Seventy five years on and there are still echos of some of the injustices of wartime US hikers find remains of Japanese WW2 internee
I worked with a Japanese American architect some years ago that was in the Tule Lake internment camp in Northern California during WW2. He was just a kid at the time and his family owned a laundry business in San Francisco. He told me that one day the authorities just showed up and took them all away to the camp, where they were interned until the end of the war. His family lost everything, their business, home and their dignity. He was about 70 years old when I met him, a really nice and easy going guy but still held some resentment at the way his family were treated.
Internment was harsh enough. I didn't realize that their property was also permanently confiscated. I had always assumed it would be reinstated at wars end.
When the US authorities relented on the internment of Japanese American US civilians,the first stage was to create the combat unit,the 442nd RCT, The unit fought first in Italy and then in the Vosges in Eastern France An ATB edition covers the event of internment and the forming of combat unit in its usually comprehensive manner........ ...remembered in the Army Times. This Japanese-American Army unit is the reason we celebrate National ‘Go For Broke’ Day
A very good film on the subject Only the Brave (2006 film) - Wikipedia TD Only the Brave is a 2006 independent film about the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated World War II fighting unit primarily made up of "Nisei" Japanese Americans, which for its size and length of service became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. The film, produced and directed by Lane Nishikawa is a fictionalized account of the rescue of the Lost Battalion.
Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar "A Grave Injustice"...A Congressional Apology In 1988, apologizing on behalf of the nation for the "grave injustice" done to persons of Japanese ancestry, Congress implemented the Civil Liberties Act. Congress declared that the internments were "motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership," and authorized a $20,000 payment to Japanese-Americans who suffered injustices during World War II.
