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:
