Swinging through the Nat’l Museum of American History with my kids this morning, I came across an exhibition I hadn’t seen before: “Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II.” It explores the forced incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry from 2/19/42 to 9/4/45. 
After FDR signed Executive Order 9066, nearly 75,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and another 45,000 Japanese nationals living in the U.S., were taken into custody and placed in prison camps. What these camps actually were was cloaked in euphemistic language—still is.
Families were removed forcibly (“relocated”) from their homes and livelihoods. Their U.S. citizenship was effectively null and void. So was their dignity as persons.
While wartime hysteria exacerbated racial prejudice, xenophobic/denigrating attitudes towards Japanese Americans long preceded the injustices of 1942. The cultural alien-ation of people (even legal immigrants) makes it far easier to alien-ate them legally, forcibly, & literally.
Fear can imprison the souls of even our most beloved heroes.
40 yrs later, Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing an apology and restitution ($20,000) to living Japanese Americans who were incarcerated. As Reagan rightly notes, restitution is about the restoration of honor and dignity, not financial debts alone.
Would we ever do it again? I want to believe we’ve learned from our mistakes; yet some we’ve repeated already. Alas, fear is an enslaving power not easily overcome. (Below: The Mochida family awaiting an evacuation bus in Hayward, California, May 8, 1942.)
