Gary Kamiya does a great profile of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American Nisei, was one of the few to resist the move to the internment camps during WW2. While Korematsu initially lost the case at the US Supreme Court, documents found over 40 years later proved that the US Government had lied to the US Supreme Court. Korematsu brought the case back to the courts witht the new documentation and the government lost.
Fred Korematsu resisted the order. He took his case to the Supreme Court. Of the four Supreme Court cases brought by Japanese-Americans involving the internment order, his was the only one in which the court directly ruled on the constitutionality of the relocation order. In what is now regarded as one of the most disgraceful rulings in the court’s history, he lost — and to this day, the right of the government to act as it did in 1942 has never been overturned. But his defeat carried within it the seeds of a larger victory. Forty-one years later, a legal team made up of mostly young Japanese-American lawyers — many of whose parents had been in the camps — brought suit to bring justice not just to Korematsu, but also to all those who had been wronged by the internment orders. In a stunned and tearful California courtroom, his conviction for refusing to report to an “assembly center” was overturned, and the shame of a dark moment in American history was finally washed away.
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The conservative Japanese American Citizens League, the sole group representing both Issei (Japan-born Americans, forbidden by racist U.S. law from becoming citizens) and Nisei (their American-born children) had decided for strategic reasons to go along quietly with whatever the authorities ordered.
Also note Steven Okazaki’s 1985 documentary: “Unfinished Business”
Resisting arrest: Six decades before Guantanamo, Fred Korematsu refused to go quietly when the government tried to put him in a prison camp because of his race [salon.com]
Gen,
Hope you don’t mind me asking, but you’re nikkei, right? Are you from LA?
J, I’m from NYC.
Do you think Mr.Korematsu is featured at anywhere in Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles?
I don’t remember seeing anything when I went a couple years ago, but then again, I wasn’t looking for it specifically.
Comparing the Japanese internment to Gitmo is an insult to the Japanese who were held prisoner – most of whom were productive American citizens, not un-uniformed combatants (the definition of spy from a Geneva Convention perspective, and thus not subject to the general rules) captured in a war zone.
Seperately, the tie between race and Japanese culture and national affiliation is much stronger than such ties in just about any other country that I can think of, short of the Maoris in New Zealand perhaps. The world in 1942 was much larger than it is today, and the likelihood of someone maintaining strong ties to their traditional culture was similarly stronger. Anti-Japanese sentiment wasn’t necessarilly racially motivated – it was culture / nationality motivated. It just so happens, though, that Japanese nationhood, culture *and* race are all intertwined – unlike most Western countries (Germany, perhaps, excluded). By virtue of my race, for example, I can be French, English, German, Italian, American or Russian – but I can’t be Japanese, or at least, the chances are remote. Similarly, Gen, in 1942, would most certainly be Japanese; whether or not he was American is open to question. So the concept of internment with such a fully integrated culture – in 1942 – is not quite the outrage that it is usually portrayed to be. I am not advocating racism; but there are times and places where circumstances make activities that appear racist also be not only defensible but reasonable and even prudent. For example, associating a bunch of Mongols, riding small horses and carrying weapons, in 1300 with the Horde might have been a good plan – and killing them on sight would probably have been very reasonable (remember: 1300 not 2004).
In a broader context, this is why religion is a poor identifier for airline screening, for example – radical Islam is inclusive and anyone could be a Muslim Fanatic. “Japanese” in 1942, though, was a very exclusive idea that subsumed a number of different things, including race – and national alignment, to a large extent.
As a final note, how about dwelling on the bad people that started the war, and the crazies that let it go on as long as it did? I hear a lot about American inadequacy, but not nearly as much about the fact that our errors are largely limited to “style” and don’t have the far-reaching consequences that others’ flaws tend to lead to. So far, cross my fingers and knock wood, anyway. For example, it wasn’t the U.S. that led the Bataan Death March, and it wasn’t the Japanese that shut down Hitler’s death camps or Mussolini’s alarmingly punctual trains. It’s not the U.S. who beheads people for apostacy (a charming feature of rigorously implemented Sharia); it’s certainly not the U.S….you know what? Fine. The U.S. is bad…fuck us. Hirohito is a better choice by far than the U.S. imposed democracy in Tokyo – which remains an occupied country 60 years on – Mr. Gorbrachev, rebuild this wall! And why not condemn South Korea to Kim Jong Il, while we’re at it? They eat too much anyway, Korean dogs. They deserve the madman that their northern brethren and Chinese put in place. A famine will put them right in their place.
Good Christ. War is a shitty fucking business, and shitty things happen during major wars to everyone. Handwringing about it 60 years on is useless and bizarre. I can tell you one thing though: you won’t see an article in a Japanese paper detailing how Imperial Japan violated the civil rights of just about everyone who didn’t have eyes that were not only slanted, but slanted in the right direction.
Thus endeth my incoherent rant.
cdg