George Takei talks about his childhood in a WWII Japanese-American Internment Camp

[FrankRep]

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George Takei rehearses a scene from Allegiance, a new musical inspired by Takei’s childhood in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II (http://www.allegiancemusical.com/article/george-takei-talks-allegiance-npr)


NPR
September 1, 2012


Today, George Takei is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek series and, more recently, his hugely popular Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei) feeds.



Interview Highlights

On his own family’s story of internment

“We were first taken from our home … in Los Angeles to a horse stable at a race track, San Anita Race Track, near Los Angeles. And we were there for a few months while the camps were being built. And from there we were taken to the swamps of southeastern Arkansas. So, all the Japanese-Americans that were incarcerated followed that pattern: first, what’s called an ‘assembly center,’ a very innocuous-sounding name, and from there to a ‘relocation center,’ another innocuous word.”
...


http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2012/08/30/takeifamily_custom-55cef650d7df73418efc39e21b92ebdf5cefeb78-s2.jpg

George Takei (left) stands with his mother and siblings during their internment at Camp Tule Lake in California.
The inset image at top right shows Takei as a kindergartener at Camp Rohwer in Arkansas.

[FrankRep]

Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal recently revealed that FDR's Solicitor General, Charles Fahy, in arguing Japanese internment cases before the Supreme Court, deliberately suppressed evidence that would have harmed the government's case.


FDR’s Solicitor General Withheld Evidence in Japanese Internment Cases (http://www.thenewamerican.com/component/k2/item/4824-fdr%E2%80%99s-solicitor-general-withheld-evidence-in-japanese-internment-cases?Itemid=651)



On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154), which authorized military commanders to designate “military areas ... from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The result: More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans, plus several thousand German- and Italian-Americans, were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to remote internment camps — “concentration camps,” Roosevelt and other officials called them until such forthright terminology acquired particularly grisly connotations — where they remained until 1945.

The Roosevelt administration argued that the internment of Japanese-Americans, most of whom lived on the West Coast, was a matter of military necessity. Persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were, the administration said, suspected of disloyalty, espionage, and otherwise aiding their fatherland, with which the United States was at war. Moreover, wrote Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt (http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/dewitt1.html), head of the Western Command, “it was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety.” Therefore, the administration maintained, the government had little choice but to relocate and incarcerate them all.

Some of the wronged parties fought back through the courts. In 1943, Gordon Hirabayashi challenged a curfew the government had imposed on Japanese-Americans, while the next year Fred Korematsu took on the internment policy. Both clearly had the Constitution on their side. Roosevelt had unilaterally suspended habeas corpus for Japanese-Americans, though the Constitution — Lincoln's precedent notwithstanding — only permits Congress to undertake such a drastic action, and then only “in cases of rebellion or invasion.” The Fifth Amendment prohibits both the curfew and the relocation because both deprived individuals of their liberty (and, in the case of relocation, their property) without due process of law. The 14th Amendment mandates that all persons be afforded “the equal protection of the laws,” yet Americans of certain ethnicities were being singled out for unequal treatment.

[libertariantexas]

The mass interments were were a really bad idea. A lot of those that were stuck in the camps later became American war heroes fighting the Nazis.

[ghengis86]

There will never be concentration camps in America; they will be called something else.