So it doesn’t bother you at all that millions of Americans civil rights were tromped all over because they happen to be Japanese?
Put yourself in their shoes. You are a 1st generation immigrant, however, you have become an American Citizen. You have a family, you work over 40 hours a week to provide food for your children. But all in all, you’re an average guy. Then the government decides to take away your Civil Rights and put you into an interment camp, not because they proved you were a spy, but simply because you were born in Japan.
There was no excuse for what happened, no justification. It was not necessary, and there was never a Japenese spy found. Furthermore, what kind of intelligence could real Japanese spies have possibly gained “mingling” with the general population? Everything Americans knew they got from the newspapers, and those were hardly “classified” sources.
I think there have to be limits here, at some level you get into libel and privacy so the idea you can put anything you want into a film or book without any liability does not exist.
One also has to be aware of the subtle corruption of history too, and on the far extreme there is blatent propaganda.
So I’d have to say that mass media does have some responsability to its audience, the argument ‘you don’t like it so don’t watch it’ is too simplistic for me.
Do we really want a world were history can be completely deformed to suit the commercial or political interests of the few at the expense of a reasonable semblance of truth ?
While it is hypothetically true that simply putting a bunch of people (who happen to have one specific ethnic background) into camps without ever actually examining whether any specific individual might have actually been guilty of anything might not have been racist,
the reality is that it was exactly a racist act.
If you dig out the actual events as they unfolded, you will discover that the men who initially called for the internment and those who pressed hardest for its implementation had very long records of racist rhetoric–and those who had served in Congress or the California legislature had proposed racist anti-Japanese ethnic legislation years before the war.
As to the internal running of the camps, what has that to do with racism?
Lightly patrolled? Several people (most of whom do not appear to have been attempting to escape) we shot because a guard claimed that they were trying to escape. On the other hand, have you looked where the camps were placed? Where do you thing that they would escape to?
The U.S. detained just over 25,000 people during WWII. Of that, somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 were of European origin. The overwhelming majority of those people were actually investigated before being interned. (And many were detained for a matter of days or weeks, then released at the conclusion of the investigation.) Only the 11,000 Japanese were rounded up with no investigation and imprisoned for years. (I don’t want to hear any carping about the word prison, either. Several of them were shot and killed by soldiers while purportedly “escaping” and FDR, himself, referred to the camps as concentration camps–although he used the word as the British had in South Africa, not as we later began using it for the Nazi death camps.)
There is a current thread dealing with this topic including historical facts an further links in GQ at WWII History Question
(BTW, ppg, only the few we shot or who died of disease or old age were interred, the majority were simply interned.)
“In the war which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on U.S. soil, possessed of U.S. citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’, the racial strains are undiluted… along the vital Pacific Coast, over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extrication are at large today.” - partial text of letter from General John DeWitt, Western Defense Command, to War Secretary Henry Stimson.
Suuuuure, no racial motivation there. :rolleyes:
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Are you fucking for real? Take some time to listen to yourself for a second.
German spys were very prevalent. When Fascism was in vogue there were many active German-American Bund organizations that popped up. Organizations that actively spied for the Reich. But hey it’s much easier to lock up a bunch of Japanese isn’t it. It’s tougher to tell if someone is German than it is to tell if someone is Japanese. Of course it was racially motivated.
Your proof that it wasn’t racially motivated is because the camps were lightly guarded?!?. The Japanese were rounded up and placed in rural, predominatly white areas. Why would you need heavy guards? What was a Japanese internee supposed to do if he did escape. Tell the policeman who stops him that he is actually an Irishman by the name of Liam O’Toole. Do you sit around and wonder why slaves had a hard time running away from plantations as well?
You also cite the fact that they organized as proof as well? Anytime you have any group of people together, they organize.
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No one is saying you can’t make any movie you want, but you make it sound like people can’t give them flak about it. Of course someone can make a movie stating that the Holocaust didn’t happen. But according to you the only thing we can do is not go see the movie?
Don’t forget that that the Japanese-Americans who were interned also lost their homes and businesses. When the war was over and they were released, all they had was whatever personal possessions they had managed to carry with them. The government confiscated their homes and busineses and cars and auctioned them off, cheap. They were, quite simply, homeless and jobless. And they had committed no crime.
One of the internees became quite famous on TV in the 1960s: George Takei, better known as “Sulu” on Star Trek. He was less than three years old when his family was forced to leave their home in Los Angeles and sent to a camp in Arkansas. You can read about it in his autobiography.
There is no excuse for what was done to them.
The standards of the US were so very much differant then.
Along with the mistreatement of Japanese Americans remember that much of the South was still legally segregated, and the anti-communist fervour had not yet even begun to strip the rights of decent folk.Gay people had a hard time, as did single mothers, the mentally ill, physically handicapped.
That does not justify anything at all but you have to look at US society as a whole to put the internment in its perspective.
Things have improved so much for the better but I wonder if the film sets things reasonably within the context with the society of the time, I haven’t seen it myself so I can only ask.
The producers of “Pearl Harbor” lost me forever as a moviegoer way back in “Armageddon”. Pretty Pictures, Low On Sensible Plot© movies never really did it for me, anyway. The fact that this movie is set in a Hawaiian naval base and doesn’t feature a SINGLE Polynesian… well.
The internment of the Japanese-Americans was not only racially motivated, it was also politically motivated.
The Attorney General of California, one Earl Warren, was a strong proponent of internment. He was going to be running for governor in 1942 and he wanted to take a stronger anti-Japanese position than the incumbent governor, Democrat Culbert Olson.
Warren’s position on internment always remained a rather inconguous black mark on the record of a man who would be remembered more for authoring Brown v. Board of Education.
And Warren probably didn’t need to be as strident as he was because Olson would have lost to just about anyone the Republicans ran.
It ain’t great, it ain’t bad, but it ain’t great (surprise!). If there’s anything in there which might piss the Germans off, I didn’t really see it. If there was anything in there that might have pissed the Japanese off, I didn’t see it. Certainly, some hyper-sensative individual might get upset about something, but really, there wasn’t much said about anything racial in the movie. The only African-American character in the film was treated far better than he probably would have been in real life. It ultimately was, a syrupy love story with a totally transparent plot that happened to take place in Hawaii during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
As for the internment camps, they WERE racially motivated, there’s no doubt about that. And, if I’m not mistaken, the Japanese and many other peoples of non-European ancestry, were not allowed to become US citizens until after WWII. Part of the reason US immigration laws changed after the war, were, in fact, because of the atrocities of the Nazis during the war. We realized that our narrow-minded policies could be twisted by some sick mind into the horrors witnessed in the European and Pacific campaigns.
dude The argument that the US didn’t have to nuke Japan is one which can never be won. I’ve been on both sides of it, at various times in my life, but it really doesn’t matter what we might think. The simple fact is that we did it, and there’s no way we can ever undo our actions. Read David McCullough’s exellent biography of Harry Truman to find out why he ordered the bombing. I’m not saying you’ll agree with him, but at least you’ll know his reasons. Truman was a combat veteran of WWI, so its not like he was simply some pencil pusher who thought it was a cool way to spend an afternoon. He knew the horrors of war firsthand and suspended the nuking of Japan after two bombs (even though the US had seven more ready to go) because he, “couldn’t stand the thought of all those kids being killed.”
Hopefully, none of us alive will ever have to make the sacrifices that people on both sides had to make during that war. Let’s all be thankful that we have the opportunity to freely debate these things, and not simply have to swallow government propaganda on what happened.
I read that Disney asked the Japanese about the film and took out parts that they requested. However, the Japanese-American community asked that a part be removed and Disney would not remove it. It was something to do with a Japanese doctor in Hawaii, inferring that he was going to give information to the Japanese. As stated by one of the other posters there is no proof that any Japanese-American was a spy. The director stated that they weren’t making a historic film, so that did not matter.
Just because it wasn’t made public doesn’t mean it never happened. Do you honestly think the government would reveal a weakness if they had the choice to? The media wasn’t as influential then as it is now.
So what? If one Japanese American was a spy, that would mean all were?
Sheesh…
That’s not correct. The people interned in Manzanar and other Japanese internment camps were almost all U.S. citizens.
Actual citizens of Japan, Germany, and Italy were “enemy aliens” and were also interned, though in that case, frankly, there is some justification.
Are you making this up?
There were not seven bombs ready to go after Nagasaki, first of all. There were NO bombs ready to go. Fat Man was the last one available at the time. And Truman most certainly did not have any qualms about using the bombs, and I don’t believe that he said he “Couldn’t stand the thought of all those kids being killed.” Truman himself claimed to having never lost a wink of sleep over his decision to use the bomb. He also said “I have no regrets and, under the same circumstances, I would do it again.”
Speaking of making things up, (although I do not think you are):
Truman was very reticent to discuss the decision at any time. While he probably did stand behind the decision as necessary, the only time I remember him being asked about regrets he refused to answer.
Do you have a citation for that particular quotation?
RickJay,
You’re forgetting that at the time the US law prohibited Japanese nationals from obtaining US citizenship. Of course, their children born in the US are US citizens by birth.
Also remember that he said, “Surrender now or face utter destuction.” Wouldn’t that make it a pre-meditated decision? He knew good and well what he was doing and what the effects would be. The only person that I remember having any regrets would be the pilot of Enola Gay. He didnt’ know what the effects would be, and he regretted naming the plane after his mother for that reason. I’d have to agree with RickJay.
I certainly do. Truman wrote this in a letter to Irv Kupcinet in 1963. Kupcinet was a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and had written a nice article about Truman and the use of the bomb. You can find the letter around but here is one link.
Whatever you might think about Truman’s decision, I think two things are pretty clear; Truman had absolutely no hesistation about using the bomb, but Truman was certainly not a cruel monster. In a letter to Samuel Cavert, Secretary of the Churches of Christ (who had written to Truman in protest over the use of the bomb - contrary to popular belief, many, many Americans, Britons, and Canadians during the war were not happy with strategic bombing) Truman wrote
What is really interesting here are two things:
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The awesome power of the atomic bomb was apparently public knowledge much earlier than I would have expected. Secretary Cavert sent his telegram protesting the “indiscrimiate” destruction of the A-bomb and their “Extremely dangerous precedent for mankind” only a day after Nagasaki.
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Contrary to popular belief, the notion that the use of the A-bomb, or massive conventional bombing of civilians is a controversial thing is NOT a case of people today judging people in a very different situation in the past. Strategic bombing was controversial THEN, during the war, and was a matter of scholarly debate pretty much from V-J Day on. Many, many people were opposed to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in both Germany and Japan.
Monty: Good point.
It looks like Dopers have scooped Snopes on another urban legend, propogated by the Pearl Harbor movie. It is unlikely that Yamamoto every said anything about the “sleeping giant”.
RickJay, thanks for the link. I have no problem with the decision Truman made as he made it. I am sure that he would have repeated his decision if the situation repeated itself. I had just not encountered the “no regrets” phrase before. As I noted, (and I have not been able to find my references), Truman specifically refused to answer that question on at least one occasion (and made the reporter feel incredibly callous for having asked it).
shagadelicmysteryman, no one has suggested that Truman made the decision by accident.