It bothers me that the Japanese Community constantly seeks to MAXIMIZE the effect of the Restrictions of Executive Order 9066 on the Japanese American Community, and MINIMIZE the effect the Order had on the Italian American (and German American) Community.

Executive Order 9066 effected 600,000 Italians, 300,000 Germans, and only 120,000 Japanese!!

Those Restrictions included Internments, Detainments, Confiscation of Properties,
Forced Evacuation from Zones, Shutting down and Loss of Businesses, Forced "Fire Sale" of properties, Curfews that resulted in Loss of Jobs, Registrations as Enemy Alien, Exclusion from Areas, Exclusion from some Professions and Jobs, Closure of Newspapers and Community Centers, etc., etc.,

As  one example, One 93 year old bed ridden, terminally ill, Italian American man was forcfully removed from his home by stretcher!!!!!!!!

Reparations of  2 BILLION dollars were paid to 120,000 Japanese Americans.
ZERO was paid to 600,000 Italian Americans  !!!!!

The Dallas Morning News
By Jacquielynn Floyd
Wednesday, December 8, 2004

(63 years ago)...Japanese bombers were raining death on Pearl Harbor,... It was a scary day to be an American and an especially scary day to be an American of Japanese descent...

It's a piece of luck that (the Hashimotos), spent World War II in Hawaii, rather than in California,....

The shocking attack on Pearl Harbor, which cost so many American lives, gave rise to a profound upswell of patriotism, and to a unified sense of purpose, which is natural and perhaps necessary in wartime.

It also gave rise to patriotism's ugly cousins, racism and paranoia. The result was the forced relocation and internment of tens of thousands of American citizens and resident aliens. They lost their homes, jobs, possessions and three years out of their lives.

[RAA: Paranoia perhaps, but how could it be Racism if Executive Order 9066 effected 600,000 Italians, 300,000 Germans, and only 120,000 Japanese??]

I don't suppose people had to think very far ahead to recognize that the Imperial attack might have painful consequences even for the most Americanized of Japanese-American families.

Longtime U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, has recalled rushing out of the house with his father when they heard the first explosions. Mr. Inouye said his father, seeing the telltale "rising sun" insignia on the incoming Japanese bombers, shook a fist in the air and miserably shouted, "You fools!"

And it was barely three months later that Executive Order 9066 was signed, authorizing the forced internment of an estimated 120,000 ethnic Japanese residents of California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona. They were summarily shipped to desolate, primitive camps – compounds of flimsy barracks surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire.

This shameful event is widely recognized as one of the most disgraceful episodes in modern American history. In 1988, President George Bush tendered a formal apology to former internees, and many were paid reparations.

[But NO Apologies and NO Reparations to Italians and Germans Interred, or Compensation for Conficated Properties, or Damages]

It is perhaps the least savory chapter in what we think of as our "good" war against ("rising sun" or nazi) brutality.

The stated reason for rounding up and incarcerating all those perfectly ordinary people – farmers, merchants, secretaries, clerks – was that they might pose a security threat, that they might "collaborate" with the enemy.

Such reasoning did not extend to wholesale incarceration of German- and Italian-Americans (though there were isolated cases). The ethnic Japanese, more visibly "different," were somehow perceived as a greater threat.

[Yes, obviously "somehow perceived as a threat" because Italians and Germans DID NOT carry out a SNEAK Bombing attack that obliterated Pearl Harbor, with threats of a Japanese Invasion of the West Coast, with known Japanese spy rings !!!!!]

Revisionists who disagree – and there are a few out there – might be asked why, if Japanese-Americans posed such a security risk, they were not also rounded up and shipped out of Hawaii, then an American territory and key naval base where the first strike occurred.

And the answer is simple numbers and economics: There were too many of them. Without its ethnic Japanese residents, the Hawaiian economy would have come to a standstill.

In the 1940 census, there were an estimated 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry living on the U.S. mainland. In tiny Hawaii, there were 157,000 – nearly half the population.

"What could they do to that percentage of the people?" my father-in-law said. "It would have shut down the whole island." His dad, a carpenter, went immediately to work on projects to repair bomb damage at Pearl Harbor and nearby Schofield Barracks.

In all, about 1,800 ethnic Japanese-Americans – mostly Shinto priests and residents who had been educated in Japan – were detained in Hawaii and sent to mainland internment camps.

The rest, by virtue of their numbers, were too important to the economy, too mainstream, to do without. And if Japanese-Americans weren't a "security risk" to Hawaii, why were they a greater risk to, say, coastal California?

They weren't. They were just an easier target.

[I wouldn't say an "easier target", I'd say UNENFORCEABLE and IMPRACTICAL to ship them to Camps. It was Easier to KEEP them in place, on Islands in the Mid Pacific, and assign Intelligence Agents to "work" amongst them!!!!]

My in-laws were married years later in San Francisco, where my husband was born. There, my father-in-law met many Japanese-Americans whose families had been interned during World War II. I asked him whether they remained angry about it.

"Not angry," he said. "They were ashamed. Ashamed that the U.S. had done this."

It's an interesting distinction: They weren't an ethnic subgroup angry at their victimization. They were ashamed, as Americans, that the United States should have such a stain on its conscience.

And shame, in this case, is as patriotic as pride.

[It might be well to "balance" the "shame" of the "Executive Order 9066" with the Japanese shame of "Pearl Harbor" and the "Japanese Atrocities of the Pacific of WWII", as the Italian Community "balances"  the "Executive Order 9066" against Italy's military alliance with Japan and Germany]
 

PEARL HARBOR DAY
Today marks the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As the nation commemorates the day that "will live in infamy" and launched the United States into World War II, the local Pearl Harbor Survivors Association remembers the thousands who lost their lives Dec. 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor was a shock; internments were a shame
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