Newsletter No. 573
News-Analysis
April 5, 2007

 

COMPARISONS BETWEEN WARTIME INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE AND POST 9.11 AMERICAN MUSLIMS

Shingetsu Newsletter No. 190 in February 2006 presented a short essay by Berkeley Professor Ronald Takaki reminding Americans how ordinary Japanese-Americans had been treated during World War II, and wondering whether a similar movement might now arise in the United States that could repeat that shameful history.

In this context, Muhammad Yusuf (Shingetsu Member No. 142) of The Gulf Today newspaper in Sharjah has brought to our attention two very recent articles, one in the Los Angeles Times of March 31st and the other in the New York Times on April 3rd. Both articles, in their own way, also draw this comparison.

The Los Angeles Times article announced the discovery that in 1943 the Census Bureau released information to the US government on individual Japanese-Americans, which was technically legal under wartime legislation, but “arguably unethical,” and not well calculated to inspire trust in the neutrality of the Census Bureau.

The article notes that the Census Bureau has recently been criticized in 2004 for releasing “specially tabulated population statistics on Arab Americans” to the Department of Homeland Security. The article quotes two critics of these practices. Said Lane Hirabayashi of UCLA: “The historical pattern is that the data is used to the disadvantage of people of color without the money and legal resources to defend themselves.” And Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Anaheim added: “It's open season on all privacy rights under the pretext of national security.”

The New York Times article presents the post-9.11 case of Turkmen v. Ashcroft, in which Federal District Court Judge John Gleeson ruled in June 2006 that “the executive is free to single out nationals of a particular country.” And though “crude,” it was not “so irrational or outrageous as to warrant judicial intrusion into an area in which courts have little experience and less expertise.” One of the lawyers involved in the case, Rachel Meeropol, has argued that “This ruling gives a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of non-citizens at the whim of the President. The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush Administration rounded up and imprisoned our clients because of their religion and race.”

Obviously, civil libertarians have been stunned at the sweeping power that this gives the government, and prominent among those who are challenging this decision are the descendents of the interned Japanese of World War II. As the New York Times article puts it: “The ruling painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population.”

Holly Yasui, one of the plaintiffs, puts it as follows: “I feel that racial profiling is absolutely wrong and unjustifiable… That my grandmother was treated by the U.S. government as a ‘dangerous enemy alien’ was a travesty. And it killed my grandfather.”

Editorial Comment

For the apparent minority of Americans who still remember the Bill of Rights and the real meaning of the principles upon which the United States was founded, we can only hope that the occasions to draw parallels between the wartime internment of Japanese and current events will be few and far between as time goes on. My hope and expectation is that the American public has already turned the corner, and that more consideration will be given to civil liberties over “security concerns” before too much more damage is done.

On the other hand, the Bush Administration has staked out a legal position that creates a truly imperial presidency, and at least one substantial section of judiciary seems to back this position. We shall see whether fear and ignorance, or courage and truth, will eventually gain the upper hand. Ultimately, it is a choice for the American people themselves to make.

These decisions will also affect the future of Japan as well, through the ever-present influence of the US-Japan alliance.

References:

Teresa Watanabe, “In 1943, Census Released Japanese-Americans’ Data,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2007.

Nina Bernstein, “Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side with Muslims,” New York Times, April 3, 2007.