[DoughtyOne]

In times of war, where you aren't really sure if you're going to come out on top or not, you have to make some tough choices.  We took a hell of a beating at Pearl Harbor.  Our leaders had a duty to ensure as best as they could the safety of the west coast and military assetts.

We interned our Japanese American citizens.  I'll take a neutral stance on that for now.  What disturbs me more than anything is that we confiscated their assetts.  Their homes, businesses and vehicles were liquidated.  As far as I know, they never got them back or adequate financial restitution.  That makes me mad. $20k would have likely taken care of the assetts in the age when they were taken.  By 1985 standards, it was a drop in the bucket.  Still it was something.

It's one thing to do something unpleasant for national security.  It's another to do it without taking care not to do mental, physical or financial harm to the subjects.  Why didn't we liquidate assetts, but them in bonds and hold them in escrow for the interned families?

Some families were split up.  Dad was sent to one camp, children and mothers to another.  I'm not convinced that was necessary.

My main beefs are the inhumane ways some of this was carried out, not so much that it wasn't called for, or should be outside the bounds of reasonable reactions to a war-time setting.

The left will always be yapping around like a bunch of terriors.  Big deal.

[jackliberty]

Their homes, businesses and vehicles were liquidated. As far as I know, they never got them back or adequate financial restitution.

The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, passed by Congress in 1948 provided $38 million for property losses. How much did the Japanese government compensate American citizens for forcing them into slave labor camps?

As for your distress over the "inhumane" way the relocation was handled; Somebody had to do something quickly. If the Emporer had told us in 1940 that he was going to attack Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, there would have been adequate time to come up with a "humane" plan.

The only families split up, that I'm aware of, were the ones that had members sent to Tule Lake, California. That camp consisted of people who asked to be repatriated to Japan, or answered "no" to a loyalty questionaire, or who the FBI had evidence of disloyalty against.

19,000 Japanese or Japanese-American citizens asked for repatriation and 8,000 actually went back. 3,500 renounced their American citizenship. 1942 was not the time to be politically correct.