The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II
Hi, Bill- Just offering some comments on this.
With respect to one's perception of the internment of Japanese-American citizens after Pearl Harbor, it helps to have been around at the time. I was just a lad then, but I have vivid memories of the fear and shock that gripped our little town just outside of NYC, in the immediate aftermath. The adults knew that we were in for a long and bloody war, not of our making, and there was no firm conviction that we could necessarily prevail in the end. One of the first things my folks had to do was to rig up one of our rooms as makeshift air-raid shelter, to which we would all retreat in the practice blackouts. Kids like myself were given an "Airplane Spotters Handbook," and we took seriously our assigned role to be able to identify enemy planes that might come over to bomb us. It was a scary time, and there were months of bad war news before the tide began to shift somewhat in our favor.
Given that climate, everything I heard was totally supportive of quarantining the J-As on the west coast. With our Pacific fleet in ruins, our western shores were wide open to attack. It would have been an easy matter for subs to land Japanese saboteurs on our shores (Germans did land on the east coast). It was a plausible scenario that Japanese saboteurs might be aided by J-A residents loyal to their homeland, and a seeming certainty that they could easily blend into the J-A communities and thus escape detection. The possibility of domestic sabotage and terrorism was thought to be very real. Given that climate, it is not hard to understand why suspicion would fall upon anyone of Japanese ancestry. Under the pressures of massive war mobilization, it seemed to make perfect sense at the time to round up the J-A population and worry later about sorting out who among them might be disloyal and a potential threat.
We have had a half-century of time now to leisurely contemplate whether this was necessary or not, whether the perceived threat was real or not. We enjoy the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. My own view is that temporary confinement was a reasonable war-time emergency step, but that in the implementation of the policy many excesses and injustices took place, owing to a lack of oversight as to exactly how the plan would be carried out. Even so, I think it is a gross overstatement to characterize the internment as an "everlasting shame" of our nation.
The internment is widely viewed today as an example of racism, but I do not believe that this event had anything to do with "racism" in the sense that we use that term today. Our war with Japan was a war between two countries, and two races. As enemies locked in mortal combat, we hated the Japanese and the Japanese hated us. Out of this hatred came atrocities perpetrated by each side on the other. Our POWs suffered a terrible fate at the hands of their Japanese captors, because the surrender of a soldier was contemptible in the eyes of the Japanese and not deserving of any pity. Japan was prepared to commit mass suicide at war's end, preferably in the form of any act that could take as many American lives as possible with them. Yet, when the war did end, the U.S. spent billions to reconstruct the Japanese economy and to restore self-government to their society. Not exactly what you would expect from a racist nation that lost a quarter of a million dead during the war.
. |
