"Our memories of history are short and ill informed in this country"

"Our memories of history are short and ill informed in this country," Myers reminded me. "Prejudice and intolerance...have certainly not diminished since the 1940s. We need to be reminded that what happened to those of Japanese ancestry in the 1940s can happen again. None of us are free if we forget this dark moment of American history."

-from pg. 9 of Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II with an essay by Gary Y. Okihoro and photographs by Joan Myers

Also from the introduction of A Fence Away From Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II by Ellen Levine

"In 1942, just months after war was declared, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were removed from their homes under orders of the United States government. U.S. soldiers herded them onto buses and trains. They were driven to racetracks, stockades, and fairgrounds, where they were temporarily quartered, and then moved to prison camps, hastily constructed in desolate areas of the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal. On that date, the president committed this nation to a journey of shame...

In the months after Pearl Harbor, the government issued a series of orders restricting the rights of Japanese Americans, ostensibly to protect national security. Government intelligence agencies, however, had reported and continued to report to the president and his aides that the Japanese community in America posed no threat to security. Nonetheless, political leaders on both the national and state levels indulged their personal biases and pandered to those of others. Along with newspaper and radio commentators, they incited and encouraged the rising tide of anti-Japanese rhetoric by repeating stories of subversion by American Japanese that were absolutely false.

Government officials lied not only to the American people about the dangers to be expected from the Japanese community living in its midst, but also to the courts of the nation. The United States Supreme court, for example, relied on misleading government reports when, in 1944, it upheld the conviction of Fred Korematsu for failing to report for evacuation.

Supreme Court Justices Roberts, Jackson, and Murphy wrote vigorous dissents in the Korematsu case. Justice Murphy argued that the reasons given for the forced evacuation "appear...to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths, and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices." He concluded,

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessary a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution." -pg. iix-ix

"There is no assurance that such an event will never happen again. Without the knowledge of what happened to Japanese Americans, why it happened, and what could have prevented it, the same thing may well occur again. The question is only against whom. The answer is a group that is powerless, that had no strong political voice, that we perceive as different from ourselves.

The voices of the young people in this book are typical of those who suffered the indignity of being labeled "disloyal," not because they were disloyal but solely because they were of Japanese ancestry. To prevent another such explosion of hatred in our midst, we must listen to them." - pg. x

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