2006: A Call to Action

[kliljedahl]

Published on Thursday, December 29, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Phil Tajitsu Nash


I look for the best in people, and do what I can to promote peace and justice in the world, but I can never forget that my mom and her Japanese American family were placed in barbed wire-enclosed concentration camps during World War II. Mom tried to be 110% American, joining the church, Girl Reserves, and the high school band in the 1930s, but it was not enough. War hysteria, racial prejudice, economic greed, and a failure of political leadership led to the forced uprooting, removal, and confinement of Mom and over 110,000 other Japanese Americans. Their crime? We were at war with Japan, so Americans of Japanese ancestry were suspect, even the 77,000 who were American citizens by birth on American soil.

President Roosevelt and his advisors said in 1942 that a "military necessity," which included details they could not make public at the time, made the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans necessary. Babies, seniors, invalids, teenagers like my mom, and all others had to live behind barbed wire for an average of almost three years.

When government records from the 1940s were made public in the 1970s, we found that there had not, in fact, been a military necessity. Members of the military and the Roosevelt Administration had duped the public, and the Supreme Court had upheld their actions in the case of Korematsu v. United States.

To remedy this injustice, Japanese Americans and their allies fought for and won redress payments for each surviving former prisoner in 1988. Federal courts in the 1980s agreed that there had been no basis for the "military necessity" claim in the 1940s. But the damage already had been done. A wall had been breached. Martial law had been selectively enforced against one group of Americans, and almost everyone else in America (with a few notable exceptions) had stood by passively and accepted the "military necessity" claim.

As we enter 2006, you don't have to view life through a Japanese American perspective to see that something is seriously wrong with our country.



Keith’s Barbeque Central