Today I was listening to a program about the internment of the American Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The theme of the discussion was how unjust the treatment of American citizens was, and I agreed, at least for awhile. Then a thought occurred to me that perhaps the internment was also beneficial in as much as emotions were running pretty hot after the attack, and may have led to wholesale bloodshed of Asian Americans had they not been sequestered away from the general populace. The logic I used is this:1; The largest concentration of American Japanese was on the West Coast, and this area was a lot more wild west than today
2; Americans of European decent have not always been kind in their treatment of Americans of other races. Examples, American Negros have been brutalized for years simply for existing, and we are all aware of how the indigenous Indian population has been treated at the hands of their “White Brothers.”
So, I pose this thought to the Board Members, and ask for their input. Is my logic sound or is it a train racing, out of control on a dead-end track/
Since you’re looking for opinions, I’ll move this from MPSIMS to IMHO. They may want to move it to GD.
Sounds like we locked up the wrong people.
Huh? Look, you’re talking about 1942. Wild West?
Ravenman,
I am not certain of the meaning of your response, if indeed it means anything at all.
I will try to clarify ,I don’t feel as though the internment was just by any means. My point is that perhaps the internment, while being unjust, also protected the American Japanese from acts of mob violence and lynch mobs
I grew up in California. AFAIK, there were never mob attacks on Japanese Americans or Japanese that were in the US following Pearl Harbor. I’d like to see reputable cites if there are any.
That said, it is in line with “we had to destroy the village to save it” line of reasoning.
China Guy,
That is my point, if you read my post you will see that I was postulating that perhaps the very fact that the American Japanese were interned may have protected them from reprisals from angry mobs. To speak to mob violence in the 40’s in the L.A. area there were the infamous “Zoot Suit Riots.”
Using that kind of logic, why not put all minorities into Ghettos, too? There was mob violence against Irish and blacks on the East Coast (New York) in the 1890s and 1910s. If the blacks had stayed in Ghettoes, the assaults during the Freedom rides and the Civil Rights struggle would also not have happened.
There’s gang violence, some motivated by racism, in the US today between different groups. So lets put all different groups each into their own ghetto! No inter-racial marriage allowed, because that would screw up the sorting.
This population was relocated to camps with lousy conditions, out in the middle of nowhere. They lost their homes, posessions, and past that they worked so hard to build in this country. Not to mention the physical and emotional toll the relocation took on them all. And you think this was worth the slim chance of being targeted? Really?
I was just about to say the same thing, this is the most fucked up reasoning ever!
Hitler was probably trying to protect the jews and gypsies too, and when he feared that angry mobs would still get at them in the concentration camps he made the humane decision to have them euthanised rather than let a angry racist mob tear them limb from limb. I mean the guy was a humanitarian!:dubious:
Racial segregation was nothing but a noble gesture to avoid racial strife and tension.:smack:
My dad tells the story of going in to elementary school in Glendale California the day after Pearl Harbor, finding everyone swarming around the water fountain. In it was a small flap of yellowish skin.
Still, “for their protection” was bullshit. As was the claim that it was easier to segregate the entire group than ferret out the spies: then why no internment in Hawaii?
It was just good, old-fashioned California hatred. More than any other state, it was the Promised Land…for white people. LA did everything it could to keep Blacks from moving there after the turn of the century when the population was otherwise exploding; during the Depression they herded Chicanos onto boxcars and sent them to Mexico; during the Gold Rush they hunted Indians and killed them like snakes.
In all fairness, at least the Japanese were allowed to return to the US West Coast after the war, albeit to nothing. When the Canadians released their Japanese citizens they gave them only two choices: move east of the Rockies, or a boat ride to (devastated) Japan.
Internment happened in the 1940s, the “wild west” had long gone and the era of anti-Asian riots had ended 35 years earlier.
And if protecting people from violence really were the reasoning, doesn’t it make more sense to lock up the potential attackers than the potential victims?
The logic doesn’t hold up.
I agree with you but internment in Hawaii would have been next to impossible given that the people of Japanese ancestry were a huge percentage of the population, more than half I believe.
I grew up in West Los Angeles which has a large Japanese-American population. The parents of many of my classmates spent their childhoods or teen years in those camps. It’s one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history.
I do not believe that the Japanese American internment was meant to protect them from violence, IMO it was a way to show hatred toward the race during the war. So why were German Americans then not also sent into camps? Because they were white and the hatred was racially driven.
It is true that the LA police did not protect Mexican Americans from violent attacks and rapes, and the reasons for it came out later, when the police had to explain their “hands off policy” in court. The service men just needed to let off a little steam, and the police turned a blind eye, failing to protect a non-white community from escalating violence against them. The Japanese may have been spared this violence as an unplanned by-product of their internment, but it is hardly a solution to protecting a people from racist violence.
No one ordering the internment ever said, “We’re doing this to protect the Japanese Americans.” It was to prevent sabotage and protect the war effort, not the Japanese.
Did it prevent riots? Well, there were no riots in between Pearl Harbor and the internment. The threat seemed nonexistant.
So then why were German Americans not also put into camps?
I don’t think the OP is arguing that the purpose of the camps was to protect Japanese Americans, just that such protection was a side-effect of the interment.
I don’t agree in any case, since there doesn’t seem to have been problems with anti-Japanese violence between the time of Pearl Harbour and when the camps were opened, or such problems in areas where Japanese Americans were confined. So I don’t see any reason to think that such violence would’ve taken place on the West Coast had Japanese American’s remained unconfined.
Uhh, what? Explain what that’s supposed to mean?
Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941. EO 9066 was issued February 19, 1942. Likely internment didn’t start on that day, either. That means there were at least 2 months 12 days for racist mobs to roam the streets.
Ok, that could be true, that no threat of violence would be directed at the Japanese Americans had they remained unconfined. The miserable conditions under which they lived in the camps was certainly unfair in any case. But this is the last time I will ask the question, because maybe someone could answer it in a straight forward manner. Why were the German Americans not placed into camps, if the reason for placing the Japanese Americans into camps- was to protect the war effort?