America confronts its past wrongs

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, WASH. — On the side of a lightly used road, from which drivers can look across Puget Sound to Seattle’s skyline, a small sign identifies the turnoff to the “Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.” On a recent sun-dappled midweek summer morning, 79 years after the exclusion began, a smattering of visitors were facing a dark episode in American history. They, and the memorial, are quiet refutations of current loud accusations that the United States does not face unpleasant facts about its past.

Seventy-four days after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the evacuation to concentration camps of, eventually, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens, half of them children. The first 227 left this island from a dock a few yards from the memorial’s sinuous wall listing all of their names.

They were destined for Idaho, via California. While they were away, many of their homes, farms and businesses sold for much less than their value.

A 1943 report on the “evacuation” made clear that the supposed “military necessity” was based on racism. The report said that an invasion by Japan of the West Coast was probable, and that it was “impossible” to distinguish loyal (if there were such) from disloyal Japanese American citizens: “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

This report was kept from the Supreme Court when it upheld the internments in 1944. As was a report, prepared for Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King, estimating that perhaps 3 percent of Japanese Americans were potentially disloyal, and that these were “already fairly well known to naval intelligence.”

The FBI, however, found “no information” of “any espionage activity ashore or ... illicit shoreto-ship signaling.” Nevertheless, to some people, whose racial animus was heated by war fever, the complete absence of Japanese American sabotage was seen as sinister evidence of how stealthily the homegrown enemies were biding their time.

Meanwhile, Japanese American soldiers, some of whose families were interned, were distinguishing themselves in the war’s European theater -- even though for a period after Pearl Harbor the Army took away their rifles. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese Americans, fought its way up Italy and into France, where it suffered 1,000 casualties rescuing 175 Texans of the 36th Texas Division’s “lost battalion” that had been cut off by Germans. By the war’s end, the 442nd was the most decorated unit for its size in U.S. history.

In time, the fever of war abated. Then, the civil rights movement sensitized the nation, and occasioned much soul-searching, some of it retrospective. In 1988, Congress formally apologized for the internments, and provided reparations checks of $20,000 to 82,000 victims. In 2018, the Supreme Court repudiated its 1944 decision as “gravely wrong the day it was decided” and “overruled in the court of history.” In 2011, here by the dock where the exclusions began, this island’s memorial was opened.

This small memorial, a modest contribution to the national memory, is a pebble from a mountain of evidence against those who accuse Americans of being too calloused or squeamish to redeem their nation’s honor by confronting departures from it.