![]() ![]() This community comprised over one-third of the civilian population and over one-half of some of the most critical skilled labor sectors like construction workers as well as food producers such as hog farms, poultry ranches, truck crop farms and vital sugar plantation workers (Odo 148–49). And, in Hawai’i, a token 2,000 individuals, half of whom who were family members of the suspects, were incarcerated, of a total Nikkei population of nearly 160,000. At least in Hawai’i, most of those arrested by the FBI were screened individually and provided the opportunity to “prove” their innocence. The earliest arrests, on or soon after December 7, involved more than one thousand individuals, overwhelmingly male and immigrant, who had been identified by the FBI as potentially “disloyal.” They had been profiled, beginning in the 1930s, years before Pearl Harbor. This official action apologized on behalf of the nation for the dozens of military, Department of Justice, War Relocation Authority, and other camps which operated during the war in every region of the country from Hawai’i to New York City. Reagan’s signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 on August 10 was a major turning point in the Nikkei embrace of the “Good War” narrative. Congress and the White House assumed full responsibility and provided formal apologies with monetary reparations for their own unconstitutional actions. This became the only occasion in American history when the U.S. When President Ronald Reagan signed HR 442, he triggered payments of $20,000 to each of the surviving Nikkei who had been incarcerated during World War II-approximately one-half of the original 120,000 individuals. It took some time before the incarceration narrative could be joined with stories, at times ironic, of military heroism to produce a powerful formula in a Redress Movement seeking an official apology and reparations. This new attention was largely due to the emergence of radical community activity and significant gains in Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies on an increasing number of American college campuses (see Quon Huen). ![]() Beginning in the 1970s, however, there was increasing focus on the wartime racism directed towards Nikkei, two thirds of whom were American citizens. Indeed, a similar lag existed before substantial celebration of the heroics of its World War II veterans. The Nikkei community waited several decades after the end of World War II before confronting contradictions between images of the “Good War” and its own humiliating incarceration. Still, many Americans, including those of Japanese descent, continue to believe in World War II as the “Good War” fought by “The Greatest Generation” (Brokaw). Certainly the scholarly world knows that FDR’s Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942, launched America’s radical experiment in ethnic cleansing by forcible removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, the Nikkei, 1 from the entire West Coast absent any semblance of due process (cf. We know, too, that the fire-bombings in Germany and atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were calculated to raze those cities to the ground and terrorize civilians (Kirsch). While few have gone so far as to posit both Allies and Axis as moral equivalents, it is commonly acknowledged that Winston Churchill tolerated massive civilian destruction to preserve the British Empire and that Franklin Roosevelt supported Stalin’s brutality in order to blunt Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe. For some time now, the notion of World War II as “The Good War” has been disputed and complicated by the scholarly community. ![]()
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