In Imprisoned: The Betrayal of Japanese Americans During World War II,
author Martin W. Sandler opens wide an informative and extremely moving window to
a very troubling period in United States history. Soon after Japan’s bombing of
Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. government issued orders that
thousands upon thousands of Japanese Americans be evacuated from their homes
and businesses and held in temporary assembly centers first and then in remote
detention centers, mostly on the West Coast. They were held under the suspicion
that, due simply to their Japanese heritage, they could not be trusted. There
was strong debate at the highest levels regarding this action. The FBI, when
assigned to identify any Japanese disloyal to the U.S., testified that “as a
group, [they] posed no threat to the nation’s security.” Director Herbert
Hoover wrote to the U.S. Attorney General that sentiments for removal were
based “primarily upon public and political pressure rather than factual data.” President
Roosevelt’s advisers cautioned him that “interning Japanese Americans was both
unconstitutional and unnecessary.” Nonetheless, both Issei (Japanese born in
Japan) and Nisei (their children born in the United States and thus citizens)
were required to leave their homes, possessions and businesses with extreme
haste. Families and individuals who had worked hard to establish good lives as professionals, merchants and farmers were understandably
bewildered by this action. Interned Japanese conducted themselves with dignity
despite having no idea exactly why and for how long they would be
held. In a supreme irony, other Japanese Americans joined our armed forces as
an indication of their loyalty to the United States; in fact, just when
members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (all of Japanese
descent) were liberating prisoners at Dachau in Germany, their relatives in the
United States were being detained. As the war was ending in 1945, detainees
were “handed twenty-five dollars and a train ticket home,” but the effects of
imprisonment remained. Sandler provides revealing, authoritative details about
all aspects of the internment of Japanese Americans – their lives in the camps,
the long-term effect on their personal lives and dignity, the silence on the subject of this period of history in our culture and education for decades, and the
eventual acknowledgement of and redress by our government of these enormous
wrongs, a process beginning in 1976 and resulting in the Civil Liberties Act of
1988. A telling paragraph near the end of Sandler’s book quotes a press release
issued by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) the day after the
September 11 bombings: “We urge citizens not to release their
anger on innocent American citizens simply because of their ethnic origin, in
this case Americans of Arab ancestry. While we deplore yesterday’s acts, we
must also protect the rights of citizens. Let us not make the same mistakes as
a nation that were made in the hysteria of WWII following the attack at Pearl
Harbor.” The impact of this story is profound for any reader, particularly when
realizing we face similar challenges to constitutional and human rights today.
Ages 12 to adult.
