After Pearl Harbor, there was just a tremendous sense of shock. The United States had never been attacked in this way, it had sought to remain neutral. The U.S. government and the Japanese government were still negotiating up to the very eve of that devastating December 7, 1941, morning.
Congress investigated and they heard from military leaders who had told them, among other things, that Japanese Americans might be dangerous. That there was a risk facing them from the possibility that all of these people—never mind that many of them had never been to Japan, they had been born in the United States, they didn’t know Japanese, didn’t know Japanese culture, that they were as thoroughly assimilated as anyone else. Nonetheless, there was a sense that—well, now that there’s war, perhaps we can’t trust these folks.
Now some of that was just the product of racial prejudice that had been there all throughout. If you go back and look at the politics of the 1910s, '20s, and '30s in the U.S. West—especially in California—there were efforts all along to say that we don’t…show more content… Because even though a mistake was made, in the 1980s—what happened is Congress saw that this was a problem and in 1988 based on all of these findings they passed a different law: the Civil Liberties Act. What that law did was it said, “We were wrong, we’re sorry.” It went further, it said to the people who were interned, whose property was taken, whose liberty was lost, who were stripped of equality and dignity—it said that if you are now still alive we will pay you reparations, 20,000 dollars per person. Now most people [who] have calculated this have figured out that it is not enough to compensate for the actual loss, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is the symbolic aspect of this. That our government as a democracy can correct itself, can look back and say, “We made mistakes then, we can do
