The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a well-known dark chapter in American history. What is less known
There were many citizen exchanges during WWII.
Our citizens were rounded up and sorted out also under our demands.
It was war.
The horror
Let’s wallow
A lot of the young men enlisted and fought in Europe, Italy mostly. No ‘woe is us we are victims’ navel-gazing for seventy years. Although yes there was a belated compensation.
No Japanese were interned in Hawaii nor on the east coast, only on the west coast. There were internment camps for Italians and Germans too; one story about an American-Italian soldier fighting in Italy while his parents were interned in the US.
“Go For Broke” (1951)
“Several of the main characters were played by actual members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team depicted in the film. The men saw action with the outfit in Italy and France.”
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043590/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRqwLrZKDw0
That’s a bunch of PBS bullshit. America did not have concentration camps. We had relocation centers. Some German and Italians were also detained. And not all Japanese descendants were detained.
People love to act like America just lost her mind one day and there wasn’t the slightest reason to doubt their loyalty.
Look up the Niihau incident.
A Zero attacking Pearl Harbor was damaged and couldn’t make it back to the carrier. The Hawaiian island of Niihau was the designated emergency landing point and pilots were supposed to land there and wait for submarines. He made an emergency landing and was treated very well by the local Hawaiian people, but they could not speak Japanese, and had no idea that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. There was a local Japanese family that lived there for decades and was part of the community. Just normal good neighbors. They were used for translators and to host the pilot.
The pilot told them what had happened and without hesitation they provided him with guns and joined him in taking the Hawaiians prisoner.
This went on for a few days until a big Hawaiian and his wife managed to surprise and overpower him along with his wife, and broke the Jap’s back on a rock wall. They two locals who helped him fled and hid. The big Samoan was decorated by the US government.
This incident sent shockwaves among the highest levels in DC. The thing that concerned them was how fast Japanese immigrants who were regarded as good community members and had lived here for decades immediately moved to assist Japan.
It was a war for survival, not a war of convenience like you see these days. It’s wrong to compare what our relocation centers were, where in Sam emergency, we interned people of suspected foreign loyalty to the Nazi concentration camps.
A look at the disloyalties rampant among the 2 million moslems Bush and Obama flooded in after 9/11 proves that the concept was not far fetched. We laugh at it today, and it’s a sort of comedy. But in 1941 with our fleet a smoking ruin and we were on the run everywhere, there was actual work that the Jap fleet might show up off of California. We were preparing for an eminent attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/22/us/1941-cables-boasted-of-japanese-american-spying.html
Mr. Lowman, who in the 1970’s worked on the declassification and publication of the decoded Japanese cables, said that Roosevelt, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and a handful of other officials were on the limited distribution list of the cable traffic.
‘’Anyone reading this flow of messages during 1941 could easily conclude that thousands of resident Japanese were being organized into subversive organizations,’’ Mr. Lowman said. ‘’Today we know that the Japanese Government misjudged the loyalty of Japanese Americans completely. But at that time no one knew for certain.’’
Just more of the “America is evil and racist” drumbeat.
I just saw a PBS show called “The Latinos”. Great show about the history of Hispanic exploration and settlement in the USA. But of course, we get treated to these endless tragic stories of how after the Mexican War, Californios, Texans, and land grant owners lost everything they owned... etc etc.
They never address how they gained those holdings. Never any discussion that they simply had done to them what THEY did to the Indians. And what those Indians had done to the Indians before them. Everything is fair game until white people do it, then the lamentations and wailing begins.
Way more than a few Japanese internees refused to sign loyalty oaths to America.
Also they were not unique, 11,000 Germans and Italians were also interned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans#:~:text=During%20WWII%2C%20German%20nationals%20and,areas%20on%20an%20individual%20basis.&text=A%20total%20of%2011%2C507%20people,Department‘s%20Enemy%20Alien%20Control%20Program.
"In late 1940 members of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service broke Japan's highest level diplomatic code and then constructed a machine that was an analog of the one used by the Japanese. This allowed the U.S. to read Japan's diplomatic traffic from then until after the end of the war. Intelligence thus gained was cover named MAGIC because it seemed that only magicians could have produced it. Among the decoded messages of 1941 were a number detailing espionage planning and operations involving Japanese-Americans along the West Coast. In February 1942 President Roosevelt authorized the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry.
"In 1983 a congressional commission, ignoring available declassified intelligence and ignorant of MAGIC revelations, concluded the President's action was the result of racism, war hysteria and lack of political will.
"Now for the first time David D. Lowman, using MAGIC messages and declassified Army, Navy and FBI reports, presents the real reasons for the evacuation. As a former high level officer in the National Security Agency and a witness before congressional committees dealing with the evacuation he was uniquely qualified to tell this story. Those who could never quite believe the base motives attributed to our wartime leaders and our country will find Lowman's story compelling.
The Census Bureau played a critical role in the Japanese internment.
The “confidential” census gave law enforcement the names and addresses of the Japanese who were conned into giving that information in the 1940 census (with assurances that the Census Bureau would never share that information with anyone).
“Bait and switch” is policy when governments do it.
The asians are still discriminated by the ‘liberals’ at university’s by being denied entry even when qualified. Those that do get in are doing so much better then others.
Star Trek George Takei still supports the democrats after he and his family were imprisoned by the the democrats.
He has not learned a thing.
Thanks for posting this.
My step-daughter is Japanese. She knew little about the Japanese internment camps when she was here going to to college (knew quite a bit about the atomic bombs being dropped - but that may be because she went to high school in Europe), so we did some research together. Afterwards she said “people made do the best they could and moved on”. A stoic attitude, but one that seems to be strongly expressed in almost all the Japanese I have met.
Many of the Japanese in the Western camps moved to Chicago and there are still many Japanese in that city. They’ve been a good addition to the city. Just like many people in the US.
Hopefully she’s coming back to the US next year to work on another degree.
The author was Assistant to the Director, National Security Agency, so he's not just whistling Dixie. He testified in some of the Congressional hearings, but for political reasons was ignored.
The book is an unfinished manuscript, so it is a bit choppy at times, but nonetheless it's an essential read.
‘Many of those interned had never been to Japan and didn’t speak Japanese.”
Many others did, and some were spying on us. On top of that, the camps were probably the SAFEST place for them to be (if staying in the US), as one might say that Japan and Japanese people were not particularly well-liked at that time.