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Comment by hornbaker | Hacker News Reader

Most of them were Japanese Americans, born in America. One wonders why German Americans weren't given similar treatment.

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Because Japanese Americans look different from "the average American", while German Americans don't.

Also, Germans had been immigrating into the US since the year 1700 and intermarried widely with other groups. So it would be very hard to decide where to draw a line and say someone is "sufficiently German" to be interned.

This is entirely supposition on my part, from someone far too young to have lived through any of it, but I suspect it's less that Japanese Americans looked different, and more that Japan was a non-Christian culture, which made it easier to dehumanize people of Japanese descent.

The Nazis might have been evil but at least they were "like us" in that they shared a common heritage, religion and linguistic root with Americans. Japan, meanwhile, was portrayed in American propaganda as an inscrutable hivemind run by a primitive death-cult.

You can see the same strange mistrust of non-Christian culture applied to Muslims in America today - even though the vast majority in the world are not violent terrorists, many Americans suspect that Islam taints and "radicalizes" the mind with evil in a way that Christianity doesn't.

Do you really believe that it was because Japan is dominantly a non-Christian culture and not because they look different? No, it was because they weren't white. And America has, for a very long time and even now, been painted as a mostly white and african american culture.

Even in modern Japan itself ironically enough, it's hard for some people to really picture non-white and non-african Americans as Americans. The word 外国人 (gaikokujin) really only applies to foreigners of European and African ancestry. I believe it's hard for them to picture those Americans as Americans simply because of the image that has been painted of the country.

Sincerely, A non-asian non-african non-white American interested in Japanese culture

>Do you really believe that it was because Japan is dominantly a non-Christian culture and not because they look different?

I believe it was both - they're two sides of the same coin. Look at the propaganda of the time - the Japanese were portrayed as being fundamentally inhuman in a way that Europeans weren't. The myth of the "inscrutable Oriental" has been around in the West for a very long time, the Japanese mind and morality were considered to be incomprehensible.

That Japanese Americans looked different probably made this xenophobia easier to act upon, though.

> suspect it's less that Japanese Americans looked different, and more that Japan was a non-Christian culture

Christianity and whiteness are surely connected in the cultural consciousness.

Fun fact: Japanese Americans in Hawaii were never interned (aside from a select few) because they made up such a large portion of the population that it wouldn't have been practical. Just goes to show that the whole exercise was ridiculous.

You should search FDR's views on Japanese and Jewish immigration and his writings in the 1920's and later. It should make it fairly clear, and reveal his views of Jewish immigration and hence why very few German refugees were accepted. Even during the war it's been revealed he had negative views of Jews and Asians.

The picture of FDR making an uncharacteristic mistake is part of the whitewash.

Twenty-five years earlier, during WWI, my German ancestors were made to swear allegiance to the United States around a bonfire of their German-language books.

By WWII, my great-uncle, who was one of the younger ones at that bonfire, volunteered at age 40 for the Army Air Corps "because the goddamn Nazis were giving the Germans a bad name." Only time I ever heard him utter a cuss word.

They were? I guess? Appears to have been different, but still done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

A relatively small number of Germans were interned based on specific individual circumstances. This was still unjust in many cases, but I wouldn't call it "similar treatment."

Japanese, German, and Italians were all interned under the Alien Enemies Act.

True but they were overwhelmingly Japanese. It appears about 11K Germans and 2K Italians were interned compared to over 110K Japanese, despite there being significantly more Germans and Italians living in the US.

Sources:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Italian_American...

It's not terribly surprising when you consider that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, whereas Germany and Italy did considerably less damage on US soil.

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