To: ManyMoose who wrote (645901 ) 10/16/2004 12:48:12 AM From: E Respond to Hi, Dave. I listened to Snow Falling on Cedars on tape, narrated by George Guidall, the best reader of them all, imo. The reason I checked it out was that I noticed he was the reader, and then it turned out to be a moving, memorable book. There were no criminal charges brought against them, no trials before juries, and no findings of guilt before almost all persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast were ordered, in many cases on only a few days’ notice, into camps built in desolate swamp and desert areas. Allowed to take only what they could carry in what was euphemistically termed an "evacuation," they remained behind barbed wire, under the watch of armed soldiers in guard towers...the racial prejudice was open. … Even the United States Army was explicitly segregated… The commander of the Western Defense, Lieutenant General John L. De Witt, opined bluntly that "A Jap’s a Jap and that’s all there is to it." As the chief proponent of the internment, he made clear that he meant Japanese Americans, because "in the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration" and "the Japanese race is the enemy race." Even with Americanization, "racial strains are undiluted." Japanese Americans would be a problem until all Japs were "wiped off the map." (United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians 99 (1983).)"their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese." abanet.org
