And we could continue as conspiracy theorists explaining that Japanese were interned because they were mostly on the West Coast, owned valuable farmland and ate funny food, whereas the heavy German populations in the US were in the Midwest, gave us beer and less of a "geographic" threat/exposure. The point is, did we learn that locking up all citizens of a suspect ethnicity and confiscating their property is not just wrong but inefficient, over the top and continues a legacy of heavy-handed, less than smart government? Did all those guys sitting on the Bush cabinet sleep through college history and civics classes? Oh, that's right, they're mostly CEOs, not lawyers who had to learn that stuff.
When I was student teaching in Shawnee, OK we were covering the Stock Market crash, Great Depression and WW2 in a combined class of 60 high school juniors, doing a playacting reenactment exercise. Fun stuff with 17 year olds. It was my task to lecture on the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. I'd just finished reading Toland's volumes on the Rise/Fall of the Rising Sun, and had answered questions like "if we sent in 16,000 troops, how many men is that? I included a bit from Toland about how the Japanese ambassador had been used by his government in delivering the Japanese declaration of war. As I remember the story, he'd been cabled to send all staff home and type the document himself. Since he didn't speak English well and without a translator, it took him several hours to accomplish the task on the English typewriter. By the time he delivered his government's formal declaration to our Sec of State, Pearl Harbor had been attacked and he was greeted with fury. The ambassador went home and committed seppuku. It had certainly served Tokyo well to enact this delay. My supervising teacher told the class after I'd left for the day that I had lied about this and they were to forget all about it, as a couple of students who knew me from church reported to me later. I was appalled that in 1974 a very talented teacher with 32 hours into a MA of European History could still be so closed-minded, much less manipulative in the study of history. Remember, I was young then. She also didn't approve when asked how different WW2 was from the Vietnam War and its protestors raging across their TV screens were, that I told them that it was a national effort, where the country rallied in unison, but also a cultural war. The AKC didn't register dachshunds, sauerkraut was not sold in most groceries, they suspended teaching German in high schools and some schools and orchestras banned German composers. These were my lessons from college texts, readings and oral histories taken of seniors I interviewed going door to door. These kids were curious and deserved a discussion their textbook did not provide. American high school textbooks have taught that the Japanese breached diplomatic protocols and deceived the US government, but no context is provided to develop the whole story. Since so many people do not take history beyond high school and early impressions remain large, it is easy for old prejudices to recur even in otherwise smart and decent people. Of course, the Japanese hadn't invaded our food market before then, and banning sushi bars and ramen noodles today would be quite objectionable, to say nothing of refusing Sony playstations and car imports. But it does remind me that we should be thinking clearly and thoughtfully, and speaking carefully to young people and to others who have not remembered the lessons of history, as we face what could become another war of cultures. Karen Watters Cole Bill wrote: Harry, You know darn well that the reason they didn't put German-Americans in internment camps was that they looked too much like Wasps. [plus there were too many of them!]. Bill Ward
