A book by Richard Reeves re. the internment of citizens of Japanese decent, published in 2015. I found it in a used book store and glad I did. The book combines the anecdotal accounts of several of those people plus those of the decision makers in D.C and the West Coast as well as the pertinent statistics. I highly recommend this book! I'm sure it can be found on Amazon. If you haven't delved into this little chapter in American history, prepare to be appalled! When you sit down to read it, it might be a good thing to have a bottle of ant-acids nearby. I was fairly knowledgeable about this topic (some of my earliest playmates were named Herei and Nakatani) but when you read these people's stories...well, what can I say? Fortunately, the author throws in the accounts of Caucasians who did the right thing as well, or one could really become embittered.
I routinely speculate what would have happened to them if they hadn't been relocated. Say someone clever chap decided to dump a load of poison in a reservoir used by Los Angeles. Then the pogrom would start, "kill the sneaky Japs!!!!" The coarser souls in the US were hoping this kind of thing would happen. If you haven't already started an outraged rebuttal you have time to read this: This is NOT an apology for the decisions and actions of long dead people. They were children of their time, all of them.
Imagining the worst in people because of their heritage and reacting to it allowed the Holocaust. As a political tool to unite the masses the technique is still in use. Incarcerating the innocent to "save" the citizenry from "Rapists and drug dealers" is an official US policy today.
Not angry, but there were plenty of "children of their time" that didn't fall into the racist trap. Same sort of unthinking hate mongering during the "red-baiting" nonsense in the 1950s. There were also plenty echoes of this after 9-11-2001 regarding Muslims. The decision makers and actions of 1942 may be dead but the basic attitude is very much alive. Still, it is part of WW2 and should be studied by every student of the war, especially Americans. I'm just saying that if you read this book it might make you uncomfortable.
Mixed, of course. The CG for California was a dick and made decisions based on "these Japs helped bomb Pearl Harbor" I suspect.
