Some deeds cannot be undone. Taking steps to rectify past injustices is a move in the right direction, but for some, nothing can be done to make full amends. Japanese Americans were forcibly detained during WWII. While the internment order of 1942 was officially rescinded in 1945, it took more than 40 years for the government to take action in rectifying the injustice—an action in itself that had significant effects, both positive and negative.
Tonight at 6 p.m. in Smith Memorial Student Union room 236, guest lecturer Greg Robinson, a professor of American History at the University of Quebec in Montreal, will discuss the ramifications of the redresses given to Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians by their respective governments. Titled “Japanese Redress in North America and its Larger Legacy,” the lecture is part of a series of events co-sponsored by the Portland State Center for Japanese Studies in recognition of the 70th anniversary of the wrongful internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
The lecture will examine the reactions to the government’s redress and how it connects to civil liberties in the U.S. “I will be talking about the connections between Japanese Americans and [African Americans] and the ways that blacks reacted to redress,” Robinson said.
Robinson, a professor of American history at the University of Quebec in Montreal, has always been interested in civil rights and American constitutional law, but he decided to study the Japanese internment after researching the early writings of former president Franklin Roosevelt.
According to Robinson, Roosevelt’s writings from the 1920s—before Roosevelt was president—revealed a preexisting racism toward Japanese immigrants. Roosevelt wrote that laws limiting Japanese immigration and those preventing Japanese immigrants from attaining citizenship and owning property were justified because they preserved racial purity against intermarriage.
“As I did the research on Roosevelt, I discovered how much Japanese Americans and Asian Americans in general have influenced the United State’s culture, law and history,” Robinson said.
Many different factors contributed to the redress’ delay and eventual adoption by the U.S. and Canadian governments, Robinson said. Japanese Americans were reluctant to speak up about the internment experience until they first had a representative in Congress, he explained.
In addition, Robinson said that the U.S. only began to examine civil liberties in a modern way with the coming of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement then gave way to the Redress Movement that formed in the 1970s and came to fruition in the 1980s.
In 1988, the U.S. government issued a formal apology to Japanese Americans and the U.S. Congress voted to grant a $20,000 tax-free payment to all survivors affected by Executive Order 9066. The Canadian government also issued an apology and provided $21,000 in monetary compensation.
“In Canada, redress started small and got bigger, and in the United States redress started large as a part of a multi-racial movement and got smaller,” Robinson said.
Robert Hegwood, a graduate of PSU’s history master’s program, said in an email interview that any attempt at redress and apology by the government was utterly futile as compensation for what Japanese Americans lost during the internment. “I think that nothing the government could do after the fact would make up for uprooting the families, homes and businesses of West Coast Japanese Americans. I think at the symbolic level, the government was compelled in the 1980s to provide reparations and official apologies,” Hegwood wrote.
Robinson agreed that no amount of compensation could ever amend the damage caused by the violation of civil liberties, but he did assert that the governments’ acknowledgement of the injustice was a positive act. “Past injustices cannot be repaired. [The redresses] were a token of the government recognition that wrong had been done, and that was a very important step,” Robinson said.
According to Ali Jessie, a history graduate student focusing on Japan-U.S. relations, little good can be extracted from the internment of Japanese Americans, but a few positive changes can be attributed to the tragedy. Jessie pointed out that Japanese Americans were subsequently granted the ability to become naturalized citizens in 1952. Also, in the post-internment decades, Japanese immigrants were able to spread around the nation, moving away from the West Coast where they still faced a high degree of discrimination.
Furthermore, Robinson said that government guilt over the tragic injustice caused future policy-makers to be more mindful of the civil rights afforded to all people.
“I think that the most important lesson of the internment is that we should look before we leap. It’s very tempting to clamp down on civil rights and practice racial profiling in a time of perceived national danger,” Robinson said, “but peoples’ fundamental rights need to be preserved especially in those times, because that’s when people are less likely to be aware of the need to defend them.”