Quote:
Originally Posted by ficke
I was raised with the narrative that you outlined for why there was Japanese interment camps.
The OP story should have been in the linked article you had for a balanced view of history.
This is the first I heard of support of a Japanese combatant by people of Japanese decent living in the US.
It defiantly ads some legitimacy to interning Japanese in the US during the war and it was not all unrealistic fear based as I thought before.
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You don't suppose this Hallstead guy isn't just trying to sell books, do you?
The truth is that there were Japanese Americans, who were born in the US, who were sympathetic to Japan. That is a fact. My dad's cousin's family moved back to Japan rather than go to the camps. There, they were shunned by Japanese citizens, and starved. They had to steal food to survive, and ended up coming back to the U.S. Then there were the vast majority who went to the camps, after being forced to sell or leave almost all of their possessions behind. No one at the time really blamed Roosevelt for the evacuation. They sort of blamed Japan, but most were pragmatic, having survived through the worst year of the Great Depression, which for farmers living on the west coast, was 1932.
I also don't think you are REALLY trying to suggest that there was 'legitimacy' to the evacuation of the ethnicity of entire West coast of the continental USA based on this one incident. I mean, tell me if I'm wrong about that, or if you don't think popular fear had reached a level in a month and a half after the attack at Pearl Harbor to cause a rather hasty act on it's own.