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Gathering Place
Karen T. Nakasone |
Imprisoning by ethnicity
can never be justified
No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ...-- Fifth Amendment, U.S. Constitution
The efforts of columnist Michelle Malkin, author of the new book "In Defense of Internment," and others who misguidedly attempt to justify the World War II internment of Japanese Americans must be rejected. There is no justification for the incarceration of 120,000 people without due process, strictly on the basis of their ethnicity.
We were disappointed to read Jane Watanabe's Aug. 15 letter to the editor responding to Michelle Malkin's Aug. 9 Star-Bulletin column, stating that she agreed with Malkin that the World War II internment of Japanese Americans -- including the internment of Watanabe's own father -- was justified to protect the country from "inside infiltration."
If Watanabe's father had been afforded his constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment, and the government required to establish that her father was a threat to national security at a hearing before a tribunal, he very likely would not have been interned. German and Italian Americans considered suspect were given due process and had individual hearings to determine their fates, but 120,000 Japanese Americans were denied such hearings and were simply incarcerated, en masse, strictly on the basis of their ethnicity.
For a decade before Pearl Harbor, the FBI and military intelligence had kept the Japanese community under close surveillance and had identified hundreds of Nikkei to be detained in the event of a war with Japan. This group included men who were leaders in their immigrant communities, those with ties to the Japanese consulate, and those who were actively supporting the Japanese war effort in some capacity.
This extensive surveillance and listmaking allowed the government to react swiftly after the Pearl Harbor attack, and arrest and detain nearly 1,300 Nikkei from around the United States within 48 hours. The number of detained Nikkei grew to more than 2,000 during the following few months. Many German Americans and Italian Americans were also arrested.
Three months later, in February 1942, even though there were no mass uprisings or fifth column activity in Japanese-American communities, the government inexplicably issued Executive Order 9066, which incarcerated every person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast.
EO 9066 was not only blatantly unconstitutional, but it was also illogical. As described above, all of the resident Japanese deemed to be of any potential danger or concern had already been identified and detained. Other intelligence on the Japanese-American community indicated a strong desire to contribute to the U.S. war effort, specifically because their loyalty was being questioned.
Yet even in the face of this evidence, the government caved in to the fear and prejudice the country was feeling at that time, and indiscriminately imprisoned all 110,000 West Coast Japanese -- men, women, children, non-citizen and citizen alike -- all without a single hearing, in blatant disregard of the Constitution.
The government's action was even more incomprehensible in light of the fact that a greater number of Japanese in Hawaii --160,000 -- nearly 40 percent of the population, in a territory 2,500 miles closer to Japan than the West Coast of the United States -- were not imprisoned. While no person of Japanese ancestry was ever charged with espionage or other criminal act against the United States, the existence of Richard Kotoshirodo and a handful of others who may have engaged in suspicious activities are no justification for the wholesale incarceration of people based solely on their ethnicity.
History has clearly shown that the internment of Japanese Americans was unjustified and blatantly unconstitutional, resulting from wartime hysteria, virulent racism and a failure of political leadership.