Dilip in your message M-ID: <CAEiMe8rKqJDiAHAHKC9f_PwUs93Bdw=mj=yX5hfrCkbuGvjb=g...@mail.gmail.com>on the subject
in issue 626 of Goanet, and Other readers who commented on and the article you wrote for *Scroll.* Prisoner of War Camps I too am angry about the treatment. In a different way I have experienced life in such an internment camp in California .The background is as follows: Soon after World War Two started Japanese who had been in the US for generations were put in camps. You gave details and just to repeat a few of them 1) The point being, again, that these are Americans like any other. Yet what forever marks them, and other Japanese-Americans, the US incarcerated over 100,000 people like them in prison camps. This happened because the US and Japan were enemies during World War II, and these Japanese-Americans were seen as potential traitors to the country they lived in. Ina was born in such a camp. Takei spent a year-and-a-half in another. 2) Inouye only side-stepped the internment by, ironically, enlisting in the US Army. He lost his right arm to a grenade and was later awarded the Medal of Honor, his country's highest military award. GRANDOLFO OWN EXPERIENCE in A PRISON OF WAR CAMP In the summer 1964, while I was a teaching Assistant at UCLA, I was doing field work with 8 other Ph.d students. I was the only coloured fellow. The others were whites. Our base camp was the prison camp. It used to accommodate several hundred persons of Japanese origin. Soon after the war, the camp had been converted into a BRACERO camp. Here Mexican labourers looked after the orange and avocado groves. One fine day when I was mapping in the orange grove a Mexican lady with a child began to talk to me. My Spanish was Zinch. Suddenly Professor Logan and a couple of students appeared . They asked me if I was OK. They spoke to the woman…She told them that her husband was on the run because he was wanted for a crime he did not commited. When we got back to LA my supervisor, Prof Thomas and his family had a visitor called Koko,who was staying with the Thomas Family. She was a Japanese girl who was going to school but was really unwell. Prof Thomas himself served in the US Army in the Sahara, his son was in the Army. My Message is that not all Americans are inhuman. Some politicians and we have many examples, and your article proves how stubborn they can be, They simply do not seem to have compassion. Finally: several characters in the Japanese Camp became important entertainment fellows. For the two of us as students needing rest and relaxation,I do not know what we have done without the TV shows…Particulary..my uncle the Martian who would make guns bend or point in the wrong direction…there was no violence and Takei is an actor who made his name in the "Star Trek" films. Etc. The Americans, in 1988, eventually apologized for imprisoning innocent people including entire families, 25 years after my colleagues were boarding there in 1964. Will Chinese - Indians from Deoli Camp who wrote to Modi to apologise for what they did in 1962 ? I hope that the bureaucrats will eventually become human enough and apologize Grandolfo
