5 September 2013 IMPRISONED: THE BETRAYAL OF JAPANESE AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR II by Martin W. Sandler, Walker, August 2013, 176p., ISBN: 978-0-8027-2277-5 

"If you hear the song I sing

You will understand

You hold the key to love and fear

In your trembling hand.

Just one key unlocks them both

It's there at your command"

-- Chet Powers "Get Together"

During WWII, the fear of everyday Americans whose appearance was "different" led to a massive hate crime perpetuated by the United States against more than 120,000 of its own people, revealing that our "more perfect union" operates far from perfectly when the country is overrun with racists.

IMPRISONED: THE BETRAYAL OF JAPANESE AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR II is an excellent and horrific account of this dark chapter in American history, and a book that I wish I'd encountered as an adolescent.

"The idea of hastily rounding  up all Japanese Americans and placing them in what amounted to prison camps was a direct and outrageous violation of the supreme law of the United States, as set out in the US Constitution.  More specifically, it was a violation of vital personal rights guaranteed by the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, which among other liberties, provides that:

'Any person accused of committing a crime has the right to be told what crime he or she is being charged with having committed.'

'Any person accused of committing a crime has the right to a speedy, fair, and public trial to determine whether a crime has been committed.'

'At this trial, the person charged with the crime has the right to have the assistance of a lawyer to defend him or her, and the right to have witnesses testify on his or her behalf.'

"It was these and other guarantees that had earned America the title 'Land of the Free.'  Yet those who wanted the Japanese Americans -- the majority of whom were US citizens -- removed were willing to ignore these cherished rights."

This questions that must be asked all these years later are: What caused Americans to behave in this manner?  When else has our country behaved in such a hatefully prejudiced, immoral, and illegal manner?  What can we do to better educate our children so that they forcefully stand against such behavior when it next arises in their lifetimes?  This book provides a lot of information that is really useful in answering these questions.

There were, indeed, some who opposed the Japanese internment:

"Lieutenant Commander K. D. Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence had searched diligently for instances of the sabotage or espionage allegedly carried out by Japanese Americans.  He had failed to find a single example.  In a memorandum intended for top government leaders, he wrote, 'The entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion largely due to the physical characteristics of the people.'  The memo was never released.

"James J. Martin, one of the nation's leading historians, was truly alarmed.  The intention to deprive Japanese Americans of their liberties by removing them from their homes and means of livelihood was, he would write later, 'a breach of the Bill of Rights on a scale so large as to [be worse than] all such violations from the beginning of the United States. 

"The FBI, the first government agency given the task of identifying disloyal Japanese Americans, testified at government hearings that those of Japanese ancestry 'were fundamentally loyal and, as a group, posed no threat to the nation's security.'  In a letter to U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, Hoover wrote that the cries for removal were 'based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than factual data.'"

We also learn that Quaker groups such as the American Friends Service Committee protested the planned internment and then, during evacuation, tried to mitigate some of the damage being done.

But the reality is that the failure of the vast majority of Americans to oppose this radical, unconstitutional, and immoral course of action, this giving in to prejudice and hatred and fear, makes most adult Americans living in those days co-conspirators in this crime.

And the crime was compounded over successive decades by those who participated in successfully hiding it from school children of my generation, stealing from us the benefits of learning from that generation's stupidity.  (I spent last night contacting a bunch of old friends.  Not a one of us had learned about the Japanese American internment in high school.)

In the process of providing visual depictions of what Japanese Americans had to endure in those years, author Martin W. Sandler also introduces readers to photographer icons Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams.

So, how do we prevent more such crimes from being committed by the majority against a minority?    

I think that we have to begin early.  Several years after its publication, I am still feeling that far too many missed the boat on the brilliance and importance of Mo Willems' CAT THE CAT, WHO IS THAT?, an oh, so perfect and simple story about how we should assume that, no matter how different from you someone looks, they are a friend.  Start there and gradually and honestly teach the many examples of America gone wrong, including that of the Japanese American internment. 

C'mon people now, smile on your brother.  As I was reminding a bunch of seventh graders to whom I was book talking this one yesterday, down inside where it counts, we're a million times more similar than we are different.  It was a crime that Americans didn't stand up for one another and stand against hatred in 1942.  

Seventy-one years later, at a time when we are debating the possibility of bombing some homicidal tyrant (and a bunch of innocent bystanders) in retaliation for his gassing his countryman, we best be sure we've first learned and are adequately teaching our kids the lessons of America's own past transgressions, beginning with the Japanese American internment, before we go deciding that we are the revengers of the world.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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