Japanese Americans Warn of U.S. Repeating History of Discrimination

August 12, 2018

Washington- Japanese Americans who were forcibly incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II warn of the administration of President Donald Trump repeating the history of racial discrimination.

On Friday, the United States marked the 30th year since the Civil Liberties Act was enacted to officially apologize for the internment of Japanese Americans.

Labeled as enemy aliens, Japanese Americans lost jobs and properties simply because they were people of Japanese ancestry. Their wish for preventing such discrimination from happening again rings hollow in U.S. society, where racial segregations are accelerating.

In Seabrook, a New Jersey town with population of some 46,000 people, many Japanese descendants are still living, says Stanley Kaneshiki, 82, a third-generation Japanese American.

At the end of the war, a vegetable-processing plant in the town lost workers due to the draft and actively recruited former internees of Japanese ancestry.

Some 2,300 Japanese Americans moved to Seabrook, seeking new lives. The town also attracted many migrants from Europe and Latin America. They worked 12 hours a day and received hourly wages of 35-50 cents.

Kaneshiki says that with shared bathrooms, the living environment was "not much different from the concentration camps."

"But we were no longer surrounded by barbed wire, and we could go anywhere we wanted to. That freedom is something irreplaceable," he notes.

In 1988, then President Ronald Regan signed the law and apologized for having sent some 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the West Coast to such camps in rural areas without holding trials, admitting that the practice had been a serious error.

The government paid 20,000 dollars in compensation to each living former internee.

The memory of the discriminatory event is gradually fading in U.S. society, however.

Trump banned entries of nationals of some Islamic countries into the United States. He described African and Latin American nations as "shithole" countries, seeking tougher regulations on immigrants.

Such an atmosphere is expanding into society, helping increase the number of hate crimes.

Irene Kaneshiki, 78, also a third-generation Japanese American, says, "(Trump's Muslim ban) is pretty much the same as what the past administration did to Japanese Americans."

"This is a country which is made of immigrants," she points out. "Seabrook is a very good example of that."

In his fiscal 2019 budget proposal, Trump said he would abolish subsidies provided for conservation work for the sites of the internment of Japanese Americans and the graves of Native Americans. He also plans to move forward with reviews and reductions in the number of national historic sites.

The Honouliuli Internment Camp on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, designated as a national historic site in 2015, could also be subject to the reviews in the future.

U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa (D-Hawaii), a fourth-generation Japanese American, criticizes the abolition of the subsidies as showing "a lack of sensitivity toward minorities and racial discrimination."

At a park near in Washington, there are 4-meter-tall statues of two cranes struggling to free themselves from barbed wire.

The monument symbolizes the history of the internment of Japanese Americans.

On the monument, a message by the late Sen. Daniel Inoue, a Japanese American, is engraved: "The lessons learned must remain as a grave reminder of what we must not allow to happen again to any group." Jiji Press