Raising the Red Flag: The Continued Relevance of the Japanese Internment in the Post-Hamdi World

Abstract

Most of what I have learned and internalized about the Japanese internment came from my mother, Mariko Hirata. My mother was just a young girl when her own government imprisoned her. Growing up, I heard all about the cold, the dirt, the embarrassing communal showers, the shame, and the guns. My mother painted a picture of her family’s perpetually dusty tar-paper shack, where they slept five to a room underneath oiled-paper windows in the dead of the Wyoming winter. At five years old, my mother played with the round horntoad droppings under the beds, believing they looked like little billiard balls. My mother recalled with ire observing her father taken away to pick potatoes, accompanied by armed soldiers. She related with sorrow the taunts of the white children from outside the barbed wire and fences, while like a Kafka-esque vision, she and other Japanese children saluted the American flag. She also told me about the prelude to and aftermath of