11 ms·

George Takei recalls his childhood in an internment camp

196 points by haunter 3y ago

voxadam 3y ago
I'm surprised that Takei has never appeared on any of the stages for The Moth,[0] it seems like a fairly natural venue for him. [0] https://themoth.org/ https://themoth.org/
SapporoChris 3y ago
George Takei's story is an important story and I highly recommend it to anyone. However, BBC's article is very brief, Takei's been talking about this for years, it's not a new story and there are much better takes on it. I recommend taking the time to search the internet and learn more. Example, a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeBKBFAPwNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeBKBFAPwNc
Broussebar 3y ago
Interesting video, and Helena Bonham-Carter's voice is always a pleasure to hear. The graphic novel "They Called Us Enemy"[1] goes into more details of his childhood for anyone interested. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Called_Us_Enemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Called_Us_Enemy
- thadt 3y ago
  My wife is a middle school history teacher that really liked "They Call Us Enemy" and has used it in class assignments. It's well done.
- tootie 3y ago
  There's a terrific drama called Bad Day at Black Rock about a veteran trying to give a medal to a Japanese family in a rural town whose son had died in the war. It's less about the internment and more about bigots getting their comeuppance.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
If you're in California it is worth visiting Manzanar, an internment camp they have kept as a museum and as witness to this period of U.S. history. We had a foreign exchange student from Japan with us for 9 months. When the school year wrapped up I rented an RV and the whole family (6 of us including the foreign exchange student) road-tripped around the western U.S. By chance Manzanar showed up as a point of interest in our vicinity and, a little awkwardly, we made it another destination. I am not sure what our foreign exchange student thought. Perhaps it didn't really register for her — another country and all that. I am not sure how affected I would be if I saw something similar in Japan. It made quite an impression on me and my wife, however.
- epage 3y ago
  I grew up next to Manzanar and I don't think it registered with me that we were right next to an internment camp and I never visited until I was in my mid-30s. The only reason I was even in the area is I came back to hike Whitney but it was too crowded so I did Langley and had time to spare. Wish I had been by sooner.
i2cmaster 3y ago
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nsteel 3y ago
Relatedly, he stars in the musical Allegiance, a story inspired by his internment camp experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(musical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(musical)
35997279 3y ago
One of the most affecting images in my high school history book for me was of Japanese American Boy Scouts hanging a sign declaring Japanese Americans “Aliens of Enemy Nationalities.” The caption mentioned that the young men themselves were afterwards sent to internment camps. [0] This image so affected me that I once saw a copy of the book left behind at a coffee shop and had to thumb through it to see it again. With all the editing of history curricula that states like Florida are doing, I hope it survives. It’s is a dark chapter in American history that wasn’t that long ago. [0]https://www.mrginn.com/uploads/8/5/4/6/85468970/chapter35.pdf https://www.mrginn.com/uploads/8/5/4/6/85468970/chapter35.pd...
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
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  - refurb 3y ago
    And to the Germans and Austro-Hungarians during WW1.
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - 03857292756 3y ago
      And the Ukrainians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadian_internment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadian_internmen...
- yummypaint 3y ago
  Their property was also stolen from them. Much of Palo Alto was farms owned by Japanese americans originally
  - 35997279 3y ago
    This page mentions they were forced to sell their land, of course at a much lower price than they would have gotten. They also weren’t allowed to take their pets, which the page says “were destroyed.” [0]. Shameful. This country took its own citizens, locked them up, stole their land and shot their dogs — without a trial. https://www.paloaltohistory.org/japanese-american-internment.php https://www.paloaltohistory.org/japanese-american-internment...
listenallyall 3y ago
George Takei is a wonderful, intelligent, hilarious, inspirational, talented human being, and it's fantastic to see him receiving so much recognition and love and career opportunity at 65, 75, and now 85 years old. Instead of Star Trek being the apex of his career or life, it's now just one part of an immensely well-lived life.
- 5040 3y ago
  I see him as a tragic figure, despite having personally suffered at the hands of the American government, he's somehow become this great apologist for strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations.
  - FemmeAndroid 3y ago
    Can you be more specific about the instances of what you're talking about when you say "strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations?"
    - h2odragon 3y ago
      Lockdowns and vaccine mandates fit that bill, in my view
      - kelnos 3y ago
        It's weird how many people have suddenly come out against vaccine mandates, when a bunch of vaccinations have been mandatory for school attendance in most US school districts since before most (all?) of us were born.
        sigzero 3y ago
        I think there were always a lot of people against this "vaccine" mandate. The Government handled it entirely wrong from the start.
NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
It seems obviously wrong to incarcerate citizens on the basis of ethnicity. That said, an important part of the discussion that usually isn't discussed at all is the Ni'ihau incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident TLDR: The first thing that happened in WWII for the United States was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second thing is a Japanese pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course). In the end a couple people were shot. Edit: I'll add some discussion from below to the top-level comment, I think it improves it. In a situation where you have no data (hostilities just started), this incident being one of the first things that happen is, in fact, quite striking. And, critically, these people weren't spies or saboteurs. They were rando civilians who, without premeditation or contact with enemy government, decided on the spot to help the enemy. If you were a commander in that war you would rightly find it terrifying. It is, we might say, a bad look. I bring it up in response to the story because it's an obvious part of the narrative about Japanese internment camps in the U.S. in WWII that is suppressed because it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, though. Obviously, this event makes the actions the U.S. government took look more justifiable. The fact that it happened so quickly after hostilities started is also striking. The idea that Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans are more likely to turn against their adopted country than, say, German or Italian immigrants seems more plausible in this light, and that helps understand the decisions made by people in power (in addition to stuff you already know, like Japanese is a very different language to English and culture to American, far more different than either German or Italian, and Japanese people and other East Asians are much more easily visually distinguished, etc.). And, I will reiterate, in my mind it doesn't justify interning tens of thousands of citizens on the basis of ethnicity. It seems obviously wrong to me, either you're a citizen and you get the same rights as everyone else, or you're not. Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is...racism? Not quite, but I suppose that's the word people use. It is a stain on the country's history.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course) Why is that treason "of course"? Seemingly, they were unaware of the events and just tried to help a fellow human being. That should never be treason. Also, since you bring it up as a response to the story, are you justifying interment camps for specific ethnicity based on one event? Otherwise your comment seems borderline off-topic.
pera 3y ago
Why is the BBC referring US concentration camps as "internment camps"?
- padjo 3y ago
  Because that’s what they’re called? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps
  - pera 3y ago
    That article doesn't seem right, or at least some academics seem against the use of "internment camp" in this case: https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/146691773/euphemisms-concentration-camps-and-the-japanese-internment https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/1466917...
- capableweb 3y ago
  Concentration camps and interment camps are synonymous, they mean the same thing. One is not "better" or "easier" than the other, so not sure why it'd matter.
- quickthrowman 3y ago
  They’re referring to them as internment camps as to not equivocate the (admittedly bad) camps where Japanese-American citizens were held with the industrialized genocide of Nazi German concentration camps. Imprisoning Japanese Americans during WWII was very wrong, but it wasn’t anywhere near the abject horror of Nazi concentration camps. The words are generally synonyms, but I think the distinction is important.
- candiodari 3y ago
  Because in Europe concentration camps are used to refer to Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Prisoners of War and children. So an alternate name needs to be found for a different thing.
  - pera 3y ago
oh_sigh 3y ago
I think/hope most people agree the internment of western Japanese people was abhorrent. Hypothetically, how many instances of sabotage/war-like acts by Japanese Americans would have to happen before the internments would be justified? I also wonder how much of a impact the Niihau incident had on the decision to do internments. Literally the first Japanese-Americans that had an opportunity helped a pearl harbor attacker terrorize Niihau.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
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  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    Why didn't fascism take over after WWII, and the US, say, continue to intern western Japanese people?
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    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      Because the western world discovered the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps--horrors truly beyond anything they could have possibly imagined--and realized that using racism and xenophobia to justify the systematic imprisonment, abuse, and deprivation of a minority might maybe be a bad idea (and certainly a bad look)?
  - stuckinhell 3y ago
    It's not hypothetical, we've seen in covid, people are more than okay with keeping the majority(not even minorities) population under near house arrest. If they were fearful for their lives like in WW2 (aka worse than covid), you can easily see why internment camps weren't opposed by the general population.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
acdha 3y ago
This is such an important bit of history for anyone who’s ever thought George Takei is too liberal or outspoken. His childhood was profoundly shaped by reactionary bigots, and then coming of age as a gay man in that era he had to face another life-altering prejudice. He was phenomenally lucky to be a talented actor and get a huge break but that also means he’s keenly aware of just how much is at stake if that kind of people regain power. An older friend was married to someone who was held in Manzanar. I drove by with them in the 2000s and the mood was somber. His life got a lot better after the war and he was able to spend most of his retirement fishing off of the coast in San Diego but it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.
- slibhb 3y ago
  Ah yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a well-known "reactionary bigot".
  - jhanschoo 3y ago
    I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?
    - slibhb 3y ago
      FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.
      - Waterluvian 3y ago
        You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong. I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.
wesleyd 3y ago
The best tweet of all time is Takei's: 'Watching people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America. "Santa is white!" Well, in our interment camp he was Asian. So there.' https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/805158718421815296 https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/805158718421815296
- Dudester230526 3y ago
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- q1w2 3y ago
  While George Takei will always have a special place in my Star Trek heart, I cannot look to him as an example of goodness since he admitted to having sex with underage (gay) boys in his Howard Stern interview several years ago. It's crazy to me that the twitter-sphere was so happy to overlook his own admitted past because he was on their "side".
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    I'd venture to say that almost all of us have done things in our past that we are ashamed of.
libpcap 3y ago
I wonder what lessons the United States government has learned from this event. If a war breaks out between the U.S. and China, what policies (if any) would the government potentially implement differently to its residents of Chinese descent?
- blululu 3y ago
  We would probably just do what we did with Italian and German Americans during WWII, or Saudi Americans after 9/11. At the Federal level this means widespread and intensive surveillance to find actual threats. At the social level this would be uncoordinated actions arising from general suspicion and distrust. This would result in small scale outbreaks of violence, boycotts, subtle insistence that on taking an ultra-pro-America stance on most issues. The War years were not going to be good for the Japanese Americans regardless of Federal policy, but mass internment was the so clearly the wrong policy and there is no reason that we should even consider repeating it. Assuming that everyone is a threat therefore we must suspend haebeus corpus and have them arrested indefinitely for nothing is generally not a great idea.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    'Suspension of habeus corpus' (ie unlawful detainment) seems to underline USA's global reach somewhat. Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) still exists, does it not. I know Biden has sought to empty it. For the last several decades (my lifetime) it's always seemed that no matter where in the World you might be, if the country is not an enemy of USA, there's a chance you [I mean, a person, not me specifically] could be whisked away to perpetual imprisonment in USA, for something perhaps as trivial as copyright infringement and the local government would just kinda shrug. Perhaps it's closer to failure to follow due process, rather than habeus corpus. Maybe that's not a balanced view of USA's projection of soft power. It mirrors the fear some in USA have of rogue cops. Does it feel to you like the World, or just USA, had improved here? Tribalism seems as strong as ever.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  The closest analog is probably the post-9/11 environment, and while, thankfully, no one suggested firing up concentration camps, the rise of racial profiling by both civilians and government was still deeply troubling.
linsomniac 3y ago
My grandfather was a woodworker and worked in construction. When I was ~18 I proudly showed him this fancy Japanese pull saw I had gotten for a woodworking project I was working on. His only comment was "We confiscated so many of those from the people we put in internment camps". Shit just got real. He was a Marine at Pearl Harbor during the attack, he never really talked about it. I wish I knew him better, but I was always afraid of him growing up. "We don't wake grandpa up when he's napping, he might accidentally kill us."
- devoutsalsa 3y ago
  On the topic of Pearl Harbor, my dad’s uncle was in the Massachusetts National Guard. He was scheduled to get out of the military on December 8th, 1941. He was on a ship from Hawaii to San Francisco when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th. His ship was turned around, and he had to serve until the end of the war. He was in the infantry & was storming beaches, including some of the infamous ones like Guadalcanal. His Battalion suffered a 250% casualty rate (aka replacement troops also suffered casualties). By the end of the war, he and one other guy were the only original members left.
alienicecream 3y ago
Why is it so unreasonable to think that immigrants from another country would have conflicting loyalties in a situation of total war between those two countries? That seems pretty human and normal. And in an emergency your rights as a citizen can be curtailed accordingly right? Weren't we all in favor of that during the pandemic? I do agree that it wasn't a nice thing to do of course.
- ok_dad 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- FpUser 3y ago
  In my opinion your way of thinking is an abomination.
  - alienicecream 3y ago
    I think that's just a way to avoid the question and to try and get others to avoid it as well.
    - FpUser 3y ago
      There is no question here. And there is no avoidance. If you are worried about spies go and catch them. That is what your 3 letter agencies are paid for. And they're paid a lot. Your amounts to - x percent of people commits crime, blacks commit even more so lets open concentration camps before they do any damage. As already said it is totally disgusting.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  Yes it is unreasonable. Japanese people aren’t a disease that kills the old and the vulnerable, and comparing them to a disease is extremely inappropriate.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
That's why it's critical to never elect strong government types like FDR ever again. This is a mar on American history, along with the Drug War that he started.
photochemsyn 3y ago
The real villain of the Japanese internetment camp program was JJ McCloy (1981): https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese-internment-humane.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese... > "John J. McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War, today defended the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II as ''reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted.'' Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage." It's true that there were actual Japanese government agents operating in the USA at the outbreak of WWII, but they were comparable in number to the German and Italian agents who were also US citizens. An overview of the Japanese government's activities from the Office of Naval Intelligence is here (Office of Naval Intelligence, 1941) http://www.mansell.com/eo9066/1941/41-12/IA021.html http://www.mansell.com/eo9066/1941/41-12/IA021.html In comparison to internment of 112,000 Japanese-Americans ancestry (and seizure of property), some 11,500 people of German ancestry and three thousand people of Italian ancestry were incarcerated on suspicion of being foreign agents, out of a population of 1.2 million German-Americans and 2.4 million Italian-Americans. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/German_and_Italian_detainees/#Comparison_to_the_Japanese_American_Experience https://encyclopedia.densho.org/German_and_Italian_detainees... Conclusion: the Japanese internment program was just another example of blatantly racist government policy, of the same kind that motivated Nazi 'master race' thinking. Incidentally, McCloy was also a primarily responsible for the early release of Nazi industrialists from prison in post-WWII Germany.
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
lannisterstark 3y ago
For someone who suffered from govt overreach, he for some magical reason is very pro govt intervention in people's lives, almost like some kind of Stockholm syndrome.
anotherevan 3y ago
There's an interview he did with David Tennant a few years ago where he also talked about this at length. It was really good. https://player.fm/series/david-tennant-does-a-podcast-with/george-takei https://player.fm/series/david-tennant-does-a-podcast-with/g...

196 points by haunter 3y ago

I'm surprised that Takei has never appeared on any of the stages for The Moth,[0] it seems like a fairly natural venue for him. [0] https://themoth.org/ https://themoth.org/

SapporoChris 3y ago

George Takei's story is an important story and I highly recommend it to anyone. However, BBC's article is very brief, Takei's been talking about this for years, it's not a new story and there are much better takes on it. I recommend taking the time to search the internet and learn more. Example, a TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeBKBFAPwNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeBKBFAPwNc

Broussebar 3y ago

Interesting video, and Helena Bonham-Carter's voice is always a pleasure to hear. The graphic novel "They Called Us Enemy"[1] goes into more details of his childhood for anyone interested. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Called_Us_Enemy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Called_Us_Enemy

thadt 3y ago
My wife is a middle school history teacher that really liked "They Call Us Enemy" and has used it in class assignments. It's well done.
tootie 3y ago
There's a terrific drama called Bad Day at Black Rock about a veteran trying to give a medal to a Japanese family in a rural town whose son had died in the war. It's less about the internment and more about bigots getting their comeuppance.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

If you're in California it is worth visiting Manzanar, an internment camp they have kept as a museum and as witness to this period of U.S. history. We had a foreign exchange student from Japan with us for 9 months. When the school year wrapped up I rented an RV and the whole family (6 of us including the foreign exchange student) road-tripped around the western U.S. By chance Manzanar showed up as a point of interest in our vicinity and, a little awkwardly, we made it another destination. I am not sure what our foreign exchange student thought. Perhaps it didn't really register for her — another country and all that. I am not sure how affected I would be if I saw something similar in Japan. It made quite an impression on me and my wife, however.

epage 3y ago
I grew up next to Manzanar and I don't think it registered with me that we were right next to an internment camp and I never visited until I was in my mid-30s. The only reason I was even in the area is I came back to hike Whitney but it was too crowded so I did Langley and had time to spare. Wish I had been by sooner.

i2cmaster 3y ago

[flagged]

nsteel 3y ago

Relatedly, he stars in the musical Allegiance, a story inspired by his internment camp experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(musical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(musical)

35997279 3y ago

One of the most affecting images in my high school history book for me was of Japanese American Boy Scouts hanging a sign declaring Japanese Americans “Aliens of Enemy Nationalities.” The caption mentioned that the young men themselves were afterwards sent to internment camps. [0] This image so affected me that I once saw a copy of the book left behind at a coffee shop and had to thumb through it to see it again. With all the editing of history curricula that states like Florida are doing, I hope it survives. It’s is a dark chapter in American history that wasn’t that long ago. [0]https://www.mrginn.com/uploads/8/5/4/6/85468970/chapter35.pdf https://www.mrginn.com/uploads/8/5/4/6/85468970/chapter35.pd...

wahnfrieden 3y ago
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- refurb 3y ago
  And to the Germans and Austro-Hungarians during WW1.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 03857292756 3y ago
    And the Ukrainians. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadian_internment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Canadian_internmen...
yummypaint 3y ago
Their property was also stolen from them. Much of Palo Alto was farms owned by Japanese americans originally
- 35997279 3y ago
  This page mentions they were forced to sell their land, of course at a much lower price than they would have gotten. They also weren’t allowed to take their pets, which the page says “were destroyed.” [0]. Shameful. This country took its own citizens, locked them up, stole their land and shot their dogs — without a trial. https://www.paloaltohistory.org/japanese-american-internment.php https://www.paloaltohistory.org/japanese-american-internment...

listenallyall 3y ago

George Takei is a wonderful, intelligent, hilarious, inspirational, talented human being, and it's fantastic to see him receiving so much recognition and love and career opportunity at 65, 75, and now 85 years old. Instead of Star Trek being the apex of his career or life, it's now just one part of an immensely well-lived life.

5040 3y ago
I see him as a tragic figure, despite having personally suffered at the hands of the American government, he's somehow become this great apologist for strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations.
- FemmeAndroid 3y ago
  Can you be more specific about the instances of what you're talking about when you say "strong central power forcibly enforcing its dictates on unwilling populations?"
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    Lockdowns and vaccine mandates fit that bill, in my view
    - kelnos 3y ago
      It's weird how many people have suddenly come out against vaccine mandates, when a bunch of vaccinations have been mandatory for school attendance in most US school districts since before most (all?) of us were born.
      - sigzero 3y ago
        I think there were always a lot of people against this "vaccine" mandate. The Government handled it entirely wrong from the start.

NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago

It seems obviously wrong to incarcerate citizens on the basis of ethnicity. That said, an important part of the discussion that usually isn't discussed at all is the Ni'ihau incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident TLDR: The first thing that happened in WWII for the United States was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second thing is a Japanese pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course). In the end a couple people were shot. Edit: I'll add some discussion from below to the top-level comment, I think it improves it. In a situation where you have no data (hostilities just started), this incident being one of the first things that happen is, in fact, quite striking. And, critically, these people weren't spies or saboteurs. They were rando civilians who, without premeditation or contact with enemy government, decided on the spot to help the enemy. If you were a commander in that war you would rightly find it terrifying. It is, we might say, a bad look. I bring it up in response to the story because it's an obvious part of the narrative about Japanese internment camps in the U.S. in WWII that is suppressed because it is inconvenient and uncomfortable. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, though. Obviously, this event makes the actions the U.S. government took look more justifiable. The fact that it happened so quickly after hostilities started is also striking. The idea that Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans are more likely to turn against their adopted country than, say, German or Italian immigrants seems more plausible in this light, and that helps understand the decisions made by people in power (in addition to stuff you already know, like Japanese is a very different language to English and culture to American, far more different than either German or Italian, and Japanese people and other East Asians are much more easily visually distinguished, etc.). And, I will reiterate, in my mind it doesn't justify interning tens of thousands of citizens on the basis of ethnicity. It seems obviously wrong to me, either you're a citizen and you get the same rights as everyone else, or you're not. Discriminating on the basis of ethnicity is...racism? Not quite, but I suppose that's the word people use. It is a stain on the country's history.

capableweb 3y ago
> pilot crash-landed on Ni'ihau on his way home from bombing Pearl, and a Japanese immigrant and a couple Japanese-Americans decided to take his side and help him (treason, of course) Why is that treason "of course"? Seemingly, they were unaware of the events and just tried to help a fellow human being. That should never be treason. Also, since you bring it up as a response to the story, are you justifying interment camps for specific ethnicity based on one event? Otherwise your comment seems borderline off-topic.

pera 3y ago

Why is the BBC referring US concentration camps as "internment camps"?

padjo 3y ago
Because that’s what they’re called? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camps
- pera 3y ago
  That article doesn't seem right, or at least some academics seem against the use of "internment camp" in this case: https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/146691773/euphemisms-concentration-camps-and-the-japanese-internment https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/1466917...
capableweb 3y ago
Concentration camps and interment camps are synonymous, they mean the same thing. One is not "better" or "easier" than the other, so not sure why it'd matter.
quickthrowman 3y ago
They’re referring to them as internment camps as to not equivocate the (admittedly bad) camps where Japanese-American citizens were held with the industrialized genocide of Nazi German concentration camps. Imprisoning Japanese Americans during WWII was very wrong, but it wasn’t anywhere near the abject horror of Nazi concentration camps. The words are generally synonyms, but I think the distinction is important.
candiodari 3y ago
Because in Europe concentration camps are used to refer to Germany's extermination camps for Jews, Prisoners of War and children. So an alternate name needs to be found for a different thing.
- pera 3y ago

oh_sigh 3y ago

I think/hope most people agree the internment of western Japanese people was abhorrent. Hypothetically, how many instances of sabotage/war-like acts by Japanese Americans would have to happen before the internments would be justified? I also wonder how much of a impact the Niihau incident had on the decision to do internments. Literally the first Japanese-Americans that had an opportunity helped a pearl harbor attacker terrorize Niihau.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
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- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Why didn't fascism take over after WWII, and the US, say, continue to intern western Japanese people?
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    Because the western world discovered the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps--horrors truly beyond anything they could have possibly imagined--and realized that using racism and xenophobia to justify the systematic imprisonment, abuse, and deprivation of a minority might maybe be a bad idea (and certainly a bad look)?
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  It's not hypothetical, we've seen in covid, people are more than okay with keeping the majority(not even minorities) population under near house arrest. If they were fearful for their lives like in WW2 (aka worse than covid), you can easily see why internment camps weren't opposed by the general population.
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acdha 3y ago

This is such an important bit of history for anyone who’s ever thought George Takei is too liberal or outspoken. His childhood was profoundly shaped by reactionary bigots, and then coming of age as a gay man in that era he had to face another life-altering prejudice. He was phenomenally lucky to be a talented actor and get a huge break but that also means he’s keenly aware of just how much is at stake if that kind of people regain power. An older friend was married to someone who was held in Manzanar. I drove by with them in the 2000s and the mood was somber. His life got a lot better after the war and he was able to spend most of his retirement fishing off of the coast in San Diego but it’s hard to forget that your home country saw you as a threat even while a child.

slibhb 3y ago
Ah yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a well-known "reactionary bigot".
- jhanschoo 3y ago
  I think you're trying to make a point other than your sentence's literal meaning, but I'm too distanced from modern domestic US history to know. Can you clarify and elaborate?
  - slibhb 3y ago
    FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation. More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong. I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.

wesleyd 3y ago

The best tweet of all time is Takei's: 'Watching people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America. "Santa is white!" Well, in our interment camp he was Asian. So there.' https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/805158718421815296 https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/805158718421815296

Dudester230526 3y ago
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q1w2 3y ago
While George Takei will always have a special place in my Star Trek heart, I cannot look to him as an example of goodness since he admitted to having sex with underage (gay) boys in his Howard Stern interview several years ago. It's crazy to me that the twitter-sphere was so happy to overlook his own admitted past because he was on their "side".
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  I'd venture to say that almost all of us have done things in our past that we are ashamed of.

libpcap 3y ago

I wonder what lessons the United States government has learned from this event. If a war breaks out between the U.S. and China, what policies (if any) would the government potentially implement differently to its residents of Chinese descent?

blululu 3y ago
We would probably just do what we did with Italian and German Americans during WWII, or Saudi Americans after 9/11. At the Federal level this means widespread and intensive surveillance to find actual threats. At the social level this would be uncoordinated actions arising from general suspicion and distrust. This would result in small scale outbreaks of violence, boycotts, subtle insistence that on taking an ultra-pro-America stance on most issues. The War years were not going to be good for the Japanese Americans regardless of Federal policy, but mass internment was the so clearly the wrong policy and there is no reason that we should even consider repeating it. Assuming that everyone is a threat therefore we must suspend haebeus corpus and have them arrested indefinitely for nothing is generally not a great idea.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  'Suspension of habeus corpus' (ie unlawful detainment) seems to underline USA's global reach somewhat. Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo) still exists, does it not. I know Biden has sought to empty it. For the last several decades (my lifetime) it's always seemed that no matter where in the World you might be, if the country is not an enemy of USA, there's a chance you [I mean, a person, not me specifically] could be whisked away to perpetual imprisonment in USA, for something perhaps as trivial as copyright infringement and the local government would just kinda shrug. Perhaps it's closer to failure to follow due process, rather than habeus corpus. Maybe that's not a balanced view of USA's projection of soft power. It mirrors the fear some in USA have of rogue cops. Does it feel to you like the World, or just USA, had improved here? Tribalism seems as strong as ever.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
The closest analog is probably the post-9/11 environment, and while, thankfully, no one suggested firing up concentration camps, the rise of racial profiling by both civilians and government was still deeply troubling.

linsomniac 3y ago

My grandfather was a woodworker and worked in construction. When I was ~18 I proudly showed him this fancy Japanese pull saw I had gotten for a woodworking project I was working on. His only comment was "We confiscated so many of those from the people we put in internment camps". Shit just got real. He was a Marine at Pearl Harbor during the attack, he never really talked about it. I wish I knew him better, but I was always afraid of him growing up. "We don't wake grandpa up when he's napping, he might accidentally kill us."

devoutsalsa 3y ago
On the topic of Pearl Harbor, my dad’s uncle was in the Massachusetts National Guard. He was scheduled to get out of the military on December 8th, 1941. He was on a ship from Hawaii to San Francisco when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th. His ship was turned around, and he had to serve until the end of the war. He was in the infantry & was storming beaches, including some of the infamous ones like Guadalcanal. His Battalion suffered a 250% casualty rate (aka replacement troops also suffered casualties). By the end of the war, he and one other guy were the only original members left.

alienicecream 3y ago

Why is it so unreasonable to think that immigrants from another country would have conflicting loyalties in a situation of total war between those two countries? That seems pretty human and normal. And in an emergency your rights as a citizen can be curtailed accordingly right? Weren't we all in favor of that during the pandemic? I do agree that it wasn't a nice thing to do of course.

ok_dad 3y ago
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FpUser 3y ago
In my opinion your way of thinking is an abomination.
- alienicecream 3y ago
  I think that's just a way to avoid the question and to try and get others to avoid it as well.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    There is no question here. And there is no avoidance. If you are worried about spies go and catch them. That is what your 3 letter agencies are paid for. And they're paid a lot. Your amounts to - x percent of people commits crime, blacks commit even more so lets open concentration camps before they do any damage. As already said it is totally disgusting.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
Yes it is unreasonable. Japanese people aren’t a disease that kills the old and the vulnerable, and comparing them to a disease is extremely inappropriate.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

That's why it's critical to never elect strong government types like FDR ever again. This is a mar on American history, along with the Drug War that he started.

photochemsyn 3y ago

The real villain of the Japanese internetment camp program was JJ McCloy (1981): https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese-internment-humane.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese... > "John J. McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War, today defended the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II as ''reasonably undertaken and thoughtfully and humanely conducted.'' Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage." It's true that there were actual Japanese government agents operating in the USA at the outbreak of WWII, but they were comparable in number to the German and Italian agents who were also US citizens. An overview of the Japanese government's activities from the Office of Naval Intelligence is here (Office of Naval Intelligence, 1941) http://www.mansell.com/eo9066/1941/41-12/IA021.html http://www.mansell.com/eo9066/1941/41-12/IA021.html In comparison to internment of 112,000 Japanese-Americans ancestry (and seizure of property), some 11,500 people of German ancestry and three thousand people of Italian ancestry were incarcerated on suspicion of being foreign agents, out of a population of 1.2 million German-Americans and 2.4 million Italian-Americans. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/German_and_Italian_detainees/#Comparison_to_the_Japanese_American_Experience https://encyclopedia.densho.org/German_and_Italian_detainees... Conclusion: the Japanese internment program was just another example of blatantly racist government policy, of the same kind that motivated Nazi 'master race' thinking. Incidentally, McCloy was also a primarily responsible for the early release of Nazi industrialists from prison in post-WWII Germany.

steve76 3y ago

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lannisterstark 3y ago

For someone who suffered from govt overreach, he for some magical reason is very pro govt intervention in people's lives, almost like some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

anotherevan 3y ago

There's an interview he did with David Tennant a few years ago where he also talked about this at length. It was really good. https://player.fm/series/david-tennant-does-a-podcast-with/george-takei https://player.fm/series/david-tennant-does-a-podcast-with/g...