By Sue Shinomiya, SIETAR USA President
Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month has taken on a deeper meaning for me in consideration of my Japanese husband and my bi-racial, bi-cultural son. My son has always identified as Asian American. This month I have taken the time to focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the Japanese American experience, which had felt distant from me in the past. I acquired a copy of George Takei’s graphic novel-style autobiography They Called Us Enemy, and I took my class of college students for a visit to the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, which currently has a special exhibit on the Minidoka Internment camp located in deep rural Idaho.
Image credit: JAMO.org
View: Minidoka, An American Concentration Camp (YouTube)
During WWII, after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan, some 120,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and sent off to 10 camps in remote locations across the country. “It’s for their own safety,” amid wartime hysteria they said. “They are a threat” was clearly the stronger driver. The Japanese Americans were given one week’s notice before being shipped off to the middle of nowhere, taking only what they could carry, and losing pretty much everything they had. Many even served valiantly in the US military, while their families remained imprisoned back home. After the war and the closure of the camps, they were given $25 to go back home and start their lives all over again.
After a decades-long campaign by the Japanese-American community, forty years later the US government finally acknowledged that the threat from Japanese American citizens had been unfounded. In 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology and signed the Civil Liberties Act into law, with a small payout for each living survivor, proving that reconciliation isn’t unattainable.
Visiting the museum always leaves me feeling a bit crumpled emotionally. How is it that a country that professes to believe strongly in freedom and equality continues to commit injustices based solely on perceived and superficial differences? It seems especially pertinent to learn about and discuss the dark history of our wartime US concentration camps right now. We look around today to see a similar phenomenon once again raising its ugly head, and people with the wrong accent, skin tone or paperwork are again being carted off to unknown holding centers.
We said “Never again!” back then - it’s high time to revisit our common history, re-learn about our rich and multi-cultural heritage, and keep saying it, a little louder this time.
