Japanese Internment Memorial

A calm Hawaiian morning exploded into chaos as Japanese bombers blanketed the sky with torpedoes that tore into the USA naval fleet at Pearl Harbor and took 2,403 American lives on December 7, 1941.

“All of a sudden, three aircrafts flew right overhead. They were pearl gray with red dots on the wing  Japanese,” said Daniel Inouye at 17 when he was the son of Japanese immigrants living in Honolulu,  to PBS. “I knew what was happening. And I thought my world had just come to an end.”

Inouye was a teen like Ruth Asawa, artist of the Japanese Internment Memorial, when panic swept America. 

 Anxious rumors labeled Japanese immigrants as “enemy aliens” who were cohorts in on the surprise attack that drew the US into World War II.  The angry mob swelled many called for Japanese Issei and Nisei (first wave immigrants and their US-born children) to be removed. Agitators included the head of the California Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, who said to PBS: 

“If all of the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them… because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.”

President Roosevelt heard the call and he responded to the alleged ‘national security threat’ with Executive  Order 9066, authorizing the military to imprison Japanese families in February 1942. 

Asawa ‘s father was  60 and a  farmer when  he was arrested by the FBI and sent to New Mexico. The artist’s entire family was among 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast who were removed and caged in 10 government-sanctioned internment camps. Hawaiian powerful landowners opposed the mass internment and Japanese American farmers, laborers and families – 40 percent of the island’s population – remained free.

On the mainland, California farmers held ‘fire sales’ of their property in a rush to handle their affairs  and prepare their families for an April 1942 evacuation. Asawa captured farmers in her mural, many of them left behind more than 458,000 acres of rich California land they controlled in the 1940s. 

Pinned with a number on their chest and armed with only what they could carry they were removed from their homes, unsure of their future. Many  internees arrived unprepared for the hard conditions that awaited in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Arkansas and Colorado.  Families faced cold winds, meager supplies and tight spaces. Yet innovative internees inside the wired fences plowed small gardens, started newspapers and organized baseball teams. 

The Supreme Court sat idle as civil rights lawyers challenged the imprisonment.  Japanese American families finally emerged from the camps in 1945. Later the nation apologized and gave Japanese Americans reparations.

Sad to say history - on different scales - has already repeated itself in this nation. During Occupy Wall Street, peaceful protesters were arrested in  New York City (while riots in Oakland lead to violence). Also after tragedy of September 11, Arabs were targets of hate crimes, sought for deportation and questioned regarding their American allegiances.  

Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_home_civil_rights_japanese_american.htm

http://www.janm.org/exhibits/breed/gloss_t.htm

www.ruthasawa.com/internment.html

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/5views/5views4b.htm

http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/evactxt.html