Doomed to Repeat Ourselves

I was only a teenager in 1942, but overnight I became the enemy of my country. I was no longer the vibrant American boy with aspirations to become a great athlete, but the enemy that sneakily attacked Pearl Harbor. I couldn’t believe the way the media had portrayed me.

I was a student at Hollenbeck Junior High in Los Angeles. Posters were placed on telephone poles throughout the Western Command of the 6th Army, which included California, western Oregon and western Washington. They indicated that all people of Japanese ancestry, immigrant and citizen alike, must assemble at designated areas to be transported to unknown inland destinations. We could take only what we could carry.

On May 27, 1942, our family along with hundreds of other families assembled at the 1st Street Bridge and, under armed military guard, were placed on trains going to unknown destinations. We ended up in Parker, Ariz., where most camp residents were held for the duration of the war.

Reading press reports of the arrests last week in Southern California of hundreds of immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations stirred up bitter memories of 1942.

A new government order requires boys and men from 18 designated nations, who are in the U.S. on temporary visas, to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The arrests -- allegedly for immigration violations -- were made when the immigrants were complying with this law.

In 1942, Japanese Americans were the targets of the racists who wanted us out of our homes and placed in American concentration camps. Our constitutional rights were ignored, and the thinking and the power of the racists ran rampant over our lives. In a short time, military orders sanctioned by presidential decree uprooted the lives of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent and legal resident immigrants.

The comparisons to what is happening today are not exact. Registration is not internment. But is worse to come in this post-9/11 atmosphere? Once again, innocent people are being rounded up based on race and national origin.

There are many similarities in how people of color and people who don’t look like the majority are treated in this country. In 1942, we were at war with Germany and Italy. German Americans and Italian Americans were picked up and locked up individually. Not so with Japanese Americans. They were picked up and locked up en masse. Would we have been interned if we looked like the majority population?

In 1983, a presidential commission, after a lengthy investigation of the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, stated that the reasons behind our internment were poor political leadership, wartime hysteria and racial prejudice. Those three reasons seem to be operating again.

The actions being taken today against another group of people, based on ancestry and place of origin, are repeating mistakes of the past.