Comments about ‘Time to record internment camp stories’

The internment of the Japanese by both the US and Canadian governments was a tragic and stupid mistake. I have close friends who suffered.

During a summer job back in the 60s I was involved in tearing down an old and unused Forestry Station. There was a room full of records from one such internment camp near Nanton, Alberta in Canada. I saved a couple of books but most of it was just burned. Housing and commissary records and even bierths abd deaths.

On the other hand I live not too far from a lighthouse that was the only thing ever shelled by the Japanese in North America.

Sad that US Citizens could be just taken and put in a camp. I understand the fear at the time but it is still so wrong. I think recording these stories is so very important. It is so sad that all they worked for businesses, homes, jobs were all taken away.

Yes, suspending the writ of habeas corpus was wrong, just as it was when Lincoln did it during the Civil War. With the Japanese government counting on an uprising of US-Japanese citizens (which never came), Japanese forces invading US soil (Aleutian Islands), enemy subs off the California coast and shocking memories of Pearl Harbor and Bataan death march fresh in the minds of citizens, the US government made emotional, wrong and illegal decisions. Retrospective clarity 60 years later does not confirm our moral superiority or intelligence. Academic historians have the responsibility to recount this tragic epic in the context of its contemporaneous times.

Mr. Shishima should go talk to all the Muslim college students in New York who are creating a ruckus because they were "spied on." Perhaps he could teach them a thing or two about what it's really like when Uncle Sam suspects your people of being a threat to America.