The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. - George Takei, (The Washington Post, November 18, 2016)
"I was just a child of 5 when soldiers marched up our driveway in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood, bayonets in hand, and pounded on our front door, ordering us out. We were permitted only what we could carry, no bedding, no pets." - George Takei, (CNN interview, February 19, 2017) |
“We couldn’t do anything about the orders from the U.S. government. I just lived from day to day without any purpose. I felt empty.… I frittered away every day. I don’t remember anything much.… I just felt vacant.”— Osuke Takizawa, Tanforan Assembly Center, San Bruno |
“'We faced a neat dilemma. We could stand on our citizenship rights and resist evacuation, or serve our country by doing what we were told. We chose the latter.” ("Nisei” internee, Barriers) |
"That night Papa burned the flag he brought with him from Hiroshima thirty-five years earlier... He burned a lot of papers too, documents, anything that might suggest he still had some connection with Japan. These precautions didn't do him much good. He was not only an alien; he held a commercial fishing license, and in the early days of the war the FBI was picking up all such men, for fear they were somehow making contact with enemy ships off the coast. Papa himself knew it would only be a matter of time." - Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, (Farewell to Manzanar, 6)
"Of 126,947 Japanese in this country in 1940, 122,353 lived in the three main west coast states. Nearly 80% were from California."(Born Free and Equal, 31) The government believed Japanese American's loyalty would be with the enemy and feared operatives would communicate with enemy submarines or airplanes.
|
“The evacuation was impelled by military necessity. The security of the Pacific Coast continues to require the exclusion of Japanese from the area now prohibited to them and will so continue as long as that military necessity exists. The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor by the enemy crippled a major portion of the Pacific Fleet... More than 115,000 persons of Japanese ancestry resided along the coast…The continued presence of a large, unassimilated, tightly knit and racial group, bound to an enemy nation by strong ties of race, culture, custom and religion along a frontier vulnerable to attack constituted a menace which had to be dealt with... It is better to have had this protection and not to have needed it than to have needed it and not to have had it – as we have learned to our sorrow.” - Lt. Gen. J.L. DeWitt's letter of transmittal |