Seventy-five years ago March 21, the first wave of people arrived at Manzanar — Americans forced into camps because of where their ancestors were born.
A month earlier, a local newspaper wrote about the impending internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry — people who would lose their homes, their businesses, their savings; people for whom years of racism had grown from a sting to a full body slam.
The newspaper warned of “the wreckage that it would bring to the lives of thousands and thousands of loyal American citizens.” The newspaper wrote, “For who … can say that the big majority of our American–Japanese citizens are not loyal to the land of their birth — the United States? Their record speaks nothing but loyalty …”
We wish those words were part of the record of the then-Kitsap County Herald. But unfortunately, they aren’t. They were written by the publishers of the Bainbridge Review. The Herald was silent on the forced relocation of its neighbors, many of whom who would go on to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces (the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed almost entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history).
Were the Herald’s editors and publishers of the war years alive today, we believe they would regret not having taken a courageous stand. For them, and for this newspaper — for which that shameful silence will always be a part of its history — we apologize. And we recommit ourselves to the call of those who suffered the indignity and racism of the time: “Nidoto Nai Yoni” — “Let it not happen again.” We remember the words of the late civil rights activist, Fred Korematsu: “I really hope that this will never happen to anybody else because of the way they look …”
And yet, ironic for a nation of immigrants, America is close to repeating that history.
The enemy of peace is hatred, and hatred wears many disguises (don’t forget that the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was perpetrated by white Americans). The enemy is not the refugee that believes in the compassion of America, not the immigrant that believes in the opportunity of America, not the child of immigrants who now joins the nation of his or her birth in a battle against a common enemy.
In his remarks on St. Patrick’s Day in Washington, D.C., Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny — whose country’s descendants make up a large portion of the U.S. population — summed up what it means to be an American:
The Irish once were “the wretched refuse on the teeming shore,” he said. “We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America. We came and we became Americans. We lived the words of John F. Kennedy long before he uttered them: We asked not what America can do for us, but what we could do for America.”
Now, many others who seek to come here today do the same. Exclusion is contrary to what our nation is about. May we not forget the human costs and suffering that results from it.
