Tag: japanese american internment
Fear Led Us To Intern Japanese Americans. Who’s Next?

Fear Led Us To Intern Japanese Americans. Who’s Next?

Imagine this.

You are a boy, living in a child’s blissful unaware. You are not terribly different from other kids. Maybe you play stickball in the street and pretend to be Joe DiMaggio. Maybe you listen to “The Lone Ranger” on the Philco. Maybe you’re crazy for Superman.

Maybe it’s a good life.

Then comes that sudden Sunday in December. All at once, everyone is angry about something bad that happened at a place called Pearl Harbor, and people you know — people who know you — are staring at you as if you are no longer who you always were.

Two months later — 75 years ago this week — there is news about a new executive order signed by President Roosevelt. Soon, the poster starts appearing on lamp posts. The headline reads: “Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.” It is an evacuation order.

As a child, you know nothing about the column in the San Francisco Examiner where Henry McLemore wrote: “Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”

And you didn’t hear how Assistant War Secretary John McCloy said, “If it is a question of the safety of the country [and] the Constitution … why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

All you know is that suddenly, with maybe a week’s notice, you are on a train, being taken away from your Philco and from stickball games, from Superman comic books, from, well … everything.

Maybe your name is Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, and you will someday be Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid” movies. Maybe your name is Hosato Takei, and as George Takei, you will become the original Mr. Sulu on “Star Trek.” Maybe your name is Norman Mineta and you will be a congressman.

But in the desolate camps to which you are exiled, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you might someday be. In the camps, as they say, “A Jap is a Jap.”

So in the camps, you live behind barbed wire, under armed guard in tar paper barracks with toilets where you must do your business in public view.

You live with inferno heat, aching cold, and gritty dust. Yet, you struggle to hold on to who you used to be.

You play baseball. You draw and sing. And you go to school, where every morning you stand, hand over your heart, and recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America …”

Seventy-five years later, communal memory recoils from what the United States of America did to you. And as we tend do when memory indicts conscience, we choose to forget.

So many of us no longer know what happened, how you lost your businesses, your homes, how your lives were never again the same.

As many of us forget the story, we also forget its moral: how fear can interdict reason, make you lash out with hatred at harmless people.

Thus, some of us cheered recently when a new executive order was signed and our airports turned to chaos. Some of us echoed McCloy: “The Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

But the rest of us were saddened by what America has done to itself — and to countless innocents — in the spasms of its fear.

The rest of us were stunned by what Winston Churchill called “the confirmed unteachability” of humankind.

We never learn, do we?

Imagine you are a boy, living in a child’s blissful unaware, not terribly different from other kids. Maybe you play hoops at the park and pretend to be Michael Jordan. Maybe you watch Power Rangers. Maybe you’re crazy for Spider-Man.

Maybe it’s a good life.

But then comes a sudden Tuesday in September.

IMAGE: War Relocation Authority – 210-G-2A-572, Records of War Relocation Authority, Record Group 210; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. Wikicommons / United States Department of Interior.

Confusion Over Trump’s First Talks With Foreign Leader

Confusion Over Trump’s First Talks With Foreign Leader

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – One day before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s first meeting with a foreign leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japanese officials said they had not finalized when or where in New York it would take place, who would be invited, or in some cases whom to call for answers.

Uncertainty over the talks shows the difficulties in turning Trump from a freewheeling businessman into a sitting president with a watertight schedule and a fully functioning administration by his inauguration on Jan. 20.

Japanese and U.S. officials said on Wednesday the State Department had not been involved in planning the meeting, leaving the logistical and protocol details that normally would be settled far in advance still to be determined.

“There has been a lot of confusion,” said one Japanese official.

The meeting was only agreed to last week and Trump and his advisers have been busy in meetings at his headquarters in Manhattan’s Trump Tower in recent days to work out who gets which job in the new administration.

While world leaders sometimes hold loosely planned bilateral meetings at regional summits, it is unusual for foreign leaders to hold high-level diplomatic talks in the United States without detailed planning. Abe is on his way to an Asia-Pacific summit in Peru.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said that to his knowledge, Trump’s transition team had not been in contact with the department either to discuss the transition of government or to seek information ahead of his meetings with foreign leaders.

Trump is expected to use the Abe meeting to reassure Japan and other Asian allies rattled by his campaign rhetoric, advisers to Trump said.

But Trump, a brash outsider with no diplomatic or government experience, and Abe, a veteran lawmaker, have differences on policy issues such as free trade.

Several Trump aides did not immediately answer requests on Wednesday for comment about the Abe visit or contact between the transition team and the State Department.

TRANSITION SPECULATION

Speculation about top appointments to the Trump administration has intensified since the head of the team overseeing the transition, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, was removed last week and replaced by Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

Transition team officials said on Wednesday night that Trump planned to announce “landing teams” on Thursday that would begin setting up staff in key agencies, like the State and Justice departments.

They added in a conference call with reporters that those who begin working on the teams would have to sign an agreement not to lobby for five years after they leave the administration, keeping with a Trump campaign promise to institute a ban on lobbying for executive branch employees.

Trump on Wednesday denounced reports of disorganization in the team, singling out the New York Times for saying world leaders have had trouble getting in touch with him since his upset victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

The Republican real estate magnate said on Twitter he had taken “calls from many foreign leaders despite what the failing @nytimes said. Russia, U.K., China, Saudi Arabia, Japan.”

The Times, a frequent target of Trump’s Twitter blasts, said on Tuesday that U.S. allies were “scrambling to figure out how and when to contact Mr. Trump” and blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach him.

The newspaper said Trump was working without official State Department briefing materials in his dealings with foreign leaders.

“The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition,” Trump tweeted, without specifying what it was in the article that was incorrect. “It is going so smoothly. Also, I have spoken to many foreign leaders.”

Trump and Pence had spoken to 29 foreign leaders, the transition team said on Wednesday.

Trump has mostly stuck to normal practice for a U.S. president-elect with the order in which he has spoken to foreign leaders on the phone since his election victory.

But some of his contacts have stretched the limits of the usual procedure.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an army general who seized power three years ago, appears to have been the first leader to speak to Trump after the election, ahead of closer allies like the leaders of Britain and Germany.

Sisi’s office called Trump last Wednesday and the incoming U.S. president told him it was “the first international call he had received to congratulate him on winning the election.”

Australian media reported that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the second leader Trump spoke to, after the Australian ambassador to the United States got Trump’s personal phone number from Australian golfer and Trump friend Greg Norman.

Trump also talked on the phone to the leaders of Britain, Germany, Turkey and other allies.

But a phone call on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the two men agreed to aim for “constructive cooperation,” raised eyebrows among Democrats and traditionalist Republicans worried about a resurgent Moscow.

Trump also met Britain’s anti-EU Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage at Trump Tower last weekend, ahead of any meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

State Department spokesman Kirby said: “There’s been no outreach to date” from Trump’s transition aides. “But it’s not for us to approve or disapprove of conversations that the president-elect is having or may have in the future with foreign leaders.”

‘ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS’

Despite fevered speculation, Trump has yet to say who will fill Cabinet positions such as secretary of state, treasury secretary or defense secretary. His team said that was not unusual and was in line with the timing of the transition of Democrat Barack Obama to the White House after he won the presidency in 2008.

Trump could add son-in-law Jared Kushner as a top White House adviser, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, has been a central adviser during the campaign and transition. The Trump transition team has repeatedly denied it is seeking high-level security clearance for Kushner.

A federal anti-nepotism law prohibits a president from hiring family members to serve in his administration, but the Journal said it was not clear if the law applied to a position inside the White House. It added Kushner had indicated he would avoid the issue by not taking pay for any White House work.

Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump aide who served as his campaign manager, said she did not think Kushner was seeking an official role in the White House.

“I just hung up the phone with Jared, and we didn’t discuss that,” Conway told reporters on Wednesday night. “I think he just wants to be incredibly helpful to his father-in-law as he’s been all along.”

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley will meet with Trump on Thursday, the transition team said. She emerged on Wednesday as a potential candidate for secretary of state.

After speculation emerged that JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Jamie Dimon remained a contender for treasury secretary, the bank’s stock price dropped.

(Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey, Idrees Ali, David Alexander, Lesley Wroughton and Eric Beech in Washington, and Emily Stephenson in New York; Writing by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Bill Trott and Peter Cooney)

IMAGE: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker conversation in Manhattan, New York, U.S., September 21, 2016. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Endorse This: George Takei Bears Witness Against The Hate

Endorse This: George Takei Bears Witness Against The Hate

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With all the paranoia against immigrants and Syrian refugees, and after one local mayor even praised the Japanese-American internment of the 1940s, here’s a celebrity who is speaking out: legendary actor George Takei, who as a child was imprisoned with his family in the camps.

Watch as the Star Trek actor who is now starring in the Broadway show Allegiance, which depicts the ordeal, describes one of the most insidious ramifications of the internment — that at such a young age, it all seemed so normal to him.

“It became routine to go with my father to bathe in a mass shover, and begin the school day — ironically, now, — with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag,” Takei says. “I can see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower right outside my schoolhouse window, ‘with liberty and justice for all.'”

And as the presidential campaign descends into such a virulent dialogue, Takei warns the country to think of the consequences: “We were 120,000, and the effect on not only Japanese-Americans who were interned — it was disastrous, obviously — but what it did to America.”

Video via CNN.

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In Face Of Refugee Crisis, Will We Repeat The Injustice Of 1942?

In Face Of Refugee Crisis, Will We Repeat The Injustice Of 1942?

This is how fear mongering works. The year could be 1942 … or 2015.

“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

Those are the words of David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia. The “sequester” he alludes to was the unjust and inhumane internment by the U.S. government of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. It wasn’t just “foreign nationals” who suffered this treatment but citizens as well, including those born in our country.

Bowers’ historically vacuous statement was apparently his contribution to the current debate over whether the U.S. should follow through on its promise to accept refugees from the Syrian civil war. What he implies is that Syrian refugees are just as likely to do the bidding of the Islamic State as Japanese-Americans were to serve the war aims of Imperial Japan.

That drew shudders from the descendants and colleagues of a distinguished American by the name of Minoru Yasui. Yasui spent virtually all of his 70 years trying to get the U.S. government not only to apologize for but also to understand the injustice of having interned him and nearly 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry during the war.

Yasui was born in Oregon. He had a law degree and had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army’s Infantry Reserve. Nevertheless, he was kept in prison and internment for three years. The reason? His ancestry.

The Yasui family has worked for years to gain their patriarch justice. He was announced as a posthumous recipient the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month. A few days later, the hysteria over the Syrian refugees reached a fevered pitch, inspiring Bower’s remarks.

“If Yasui was here, he would condemn what is happening,” said Peggy Nagae, a Portland attorney who served as the lead attorney in reopening the case of his conviction for breaking laws restricting Japanese-Americans.

She notes that a 1981 governmental report, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, determined that the internment was not justified by military necessity but a “grave injustice,” the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

No acts of espionage or sabotage were ever found among those interned. Yet the Japanese-Americans were thought to be waiting, plotting something really big against their own country.

Yasui purposefully broke a curfew, trying to mount a legal test. He spent nine months in solitary confinement while awaiting an appeal for disobeying an order for enemy aliens. The fight went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the curfew constitutional as a wartime necessity.

Yasui was assigned to the Minidoka Relocation Camp in Idaho and later was sent to work in an ice plant.

After the war, he ended up in Denver, where he helped establish civil rights organizations and worked closely with African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. Yasui died in 1986.

And it wasn’t until nearly 50 years after the internment, in 1990, that the first checks of compensation for that act were issued by President George H.W. Bush. About $20,000 went to each internee.

For Nagae the parallels between Yasui’s era and the fears driving the politics today, especially after the Paris terrorist attacks, are stark. Her own father had also been interned and was befriended by Yasui.

“Fear is used to justify actions on the basis of military security and national security,” she said. “It’s an issue and conflict that doesn’t go away.”

Chani Hawkins, Yasui’s granddaughter, is working on a documentary film and other memorials to her grandfather’s life.

“We feel it is an important lesson that we must learn from as a country so similar mistakes are not repeated,” Hawkins said.

Apparently, many of us haven’t learned. More than half the nation’s governors have asserted that no Syrian refugee will be resettled in their state.

It’s a posture that won’t pass constitutional scrutiny — but also that makes little sense. The system of security checks for refugees is already rigorous, including vetting by counter-terrorism agencies. Yet a bipartisan House bill hurriedly passed last week would upend the complex security process already in place for judging refugee applications.

“Race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Let’s remember those words — and make sure they play no part in how we respond to the Syrian refugee crisis.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2015, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: Dust storm at Manzanar War Relocation Center. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikicommons)