I like this quote attributed to the Dalai Lama: “The very purpose of spirituality is self-discipline. Rather than criticizing others, we should evaluate and criticize ourselves.”
I really liked “Snow Falling on Cedars” but I have to say, it stole a lot of material from “Farewell to Manzanar” without attribution. I’ve taught both books, and I like both. And I’m still appalled that our country put citizens in detention camps. People BORN on American soil. Incomprehensible.
I’ve spent the last year trying to get the state of Michigan to apologize for its thousands of forced sterilizations. As a country, we suck at owning up to our dark past.
Walmart recently tried to sell pictures of internment camps as wall art: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/japanese-american-incarceration_us_5a0c99a9e4b0b37054f4119c
Personally, I don’t care -at all- what other countries do with their past. I care about what mine does. And I wish mine acted more like Germany’s which talks openly and critically about its past.
@katliamom Americans really didn’t know the extent of the horrors of the holocaust in WWII until later. Complimentary articles appeared in our newspapers in the 30s and 40s about Germany’s sterilization (and a few even praised the euthanasia) program.
There’s a very long history of anti-Asian sentiment in this country, especially in the west. Remember, Asians were the first people we excluded from immigration in the late 19th century.
There’s a “logic” to why the Japanese were targeted but not Germans. That said, German-Americans largely laid low during those years. A lot of Germans in the first half of the 20th century changed their names to something less German sounding. (This is where the myth that “they changed our name at Ellis Island” largely came from.)
German cultural practices in the US had been driven down by bigotry in World War One.
https://www.npr.org/2017/04/07/523044253/during-world-war-i-u-s-government-propaganda-erased-german-culture
https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/german8.html
https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=214
Presumably, this meant that, by the time of World War Two, German Americans were not very visible by cultural practices, and were obviously much less visible on first glance compared to other white Americans, relative to visible minority groups like Japanese Americans, who were easily targeted by bigots due to visibility no matter what cultural practices they did or did not practice.
Also, German-Americans made a good portion of the beer in the USA. 
Sorry, I wasn’t going to go into a novel-length description of why Germans weren’t targeted like the Japanese. I was just making a point that there is a reason why it happened. It’s not a mystery.
Sure you should. Just saying the US isn’t alone or even the best in modifying history to fit the moment’s narrative.
My mother had German ancestry and a German last name. She could remember being mocked and spit on. It wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops for them either.
A college friend’s family moved to Wisconsin where her father was an architect instead of going to an internment camp in California. Wisconsin had and has so many Germans it would have been hard to move them. Also middle of the country and white Europeans. It has been said that half the people are part German around WI. Fit my cousins. My parents never talked about that war when we were kids- they were late teens then.
My son’s 4th grade gifted pullout talked about Japanese internment and the Chinese poetry on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. The regular California history covered in 4th grade typically barely gets beyond missions and the Gold Rush.
We have a friend whose mother was interned on the West Coast and whose father enlisted instead of being interned and was a cook for the troops in Europe. Their families were never restored the property that was taken from them.
Few people know this, but there were a couple places on the US mainland attacked via Japanese submarine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood Of course, the internment is still a shameful part of our history.
I don’t think our kids read “Farewell to Manzanar” in school. They do all read “Island of the Blue Dolphins” here.
Didn’t say it was all sunshine and rainbows. If it was, there wouldn’t have been name changes to hide German heritage. But the Germans weren’t rounded up and stripped of their freedoms.
Exactly. Or of their property and possessions. No comparison, in my opinion.
And the property confiscated remains unreturned!
True. The outright theft of Japanese assets was horrendous. It is truly a testament to that community that so many of them rebuilt their lives from scratch. The only positive thing I have read about the whole sordid affair is the apparently good relations that Hawaiian residents maintained throughout the war years. I saw a documentary a few years ago about how there was much cooperation and “good feelings” between Japanese and white civic leaders in Hawaii during the war, such that an internment order was out of the question for Hawaii. Of course, I imagine that Japanese Americans were good neighbors on the west coast of the mainland, too, but that didn’t prevent the U.S. government’s wrongful conduct.
At University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, there are cherry trees planted in memory of the 36 students made to leave for the internment camps. Some were recently replanted to keep the memory alive. https://www.pugetsound.edu/student-life/office-of-intercultural-engagement/celebrations-commemorations/japaneseinternment/