JASU Day of Rememberance

Submitted by Nao Satoh BR'12, JASU Co-president


For the Japanese American Day of Remembrance, JASU (Japanese American Students Union) invited Professor Glenn Kumekawa for a Branford College Master's Tea. The Day of Remembrance, observed on February 19th, marks the date that Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, beginning the first and only systematic internment of an ethnic group within the United States. Professor Kumekawa was 14 years old when he and his family were taken to Tanforan Racetrack under military surveillance and then to Topaz Internment camp in Central Utah, where they remained until their release some three years later.

While the historical issue at hand was surely the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, it was made clear in Professor Kumekawa's presentation that the issue at heart was something much larger and important. Executive Order 9066 authorized the internment of peoples of “Foreign Enemy Ancestry” during the war but, by far, the most widely affected group was those people of Japanese ancestry who were removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona. As then California Attorney General Earl Warren put it, "When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field." Over 120,000 persons of Japanese descent were relocated into internment camps, over 70% of whom were native-born American citizens.



The legacy of the internment lives on in the Supreme Court decision of Korematsu v. United States, which challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, and still stands under the reasoning that the need to protect the country against espionage outweighed the rights of the internees as American citizens. Even though the matter was litigated in the Supreme Court, it later surfaced that the government had suppressed its own evidence that established that the interned Japanese Americans were, in fact, not a security threat. Is this dark period of history really over, when the door to repeat history is still wide open?

Professor Kumekawa, in affirming the importance of this dark period in American history, drew the contemporary parallels between the Japanese American internment and the situation of Muslims and people of Western and Central Asian descent. Calls to “round up the Arabs and send them home” echo those made against the Japanese Americans during the war, many of whom had never seen their so-called “home”. In this post-9/11 era and continued enforcement of the USA PATRIOT Act, Kumekawa made an important point that instead of simply reaffirming our own “commitments” to America and pointing to certain groups as the “other”. If really are to “Unite and Strengthen America” as the first three letters of the acronym for the act state, we need to and should stand together. There is nothing that makes someone “more American” than anyone else simply based on their appearance and we must defend that vein of thought in our everyday actions.