Japanese Americans seek redress

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Anyone under the illusion that World War II was a war for democracy would do well to look at what happened to people of Japanese heritage in the United States during the war years.

In 1942, despite the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, Japanese-Americans were rounded up, excluded from the West Coast of the United States, and detained in 10 huge concentration camps until the end of the This was accomplished by the Roosevelt administration using Executive Order 9066. The grounds for the order-for which no shred of evidence was ever produced-were that the ethnic Japanese on the West Coast were a threat to the war effort and a reservoir of support for Japan. The government argued that they could become involved in sabotage and espionage.

Today, important challenges to the legality and morality of detalned In 10 huge government suppressed important evidence in the first trial. Hirabayashi is attempting to have his conviction overturned.

Hirabayashi's case, like that of Fred Korematsu and Minoru Yasui-whose convictions for refusal to obey governmental orders were vacated in 1983 because of proven governmental suppression of evidencehas undermined the basis of the 1944 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the wartime internment procedure.

According to Don Tamaki, one of Fred Korematsu's attorneys, these cases have "fatally discredited the 1944 Supreme Court decision... the next best thing to a reversal."

The fight for compensation Two years ago the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded after extensive hearings that what befell the interned Japanese was unjust, illegal, and immoral.

Recommendations from the commission center on two Action that the report of the Commission on the Economic Losses of Ethnic Japanese as a Result of Exclusion and Detention, published in 1983, estimated their losses at $6.2 billion in 1983 dollars.

Tateishi conceded that the $1.5 billion figure in the proposed legislation is considerably less. But he emphasized the moral as opposed to the financial aspects of the redress bill, pointing out that many Japanese-Americans are reluctant to place a dollar equivalent on the internment trauma.

Yet it is widely recognized that the government's payment of this money would serve as a powerful counter to the 1944 Supreme Court decision.

Anti-Asian racism

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, co-author of "Farewell to Manzanar," the moving personal account of a family's threeand-one-half years in a California concentration camp, told Socialist Action that "three prongs" of the background to internment were "100 years of anti-Asian racism" experienced by ethnic Chinese and Japanese in the Western United States as well as "political and economic opportunism."

•Houston said that this opportunism was directed against Japanese farmers and expressed by the threat, "Japs out of the Valley."

The farmers were forced by Executive Order 9066 to liquidate their property and mortgages—a significant portion (42 percent) of California's commercial truck farms.

The fact that racism against Asian people was a major factor in this denial of human rights is illustrated by the fact that ethnic Japanese in Hawaii were not subject to the internment.

One internee described the experience as a life "of slow relocation camp during World War II.

torture."

He stated: "The queerest part of American democracy is that it is torturing its own citizen because he happens to have Japanese blood in him while German and Italian aliens go scot free."

[quoted in "To Serve the Devil!, 1971, from Japanese Relocation Papers in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley] Voices of protest The Socialist Workers Party was one of the very few voices of protest in 1942 against Executive Order 9066. Hayden Perry, writing under the name "Gordon Bailey" in the SWP newspaper, The Militant, attacked it as an "indiscriminate and brutal witchhunt."

The SWP attributed the internment of the Japanese to the greed of the corporate agriculturalists for the land develCarl Mydans oped the Japanese-Americans.

Could such a terrifying betrayal of human and constitutional rights happen again in the United States? Without constant vigilance, it certainly could.

Elaine Elinson, Public Information director of the Northern Calitornia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told Socialist Action, "Nothing could stop another American president at another time" from issuing an Executive Order like 9066. Elinson pointed out that the government could use a "national emergency" or war as a pretext for violating constitutional rights.

Our best hope for preventing such a tragedy from recurring is to organize a large movement against the current preparations and acts of war of the United States.