Which is what happened to my wife’s grandmother. She had a small tailor/drycleaning shop. When she was interned she had no time to sell it, so she had to walk away from it. While she was in camp it was auctioned off for taxes.
When the family was released from camp, half of them returned to California, the other half moved to the Midwest.
As for Hawaii, it was ironic that the site of Pearl Harbor did not see large-scale interments. But I believe a lot of the wealthier whites had known the families of their Japanese servants, gardeners etc for a couple of generations, sometimes even had gone to school with them, and often vouched for them to the authorities.
Of the mighty 442nd Infantry Regiment, already mentioned by silenus but worth another mention, I don’t know how many if any are still alive, but when I lived in Honolulu there were still regular reunions.
Fun example of what occasionally happened. My grandparents neighbors were a japanese couple with a small child. The husband also owned a business. Seeing the proverbial writing on the wall they sold the house to my grandparents for some trivial amount and then proceeded to rent the house from my grandparents. The business ended up being sold off. When the neighbors were hauled off to the camps, my grandparents held the house, mowed the lawn, etc. When they came back, they sold the house back to them for the same amount originally paid. Up until the neighbors passed in like 2005, my grandparents always got the most lavish Christmas gifts from the neighbors.
To anyone interested in a fictionalization, I recommend the musical “Allegiance” which started out in San Diego and is now on Broadway. George Takei is wonderful in this show inspired by his family’s experiences:
As I found out from the links on the backstory of the musical, there’s a movement to call the internment “incarceration” and the internment camps “concentration camps”:
“The commonly used term “internment” is misleading when describing the concentration camps that held 120,000 people of Japanese descent during the war. “Internment” refers to the legally permissible detention of enemy aliens in time of war. It is problematic when applied to American citizens; yet two-thirds of the Japanese Americans incarcerated were U.S. citizens. Although “internment” is a recognized and generally used term, Densho prefers “incarceration” as more accurate except in the specific case of aliens detained in a separate set of camps run by the army or Justice Department. “Detention” is used interchangeably, although some scholars argue that the word denotes a shorter time of confinement than the nearly four years the Japanese American camps were in operation.”
http://www.densho.org/terminology/
Great story!
Actually, during the war and in the immediate post-war period the camps often were referred to as concentration camps . The original meaning of “concentration camp” was any place where large groups of people, usually civilians, were detained which is a great description of the camps. The problem is that the Nazis used the term somewhat euphemistically to describe their extermination camps and that euphemistic meaning has largely overshadowed the original one. Later on, Jewish groups in particular objected to the use of “concentration camps” to describe Japanese internment camps because that term has come to imply death camps which, bad as they were, the Japanese internment camps definitely were not.
While I am sure that we all sympathise with Japanese Americans who were badly treated, you may wish to consider how the Japanese treated Western colonial communities in the Far East after the surrender of Singapore. Approximately 40,000 Western civilian women and 50,000 men were interned by the Japanese in camps in the Far East
“In a camp of 4,000 women in Java there were only three doctors to attend to the internees. In addition, whether sick or not, the Japanese forced these women to carry out hard manual labour.”
Describing Changi Prison: “Day-break resembles an improvised casualty station in a besieged city. Prostrate bodies lie in closely packed rows. Some on rough wooden benches, some on mattresses, heaps of clothing or sacking on the concrete floor. Narrow irregular paths lead through the human morass. A miscellany of objects and articles of clothing slung across bamboo poles suspended from iron pipes and girders”
You might also wish to look up “The rape of Manilla”
Yes and Western colonial communities treated the “natives” so well.
“They did worse,” is not a defense.
I entirely agree. To be forcibly taken, moved into a camp, forced to work and allowed to die, was a terrible thing, regardless of whether you were Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, English, American or Jewish.
I just wanted to balance the scales a little.
Two wrongs don’t make a right.
I don’t recall any Western colonial communities that established hundreds of camps where tens of thousands of women were raped multiple times from dawn til dusk, including being gang raped, having their breasts cut off with swords or being impaled on swords jammed up their vaginas.
I don’t recall any Western colonial communities that forced “natives” to work 16 hours a day at hard physical labour on 1000 calories per day resulting in tens of thousands of “natives” being executed when they collapsed.
I don’t recall any western colonial communities that burned hundreds of “natives” alive.
I don’t recall any western colonial communities that murdered 30, 000 “native” civilians to “pacify” a captured town.
And so on and so forth.
Western colonialists were no angels, but to suggest that western powers ever practiced barabarity on the level of the Imperial Japanese betrays a complete ignorance of history.
During the war, the American and British press was censored and any reports of these atrocities that leaked out were suppressed, apparently for fear of making things worse for those still incarcerated.
After the war, as people were repatriated, most of them did not want to talk about their experiences and no one was really interested anyway. Even returning war heroes soon find that no one wants to listen - whatever war we are talking about.
Remember that there are still people around (many were children at the time) who lived through all this. I doubt that they would have a great deal of sympathy for a Japanese American who only lost his business.
I’ll put this a little more bluntly this time. So what? It was wrong. Period.
My folks were aged six and eight when the war ended. Other than missing their fathers, they weren’t too aware of what the broader issues were.
On e again, they did worse is not a defense.
This is in GQ and not a GD discussion of which was worse.
This quest for “balance” confuses me. It is perfectly possible for me to believe that the United States treated its own natural born citizens badly, and that Japan, by orders of magnitude, treated its captives worse. And I haven’t even had breakfast yet!
But some Japanese-Americans were “interned” away from the West Coast. From the Handbook of Texas:
That “majority” was not 100%. In a little residential neighborhood near my girlhood home on the plains between Galveston & Houston, there were some tall plants & trees, growing in a curious linear pattern. Mom explained that it had been a nursery run by a Japanese family–gone wild after they were sent to a camp. She had gone to high school with a daughter of the family. After the war, the mother went to Japan as a missionary…
Are you a WIZARD???!!!???
Yeah, you’d probably have to go back to the colonization of the Americas to find that kind of behaviour by white people… Unless you’re thinking of Tasmania, etc. King Leopold in the Belgian Congo generally only cut off the hands of much of the local population.
I think it was L.P. Hartley’s quote in the opening of “The Go-Between”(?) that said:
It may seem harsh that, for example, the government took and auctioned off the possessions of interred citizens, but what’s the alternative (once they determine to inter?) Leave it to rot? To be looted and stolen? We hear complaints about foreclosed houses falling to ruin; the same would have happened to Japanese dwellings. A fishing boat or farm tractor or automobile left alone for a decade where it sat would be junk if/when the owner returned.
I recall reading a discussion of the Canadian politics behind internment. The federal government resisted, and much of the pressure came from the racist attitudes of the British Columbia politicians. Like the Muslim hysteria today, the feds if they did nothing would be seen as “aiding the enemy” so they had limited push-back. The BC folks being the west coast had the majority of Japanese immigrants and citizens, so the prejudice as usual was strongest. Like any ethnic group that worked hard and did a good job, they excited the envy and hatred of lazy or xenophobic neighbours. “They will help our enemies” was more of convenient excuse than a valid concern.
This response frustrates me greatly. My father who was 16 at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack and a US citizen (his parents were Japanese immigrants) was interned at Heart Mountain during WW2. He “escaped” the camp by volunteering for the Army when he turned 18 & served in the 442nd Regimen. His brother also served and was killed in action. When I tell people the story, I often hear “well the Japanese did worse to the Chinese in the rape of Manzanar…”.
FTR my dad was not Japanese, he was AMERICAN.
Actually white people engaged in some pretty bad behavior in the 19402 in Germany.