Eighty-three years ago this month a guest saved the life of one of his hosts.
Who are we kidding?
Cast aside the euphemism and you’re left with a prisoner saving the life of one his jailers.
In May 1942 the United States internment camps were up and running. The federal government was rounding up Japanese- Americans in this country and shipping them off to isolated locations nationwide. The incarceration was the result of a presidential executive order— Order 9066. It was just one of this country’s responses to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On May 22, 1942 The Chula Vista Star published an item detailing the incident.
“A young Japanese physician, trained in American hospitals, called forth all his skills to save the life of a Caucasian official at Manzanar, California Reception Center for Japanese recently.”
Reception centers are what you find at bayside resorts and convention centers. This was a concentration camp and no amount of verbal gymnastics and soft peddling will show otherwise.
“Stricken as he was supervising an induction of 1,000 new arrivals at the camp, J. Mervin Kidwell, service director, was rushed to the camp emergency hospital, manned entirely by Japanese doctors and nurses. His condition was reported critical by Dr. James Goto, hospital chief, who diagnosed the attack as acute lobar pneumonia…Dr. Goto an American-born Japanese, was for six years house surgeon at the Los Angeles County hospital.”
Nearly 100 years ago thousands of American citizens were, without due process, torn away from their livelihoods and communities and shipped off to concentration camps in the interest of the nation’s security.
There’s no way such a shameful episode in this country’s history could repeat itself, could it? Knowing what we do now about the assault on democracy that stains our history we wouldn’t let that happen again, would we?
What would it say about us—our values and principles and commitment to justice— if it did? We’re not the sort of people to allow and make the same ugly mistakes our predecessors did, are we?
