Reply #38: I would like to make Michelle Malkin eat it

[Generic Other]

Sorry, fooj, but that booklet gave me a chill of horror. Even though I wasn't alive when the evacuations happened, I am Japanese American, and am much more sensitive about those days than my mom's generation--the Nisei.

That book reminds me of the reaction I had when some one once brought me some chunks of pavement from Manzanar. Anger.

And once when I was going through newspaper reels at the library I found a full page ad with the names of every Japanese business in town printed the Christmas after Pearl Harbor. It had a flag and a declaration of loyalty. By February, they would be giving the FBI all their radios, cameras, guns, Japanese books, samurai swords, binoculars, etc. In Washington state where I live, the whole Japanese community went to Camp Harmony a makeshift jail in the pig barn at the county fairgrounds, and then were sent on to a Camp Minidoka, in Idaho. Some of their non-Japanese friends and neighbors came to say goodbye standing outside the chain link fences. It was unspeakably wrong.

I am always surprised at how emotional I feel about it. I always wonder what I would have done in their shoes. Would I have meekly accepted or what? Gotten myself killed? It's good not to forget. But thinking about it always leaves me a little anxious. Too many hard questions.

I hope you are able to scan the booklet.