BF2S Forums The Huge WW2 Discussion Thread

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Thanks for your thoughts Uzique and Newbie.

I am teaching Japanese Internment this week. Is it okay for me to tell the kids it was the only bad thing we did in the war? Can I call the camps concentration camps?

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

I think you're smart enough to find a way to present facts in a clear and concise way without showing personal bias. Presenting something as "this happened in the past" without providing historical context and motivating factors is teaching a factoid to students, not encouraging them to analyze and apply critical thought to history.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I'm familiar with history, it mostly happened in the past and therefore doesn't matter too much.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Moving on, Japanese interned in America were lucky they weren't raped and herded into the sea to be machine-gunned, or the women used as sex-slaves and the men worked to death cutting railways through the tropics, or used as guinea pigs in biological weapons experiments.

Last edited by uziq (2021-01-12 04:38:04)

The redress campaign wasn't just about trying to gain monetary compensation. I mean, you figure three years of imprisonment and the 30 years of guilt and shame we lived with, $20,000 wasn't going to abrogate all of that. But the money was part of the message. The American public didn't give a damn until the minute we started demanding compensation.

As a leader of the redress campaign, you spoke on radio programs about Japanese American internment. How did audiences react to learning about what happened in the camps?

There was a huge hostility against us because people assumed that we were guilty of something—that we betrayed the United States, the country of our birth. People would say, "Oh, you're lying. Those camps never existed." Or they would say, "The government did what they did because they had good reason to do it." Because obviously in America, we don't put people in prisons unless they're guilty. Well, we've discovered that's not necessarily true.

It was all based on racism and had nothing to do with fact. And the one thing no one ever could present to me—either officially or people calling into talk shows—was any piece of evidence that would justify what happened to us. The reason they couldn't do that was there was no evidence [that Japanese Americans were guilty of treason].

The day after 9/11, the JACL published a letter warning the U.S. not to racially profile Arab and Muslim Americans. Specifically, you urged Americans "not to make the same mistakes as a nation that were made in the hysteria of WWII following the attack at Pearl Harbor." Why did the JACL anticipate this reaction?

For Japanese Americans, there are certain parallels that were apparent between [the attacks on Pearl Harbor] and 9/11. We were being attacked on our own soil for the second time. There was an enemy who could be identified, and individuals living in this country resembled the terrorists. In our case, the attack was by Japan and we were an ethnic group who resembled the attackers.

I would hear people say things [about Arab and Muslim Americans] that were similar to what I was heard about us. "There is no way we can identify those who are potential terrorists"; "You've seen what terrorists can do, and here are these people who are walking around free. How do we know they're not going to bomb us?"

From our experience, we knew that fear overcomes reason very easily. I don't think there was an American on 9/11 who didn't feel a sense of fear, including those who are Arab and Muslim. But they had to fear something else that other people didn't have to, and that was the wrath of the American public.