Remembering Pearl Harbor and the tyrannic treatment of Japanese Americans that followed
University Museums held an event in honor of Pearl Harbor and World War II on Dec. 7. Artwork created by Christian Petersen, an artist in residence at Iowa State, was shown in relation to these events. His public works and small studio sculptures were discussed.
December 7, 2020
A day which lives in infamy; Americans remember the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor amid a year of a similar status.
On Dec. 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes landed on U.S. naval base Pearl Harbor. The surprise attack resulted in more than 2,400 American deaths including civilians, according to History.com. Nearly 20 American naval vessels were damaged, including eight battleships and over 300 airplanes.
Sara Lemlin, a sophomore majoring in advertising and a Japanese American, said while Pearl Harbor is a tragedy, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two tragic events that are often overlooked. On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. detonated nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities. Between 129,000 and 226,000 people died, the majority being civilians.
Relations between Japan and the U.S. began to deteriorate during the ominous prelude to World War II. Japanese forces surged through eastern China fueling fears of the rising sun. This resulted in the U.S. restricting materials to the Japanese war machine such as oil.
The day after the attack the United States Congress declared war on the Empire of Japan at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt. The nation was overcome by a long-standing anti-Asian prejudice.
“This entire group of people instantly became stigmatized even more than they were,” Lemlin said. “Already, not being white in America comes of its own issues but all of the influences coming from the war, it made everything worse.”
Japanese immigrants arrived on Hawaiian islands in the 1860s for work and migrated to the U.S. mainland settling in California, Oregon and Washington. Japanese immigrants were barred from participation in America’s legal or political system.
Although they were not allowed citizenship, Japanese immigrants settled into their own communities, creating education and business opportunities for themselves, according to the National Museum of American History.
Following the attack in 1941, Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the removal and incarceration of “Any and all persons” from areas of the country deemed vulnerable to attacks or sabotage.
Lemlin said this was a quick decision made out of fear.
“It is all just fear base and I feel like that’s where a lot of insecurities and hatred is rooted from fear and not knowing,” Lemlin said. “It was ignorance and a way to discriminate and overgeneralize a whole population of people.”
This resulted in nearly 75,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry to be taken into custody. Another 45,000 citizens of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S, who had long been denied citizenship because of their race, were incarcerated, according to the National Museum of American History.
Japanese Americans and residents living on the Pacific Coast and in southern Arizona were removed from their neighborhoods by military officers. Americans of Japanese ancestry and Japanese nationals were ordered to register and report to designated temporary detention centers. Homes, businesses, pets and belongings had to be left behind or sold for rock-bottom prices.
For up to four years, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans lived in the desolated camps surrounded by barbed wire and a guard tower overhead. The U.S. government stripped them of their constitutional rights, as inmates experienced forced regimens.
During this time, Japanese Americans started civic organizations such as schools, regardless of the artificial livelihood the camps created. Amid World War II, 10 Americans were convicted of spying for Japan, none of them from Japanese ancestry, according to History.com.
The last internment camp was closed in March 1946. President Gerald Ford repealed the executive order in 1976. Paper checks for $20,000 and a letter of apology for the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent to over 80,000 people.
The belated payments were issued under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 in an expression of regret for unjustly seized land.
The biggest injustice is the lack of acknowledgment of the internment camps in attempts to protect nationalism, Lemlin said. Throughout school, she remembered the camps being referred to as “relocation centers.”
“We are taught the very cusp of that history,” Lemlin said. “That in itself seems like one of the biggest slap in the face because it is so disrespectful. We completely skim over a dark time in American history.”
Lemlin said over the past four years the series of travel bans the U.S. emplaced had a familiar ring.
“It is just another example that we are not properly educated on the history and there are world leaders repeating the same actions,” Lemlin said. “We need to keep evolving and keep pushing for change and social restructure, but we won’t be able to do that unless we understand the mistakes we made in the past.”
Bingo Bongo | Mar 11, 2024 at 12:09 pm
Most Japanese-Americans held dual citizenship with Japan. Up until the 1920s, Japan granted citizenship to anyone born in the US OF Japanese parents. After the 20s, Japanese parents had to request ctzenship for their newborns. Most did. Japan built a consulate in San Francisco to handle the requests.
Japanese-American kids were sent to Emperer worship school were they learned the Japanese emperor was their living gom whom they were obliged to obey.
About an eighth of Japanese-American kids were sent to Japan for school, which Japanese parents saw as better. These kids returned from Japan as hyper-Japanese, wearing kimonos and expressing Japanese customs. They were called kibei, which means champion in Japanese.
Would some of these kids grow up to be spies and saboteurs during a war with Japan? Yes, of course they would and did. Google the Nina’s Incident which startled the government and prompted it to relocate Japanese-Americans.
Japanese spies, mostly Japanese-Americans, operated in America. There wasa spy ring in San Diego, near the Naval Base. Other spies were sending shortwave transmissions from defense plants in California. Some scouted Pearl Harbor for the .attack. He got a check from the government in the 1980s as an apology for wartime relocation. All the Japanese-American spies got away with it. None were caught.
Hundreds of Japanese_Americans joined the Japanese military during school in or trips to Japan and fought against America, mostly as intelligence officers.
Simply put, the Japanese-Americans had divided loyalties. They could flip either way.
No Japanese-Americans were incarcerated nor interned nor imprisoned during WWII, but rather ere moved from the vulnerable West coast to relocation camps in the interior. If you were Japanese-American and lived in the interior of the US, you were unaffected.
Japanese-Americans could come and go from the camps. If a town was nearby, they could shop there. At Manzanar, they left camp to fish in a nearby trout stream.
Five thousand Japanese-American kids left the camps to attend college in the interior. Thousands of Japanese-Americans left the camps every year during harvest to pick fruit in Oregon.
If you found a job in the interior, you could leave and move there.
If you have never heard of any of this, you screwed up: You trusted the media to tell you the truth. You’ll never find the truth about this in the pages of a the Iowa State Daily.