Dear MEL Topic Readers,
As a kid, America sent him to live in
barracks with 18,000 others. Now, decades later, he's getting an apology
The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941 by the Imperial Japanese navy shocked and angered Americans.
Then-President Franklin Roosevelt authorized an executive order to relocate and
incarcerate American people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the
West Coast. 120,000 of the first, second and third generation of Japanese Americans
were forced into concentration camps, some were sent to other states as far as Arkansas.
They lost what they had had, their freedom, civil rights, and contacts with
others outside of their camps. This forced relocation and internment lasted for
four years even months after the end of the Pacific War. Sounds like the
detention camps that the US is criticizing nowadays, doesn’t it?
It took decades for the US to start reflecting
what they had done to their own people and it was 1988 when President Ronald
Reagan signed a law apologizing for the internment on behalf of the U.S.
government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each camp survivor. Now, the state of California, where most of the relocated Japanese American lived, is
about to pass a resolution to formally apologizing for the act.
Why does it take too long for a government to
admit its own mistake?
Now as the coronavirus outbreak is spreading
around the world, such forced detention by race or nationality is another
concern.
Read the article and learn how the US detained
its own people during the war.
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