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Home Front: Politix

L.A. County Board to vote on repealing support of WWII Japanese internment

2012-06-06

I don't like it either, but it was war, not Tiddlywinks. And we finished it in three years and everyone got on with their lives rather than suffered for the next twenty years before declaring victory and walking away leaving things undecided. It bugs me that we could have easily taken care of their houses for them in the meanwhile rather than giving them a week to sell, and we could have put them on their feet better after the war was over, but I don't know the details. Maybe we should get the Japanese government to apologize for making us do what we had to do. Makes about as much sense.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote Wednesday on repealing a resolution made seven decades ago supporting the internment of Japanese Americans shortly after Japan's Pearl Harbor attacks, which led the United States to enter World War II.

"Seventy years ago, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted itself onto the wrong side of history," Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said in a statement in which he announced he'll introduce the motion Wednesday to repeal the board's action.

The board voted unanimously to endorse President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 that put 120,000 Japanese Americans, about a third from Los Angeles County, in internment camps for up to three years, Ridley-Thomas said.

The board said it was difficult "if not impossible to distinguish between loyal and disloyal Japanese aliens."

Ridley-Thomas said his motion "will seek to address a historic wrong."

Actor George Takei, who played Mr. Sulu on the television series "Star Trek," is expected to be among those testifying in support of the motion and recalling his experience as a boy taken from his Los Angeles home and placed in horse stalls at the Santa Anita racetrack.

Takei and his family were then sent to internment camps in Rohwer, Arkansas, and Tule Lake, California.

Posted by:gorb

#9 My mother was a child of 11 at the time, and living with her family in Pasadena, California. Her very best friend was a Japanese-American girl her age, who was the daughter of a nursery-gardener who was one of my grandfather's suppliers. (Grandfather being the head gardener for one of those enormous estates.)And my mother's friend and her family were interned first at the old Santa Anita racetrack in Altadena. My grandfather took her to visit with her friend; they could talk to each other across the barbed wire fence around the internment center.
My grandfather stored all of the property that they couldn't take with them in his garage for the duration. There was another retail nursery-gardener, an Anglo - who bought the nursery and the house that they had to sell, but he paid them a very fair market price for it, which apparently was quite unusual.
They worked for him when they came back, after the war.
Just for grins and giggles, I'd also like to know who benefitted from the forced sales of property. I've also rather cynically been amused at how the print media these days so solemly get up and decry the public hysteria on the west coast that led to the demands for the Japanese to be interned - when the Hearst newspapers in 1942 took a leading role in whipping up the anti-Japanese hysteria in the first place!
My mother has always said that she was rather glad that her friend and her family were interned, because then they were protected by armed guards. She said that after Pearl Harbor, and the fall of the Phillipines, she heard so much ugly talk about what ought to be done about the US-resident Japanese. They didn't tend to live all clustered together - no Chinatown-type district, back then. Most of the Japanese-Americans she knew lived out on little truck farms, or scattered thru suburbia. She says there very likely would have been mob action, and random attacks on Japanese during 1942 and 1943. People were frightened, and very, very angry; it always astonished and shocked her, the ugly things that people said in public - in front of her and other children!

Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2012-06-06 16:12

#8 Exactly Proc. There was a very real danger of Sabotage. Who knows what might have happened if we _didn't_.

It was a terrible thing to have to do - and in most cases unwarranted. But we didn't have the liberty to play Political Correctness at the time.

Still should have guarded their property better.

Posted by: CrazyFool 2012-06-06 15:50

#7 Not making the hard decisions should cost them their jobs. In a sane world.

Posted by: gorb 2012-06-06 14:40

#6 So apparently all other problems were solved and they could get on with 70 year old ones that no one really gives a rat's ass about anymore.

Or are they trying to keep from making really hard decisions that will cost them their jobs by the voters?

Posted by: DarthVader 2012-06-06 13:25

#5 Bingo, rj!

Posted by: Barbara 2012-06-06 12:31

#4 So people who were not alive at the time will rescind a decision that they didn't make, 60 years after the fact.

The word "pointless' leaps to mind.

Posted by: mojo 2012-06-06 11:31

#3 Of course 'new' information gleaned from the declassification of the pre-war and WWII Japanese diplomatic traffic in the 90s won't get the volume of attention that the original act did. Whether the Japanese consulate personnel were just telling their bosses what they wanted to hear or that there was some truth to their reports is up to interpretation. What was not up for interpretation was that the people responsible for security didn't have the luxury to play political correctness with 90 percent of all the nation's aircraft production in the LA or Seattle area based upon those intercepts.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2012-06-06 10:26

#2 A number of folks profitted from the property theft. Id be more impressed with LA if they found a way to publicize who did and by how much. I suspect a lot of them were strong Democrat supporters which is why nobody has so far taken that step.

Posted by: Rjschwarz 2012-06-06 09:58

#1 Harsh and probably unwarranted in most cases, yet somewhat humane treatment as opposed to how the Japanese treated their Chinese, Korean and Filipino subjects.

Posted by: Mullah Richard 2012-06-06 09:45

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