Thank God we have blacks in this country. Would they not have put up with it. The Japanese Americans kept to themselves and did well. Tradition and stability. They moved on and some even managed to get a $20k settlement decades later. It acknowledged that ‘something happened’ but didn’t even begin to settle what was lost.
After Dec 7 It took 6 months to evacuate them from their homes. It took ONE DAY for the FBI to arrest the leaders of the community. Nothing’s changed.
I went the museum in Powell, WY this summer. Excellent museum.
If it was an “injustice” it was an injustice born of necessity. One reason the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was so effective is that there were American-born ethnic Japanese living on Oahu who were covertly surveilling what was happening at Pearl and Hickam and relaying that information to Japanese intelligence.
If there was bigotry involved it was as much because the “sneak attack” offended Americans’ cultural sense of “fair play” as it was racism against the Japanese.
Judging from the author’s photograph I’d guesstimate that it’s a sore spot for her because her’s was one of the oxen that got gored but the simple fact is it was a vastly more efficient means of dealing with the potential for Japanese espionage and sabotage than if they had been left running loose. And the same solution would not have been so effective against Americans of German or Italian extraction because, unlike the Japanese, their faces wouldn’t give them away. They could change their name or O’Reily or MacDoogal and no one would be the wiser. In the end it might have been the best thing for the Japanese because with the bad taste that the attack on Pearl Harbor left in most Americans’ mouths, there’s no telling how many ethnic Japanese might have been railroaded on trumped-up charges of espionage and executed if they had been roaming at large.