"When Can We Go Back to America?" by Susan Kamei

The attack on Pearl Harbor did more than plunge the United States into a two-front war, it turned over 120,000 Japanese-Americans into prisoners of war--in their own country.Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped in Hawaii, Japanese-Americans were being rounded up in California. “Swept up in the first wave of arrests were nearly all the Japanese fishermen on Terminal Island—an area just five miles long and largely manmade in Los Angeles harbor. These fishermen were part of a thriving, close-knit community of approximately 3,500 Japanese residents whose fathers and grandfathers had built a prosperous industry in canned tuna and sardines,” noted Susan Kamei, author of When Can We Go Back to America?: Voices of Japanese-American Incarceration During WWII.“Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans who had established their homes and livelihoods there, the small island was next to a naval shipyard where warships were under construction. Many fishermen were arrested as soon as they docked their vessels and were prevented from even saying goodbye to their families,” stated Kamei, who recalls her own family’s experience during the war.“Growing up as a third-generation Japanese-American Sansei in Orange County, California, I had a vague notion that my Japanese immigrant Issei grandparents and my American-born parents had spent the three years of World War II in some kind of prison camp because they were presumed to be disloyal simply because of their race,” Kamei said.“It’s taken me years of listening and researching to better understand why it was so difficult for incarcerees to tell their stories, to gain some appreciation of the hardships they endured, and to realize why their stories are so important today,” she said.Why should we care about events that happened nearly 80 years ago? “Because there are those who cite the Japanese American incarceration as ‘precedent’ for ‘rounding up’ others on the basis of race, national origin, and religion, for no justifiable reason,” said Kamei.Kamei’s book presents the voices of some of those who were incarcerated, many of them children at the time. While many wondered, “What have we done?” 127,000 Japanese-Americans were packed up to spend three years in makeshift camps in some of the most desolate parts of the country.Kamei pointed out that not all U.S. officials were in favor of incarceration. Gen. Delos Emmons, the Army Commander in Hawaii, voiced strong opposition to the West Coast “evacuation” plan. “Emmons dismissed all calls to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from the islands of Hawaii,” she stated.“In the president’s cabinet, both Attorney General (Francis) Biddle and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes opposed infringing on the rights of more than 80,000 Nisei American citizens. They considered any proposal to remove the Nisei against their will to be a violation of constitutional rights guaranteed to citizens,” said Kamei.Despite receiving reports that insisted there was “no Japanese problem on the coast,” President Franklin Roosevelt left the decision on what to do with Japanese-Americans to the military, where wartime hysteria won out, she said.As a result of the decision to incarcerate thousands of American citizens, Japanese-American families lost homes, businesses, and possessions when they were abruptly uprooted from their California homes. About a third of those who were “evacuated,” never returned to the West Coast, said Kamei.Despite their treatment at home, many Japanese-Americans served honorably in the U.S. military, she said, citing a much-decorated Japanese-American battalion that fought in Italy and France.Unfortunately, Japanese-Americans also faced problems after the war due to prejudice and persecution, said Kamei. “Somebody said that the more you know, the worse it gets, but you just keep on going because we have to,” she said.