamation, President Gerald Ford emphasized: “We now 
know what we should have known then--not only was that evacuation wrong, 
but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans. On the battlefield and 
at home, Japanese-Americans -- names like Hamada, Mitsumori, Marimoto, 
Noguchi, Yamasaki, Kido, Munemori and Miyamura -- have been and continue to 
be written in our history for the sacrifices and the contributions they 
have made to the well-being and security of this, our common Nation.”

About four years later, in June 1980, President Carter signed a bill 
establishing "the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of 
Civilians," which determined that the major cause of the mass incarceration 
was racism, opportunism and the failure of political leadership. In its 
report issued in 1983, the commission recommended that the former inmates 
be given an official government apology, given $20,000 compensation to each 
surviving internee and establish an educational trust fund.

President Ronald Reagan, on August 10, 1988, signed into law the federal 
Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that included an apology. In this act the 
Congress recognized that a grave injustice was done to both citizens and 
permanent residents of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and 
internment of civilians during World War II. “.
. For these fundamental 
violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights of these 
individuals of Japanese ancestry, the Congress apologizes on behalf of the 
Nation."

Finally, in late 1989, the federal government started issuing checks and 
apologies, inviting nine of the oldest internees to Washington, D.C. 
Attorney General Richard Thornburgh got on his knees and presented each one 
with a check and an apology and said he was sorry it took so long. 
Beginning in 1990, a check of $20,000 in compensatory payment was sent to 
all eligible living Japanese Americans who underwent the humiliation of 
living in an American internment camp.

However, 15 years after President Reagan’s apology some newcons are giving 
a new twist to the unfortunate episode of internment. In the current 
Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim climate prevailing in America, Michelle Malkin, 
in her book “In Defense of Internment,” is applauding the roundup and 
imprisonment of the Japanese. She argues that Civil Liberties are not 
sacrosanct.

In the words of the University of Colorado law professor, Paul Campos, 
“Malkin's book is an odious exercise in revisionist history, with a 
distinctly fascist tinge .....using arguments that are often absurd on 
their face.”

Another neocon, Daniel Pipes, taking advantage of this hyper climate, is 
suggesting that the wholesale relocation of American Muslims to internment 
camps might be a good idea.

To quote Prof. Campos again, this is a dangerous argument. “After all, none 
of the 9/11 hijackers was American - unlike, for example, Tim McVeigh and 
Terry Nichols. It would be far more efficient to engage in what Malkin 
calls "threat profiling" by setting up internment camps for members of 
far-right political groups than for American Muslims,” he concluded.

It will not be too much to say that the newcons are now bent on distorting 
the history of Japanese Americans’ internment in a bid to foment hatred 
against certain ethnic and religious communities. People of Japanese 
ancestry were sent to internment camps without any real evidence. 
Ironically, the American Arabs and Muslims are being profiled and harassed 
without any real evidence and for them the Patriot Act and other government 
measures have converted the whole country into a virtual internment camp.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine 
American Muslim Perspective 
<http://www.amperspective.com>www.amperspective.com


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