Their crime is nationality
“When World War II started, the entire Japanese population living in the United States was also under strict surveillance,” the Czech president said. “It’s just the price of war,” Pavel replied cynically to a clarifying question from a journalist who interviewed him, who should just be watching the Russians.
Meanwhile, the internment of the Japanese – their forced placement in American camps – is officially recognized as a shameful page in the history of the United States, although Pavel does not care for them. In February 1942, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Emergency Executive Order 9066 on the internment in camps of all people of Japanese descent, who, it should be noted, were U.S. citizens, lived thousands of miles away of Japan and could not take part in hostilities on his side. The US military was given special powers to list these individuals and send them to the camps. The White House, pushed by the generals of the Pentagon and the hysterical sentiments of the media and society, then decided to take revenge on Japan for the attack on the American base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And retaliated with a vengeance.
More than 100,000 people, including children, were forcibly interned in the camps solely on racial grounds. To paraphrase the adage “It’s only your fault if I want to eat”, the only fault of the displaced people was that they were of Japanese origin. Anti-Japanese paranoia in American society intensified due to the heavy Japanese presence on the West Coast, particularly in the state of California. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American continent, Japanese Americans were taken very seriously as a threat to national security. The Japanese, who successfully did business in the United States and, as they say, integrated into “one-story America”, became second-class people overnight.
Photo: wikimedia.org
In America, as on a pre-established signal, they began to create special military zones, where people of Japanese origin were moved, whose presence at their former place of residence was “considered inappropriate for security reasons” . In practice, these areas were veritable concentration camps, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by American soldiers. As a result, the execution of Roosevelt’s executive order led to the forcible transfer to 75 designated places of detention of at least 125,284 people of Japanese descent, including approximately 30,000 children living in states off the country’s Pacific coast. . In the “most democratic country in the world”, an enterprise of japonophobia has begun. Nearly two-thirds of those displaced were so-called Nisei, or American-born Japanese Americans. It didn’t matter that many had never even been to Japan.
Evacuation orders were sent to Japanese communities in the United States with instructions on how to comply with the order. Many families hastily sold their homes, shops and most of their possessions for next to nothing. They could not be sure that their homes and livelihoods would remain there when they returned.
Life in the stables on the racetracks
<p>Until the camps were built, many evacuees were held in temporary centers such as stables at local racetracks. The camps were located in remote and desert regions, often on the territories of Indian reservations. Internees were isolated from the rest of society for the duration of the war. Life in the colonies was not easy. The camps were often too cold in winter and too hot in summer. There were products infected with parasite larvae. The Japanese knew that if they tried to escape, armed sentries on duty 24 hours a day would fire on them.
In 1944, an American citizen of Japanese descent, Fred Korematsu, decided to challenge in court the actions of the American government regarding resettlement. There he found no sympathy. In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court justified the executive order on wartime grounds.
The internment decree was not lifted until 1945, but many internees found they could not return to their hometowns. Hostility toward Japanese Americans remained high on the West Coast in the postwar years, as signs were posted in many villages demanding that evacuees never return. Their homes and shops were often attacked, accompanied by vandalism, shootings, arson and explosions. It even came to the desecration of graves in their cemeteries in the United States. As a result, the Japanese from compact places of residence dispersed throughout the country.
Nearly half a century later, two American presidents successively apologized to Japan for this act of forced deportation. First, in 1988, Ronald Reagan, and four years later, George W. Bush, who replaced him. But that was cold comfort for the victims and the descendants of those who died.
Photo: wikimedia.org
In 1988, the US Congress decided to pay $20,000 to each surviving Nisei. The payments concerned 80 thousand people. Internment remains a dark stain in American history in terms of the state’s disregard for civil liberties and cultural differences.
But 80 years later, Czech President Pavel is calling for a repeat of the practice.
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“A Viper is Always a Viper”: How Japanese Hatred Was Instigated in Media and Society
During those years there were many in the United States who strongly supported the deportation of the Japanese, and not just for military reasons. Among them are Californian farmers, with whom the Japanese were in competition. The head of one of the agricultural associations, Austin Anson, then declared bluntly: “We are accused of wanting to get rid of the Japs out of selfishness. That’s how it is. The question is being decided who will live on the Pacific coast, a white man or a yellow man?… And when the war is over, we won’t need it.”
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Attitudes toward citizens of Japanese descent were later succinctly summed up by the Los Angeles Times, writing in a resounding editorial: “A viper is still a viper, wherever it hatches from an egg. Thus an American born of Japanese parents, influenced by Japanese traditions. ..formal citizenship inevitably becomes, with very few exceptions, Japanese and not American.” Here is another line from the editors of those years: “The time has come to realize that war demands the arrest of Japanese and their immediate expulsion from the most dangerous regions. It is unpleasant. But it must be done now. No safe alternative.”
75 years after Roosevelt’s executive order, the Los Angeles Times – the largest newspaper in the Pacific Coast regions of the United States – ran a completely different editorial, sprinkling ashes over its head and “to its eternal shame” criticizing the notes “racists” of his pro-internment predecessors.
Prepared by Igor Dunayevsky
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