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4 November, 2001
INTERNMENT
TODAY
Racial profiling is more than a current buzzword - it's become a reality in the weeks since the terrorist attacks on the US.
| This is a time when Americans need most to be reminded - or perhaps informed for the first time - about the Internment. |
I don't think anyone would deny that racial profiling is now a reflex action - a quick glance to assess if people you meet could be of Middle Eastern heritage is natural, even if you are a card-carrying liberal. It's what you do when you see someone who may fit the profile that is the test of your convictions. I must admit that if I were boarding a plane and saw a group of people that looked to me like they could be from the Middle East at the same gate, I'd flash on Sept. 11. I may not actually think these people might be terrorists, and I may not act out my moment of panic in any way. But I'm afraid I would probably suffer that moment of panic, nonetheless.
Such tests of my convictions linger in my mind these days. But a recent symposium and book about to be released give me strength in these uncertain times.
The Colorado Asian Pacific Student Alliance (CAPSA) recently organized "Acts of P.A.T.R.I.O.T.ism: Privacy or Protection," a Symposium that discussed the myths, realities and ramifications of the bill, and featured representatives of lawmakers, the American Civil Liberties Union, a Muslim African-American attorney who supports the bill, and Flo Miyahara, a Japanese American who was interned as a young woman during World War II.
She recounted her family's experience as they were rounded up in the weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Miyahara recalled her first thoughts when she heard about the attack against Pearl Harbor: "What the hell is wrong with those Japanese, picking on us? I thought of myself as an American, but shortly after that I found I wasn't an American, I was an Enemy Alien."
She linked the JA Internment to the current harassment of Muslim Americans, saying, "I didn't do anything but be born with a yellow face and black hair."
The unspoken warning - that taken to extremes, Internment might happen again - hung in the air like a dark cloud.
The timely release of "Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans" (Palgrave, $24.95) also raises the specter of future internment, although the book was edited long before the attacks. It's being published at a time when Americans need most to be reminded - or perhaps informed for the first time - about the Internment.
Sixty years after the Internment, Erica Harth has compiled an often moving, sometimes disturbing collection of essays and memoirs about the internment from the points of view of those who suffered through it, those who were touched by it, and in the case of younger writers, those who have to deal with the implications of it, generations later.
Harth herself was touched by it - along with several other writers in the collection, she is a Caucasian who lived with internees. She writes about attending classes with Japanese students in Manzanar, the camp located in the desert of California.
Many of the other entries in the book look at specific aspects of the internment experience: The first essay, Toyo Suyemoto's "Another Spring," is an autobiography that also recalls the schools organized within the camps. Suyemoto became a teacher and librarian while at camp.
She recounts her own family's upheaval - a common story for many -- forced to live in hastily converted horse stalls at a racetrack for months until they were sent to the dusty Topaz camp in the middle of Utah.
"However clean and new our barracks looked compared to the Tanforan horse stalls, they were far from the place we once called home," she writes. "We arrived in Delta, Utah and were taken by buses to the Topaz site where we were greeted by a band of young Boy Scouts playing 'Hail, hail the gang's all here' on their brass instruments. The Scouts carried a banner that read "Welcome to Topaz, the Jewel of the Desert."
Such horrible ironies and inequities abound throughout in the stories told by those who lived through the ordeal, though to be fair, several writers who were kids in camp also remember having fun and years spent playing.
The internment "was not bad enough," as several writers note in "Last Witnesses," when compared to the crime against humanity that, say, the holocaust perpetrated against the Jews by the Nazis. But the experience was bad enough, and ripped deeply enough into the Japanese American population's psyche, that an entire generation - the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans - avoided talking about it for decades.
One recurring theme among those who came in the next generation, the Sansei or third generation Japanese Americans, was the phrase "How come you never told us?"
The mother and daughter essays of Mitsuye and Jeni Yamada dance around this topic. Stewart David Ikeda, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian writer whose terrific "Mixing Stories" is far and away the best-written submission in the book, intertwines his life as a professor of creative writing in Asian American studies with his research into his grandfather's life, including his years of internment.
Other chapters deal with several writers' personal treks to and research about the camps where they were born, where they lived for a time or where their parents worked. Several chapters deal with the reflection of internment in the arts.
Perhaps the most chilling chapter is Allan Wesley Austin's "Loyalty and Concentration Camps in America." The essay is dry but enlightening, about Title II of the McCarran Act of 1950, which for years left open the possibility of interning any group of people in the US if they were perceived as posing a threat to the country. The act, based on the Japanese American internment, was repealed - with help from Japanese Americans - in the 1970s.
But, as the writer warns, "…the potential for the future establishment of concentration camps in the United States remains."
I thought of these words as I listened to Flo Miyahara's story of her Internment more than 50 years ago, and her concern for Muslim Americans today. Maybe it's sheer liberal paranoia that another Internment can happen in this country. But maybe not.