As an immigrant to America, I started school in the United States in the fifth grade at the age of 12 at Angeles Mesa School in Los Angeles. I have fond memories of that experience that I still cherish to this day, at age 70. My subject in this piece, however, is about something else: The internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. I don't recall ever hearing about this dreadful episode in American history in my US History books. I only heard it from outside sources and my own study of it. It still amazes me to this day how this horrible episode happened and how nobody paid a price for it, let alone the single perpetrator of it, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Occasionally, something comes out that reminds us of what happened. David Ono, a news anchor at the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, recently made a wonderful short documentary about the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming. Click here to view this wonderful short documentary that summarizes what the innocent Japanese Americans went through during World War II. In an earlier piece in 2011, on this blog, I detailed what happened to the Japanese Americans. You can check it out by clicking here.
I can understand war hysteria. In the 1950s and 60s we were paranoid about communism and the dreaded "Domino Theory," The Vietnam War was started, in part, for this reason. In the 1960s we were also paranoid about a Russian nuclear bomb. Many people built shelters in their back yards.
To put what happened to the Japanese Americans in today's perspective, let's say that after Vladimir Putin took over the Crimea and then invaded the Ukraine, the United States in it's paranoia, arrested and confined all Americans of Russians descent. So, as Maria Sharipova is playing at the Paris Tennis Tournament she is taken into custody, just because she is Russian. This, in short, is what happened to the innocent Japanese Americans. They spent three to five years in a concentration camp just for being of Japanese ancestry, nothing else. Nobody in the government paid a price for it.
