From the front page of the April 10, 1942, The Chula Vista Star:
Japanese residents of the Southbay area, with hundreds of others in the Southern California defense area, left San Diego railway station Tuesday evening at 7 for Santa Anita, from which station they will be sent inland for the “duration.”
It has been estimated that about 450 left the Chula Vista area and about 1,000 from the San Diego territory.
The five-paragraph story went on to note the difference in attitudes of young Japanese and their older counterparts, the former seeming to be excited by the sense of a new adventure while the latter weighed down by the gravity of the move.
The story does not mention that Japanese families — most of whom were citizens — were forced by the federal government to leave their homes and relocate to internment camps. Or that the reason for their relocation was not based on any criminality but instead because of their ethnicity.
The prejudicial order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was based on fear and bigotry that was allowed to fester and infect this country after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In 1988 the Civil Liberties Act passed by Congress acknowledge the internments were “motivated by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and offered an apology to Japanese Americans on behalf of the nation.
This week the state of California was expected to issue its formal apology for their role in displacing Japanese Americans. The bill’s author, Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, said it was important to him to bring up the issue now, given the similarities between the fear mongering rhetoric of then and now.
“There are striking parallels between what happened to Japanese Americans before and during World War II and what we see happening today — you know, not just the fear mongering rhetoric talking about the caravan or the images of [immigrant] children and families being held in cages, but we see what’s happening to Muslim Americans,” he told National Public Radio’s Ari Shapiro.
Apologies as a political and historical act can provide some comfort to the afflicted, but the true test of an apology’s sincerity is if the same action is committed again. Hopefully we as a community do not allow fear and bigotry to guide us again.
