Incarceration of the Japanese Americans: A Sixty-Year Perspective

Abstract

I FINISHED THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this essay in late August 2001.1 In the aftermath of September 11th it became clear to me that something else had to be added. Although I do not believe, as many do, that everything changed or that there are many parallels with December 7, 1941, there are some obvious similarities and differences. The 1982 report of the presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians found that three broad historical causes shaped the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans:2 race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. It is clear that today prejudice and hysteria are again all too present, but, at the top at least and beginning from the oval office, there has been a clear distinction between Arab/Muslim terrorists and Arab Americans. It also became clear to me, despite cynics who insist that we never learn from history, that a heightened awareness of what was done to Japanese Americans almost sixty years ago, has had a sobering effect on today's policy makers. We can credit some of this to the long chain of scholarship that stretches back to Eugene V. Rostow's courageous 1945 articles,3 and to the Japanese American activists who finally got an apology and symbolic compensation for their wartime ordeal from the government in 1990. However, we should not be overly congratulatory yet. It must be noted that, however tolerant the words at the top have been-and words do