They Called Us Enemy

Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way the victims do.

Years later, the trauma of those experiences continued to haunt me. Most Japanese Americans from my parents' generation didn't like to talk about the internment with their children. As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn't their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way the victims do.

That remains part of the problem—that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually dependable, but at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth. For a child, that sweetness, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

People can do great things, George. They can come up with noble, shining ideals. But people are also fallible human beings, and we know they made a terrible mistake. - Takekuma Norman Takei

As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn’t their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don’t carry it the way victims do.

Our Democracy is a Participatory Democracy. Existentially it's dependent on people who cherish the shinning, highest ideals of our Democracy and actively engage in the political process.

Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators... but they don't carry it the way the victims do.

The wheel of democracy turns slowly.

Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That history can't be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. But must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. --President Barack Obama

In 1944, dozens of these principaled objectors were transferred to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. I'm proud of them, and I consider them just as heroic as those who fought on foreign battlefields. Though they responded in different ways -- caring for their families, fighting on the battlefield, or serving time for their principles -- all these Japanese Americans showed incredible courage and heroism. They proved that being American is not just for some people. They all made difficult choices to demonstrate their patriotism to this country, even when it rejected them.

As a kid, I couldn't grasp the injustice of the situation.

That is not the American way. Americans are not afraid of their police.

As President Clinton said that day, "Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill treated.

Mama was not going to allow anything… not even the United Sates government… to affect her family’s well-being.

I though everyone took vacations on a train with armed sentries at both ends of each car. It was an adventure.

He said we have no reports of spying, or sabotage, or fifth column activities by Japanese Americans… and that is ominous because the Japanese are inscrutable. You don’t know what they’re thinking. So it would be prudent to lock them up before they do anything. The absence of evidence was the evidence, for this attorney general.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past...usually dependable, but at times, deceptive.