PD Editorial: Day of Remembrance offers lessons from internment camps

On this date 80 years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an infamous order that opened one of the darkest chapters in American history.

Executive Order 9066 provided the official basis for imprisoning American citizens of Japanese heritage.

By the end of 1942, virtually every person of Japanese descent on the West Coast — about 120,000 people — was sent to one of 10 remote camps where many of them stayed for the remainder of World War II, confined behind barbed wire and watched by armed guards. They lost their jobs, their property and their freedom.

There was no grave threat to national security, only racism, post-Pearl Harbor hysteria and a failure of leadership that reached the highest level of the U.S. government.

This episode left an indelible stain not just on Roosevelt but also the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld interment in a case called Korematsu vs. United States.

Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old Oakland native, defied an order to report for relocation to one of the camps. He was arrested, convicted, placed on probation and sent to a camp. When his appeal reached the Supreme Court in 1944, the justices voted 6-3 against him.

We now know that the government didn’t believe there was a credible threat or widespread disloyalty, and those facts were hidden from the Supreme Court and the American public. We also know about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a celebrated Army unit made up of Japanese American volunteers who fought their way across Italy, winning more citations for distinguished service and bravery than any unit its size.

Americans commemorate the attack on Pearl Harbor and honor the now dwindling corps of World War II veterans. In recent years, we also have taken stock of the grave wartime injustice suffered by so many of our fellow citizens.

President Ronald Reagan signed an apology as part of a restitution act, the Supreme Court repudiated the Korematsu ruling, and California celebrates Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution each year on Jan. 30, his birthday.

Feb. 19 is marked annually as a Day of Remembrance. Bruce Shimizu of Windsor, whose parents and grandparents were interned, writes about the impact on families and about some Day of Remembrance events in a commentary at pressdemocrat.com/opinion.

Two internment camps, Tule Lake in far northeastern California and Manzanar in the eastern Sierra, are now, respectively, a national monument and a national historic site.

Visiting any of the remaining camp sites requires travel to distant corners of California and other Western states. If you can’t do that, an exhibition opening Saturday at the Museum of Sonoma County offers a look at life inside the wire at Manzanar through the lens of celebrated photographer Ansel Adams. Photos in the exhibition come from his 1944 book “Born Free and Equal,” in which he denounced the “enforced exodus” of American citizens within their own country.

Americans are debating what history should be taught in school, with some preferring to celebrate national triumphs without acknowledging failures like the World War II interment camps. Rounding up citizens may seem unimaginable today, but as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia warned in a 2014 speech, “you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again.” The best deterrent to acting on fear and hysteria is learning and understanding history, the good and the bad.

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