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Comment by kilps | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea about this before this article (I'm not American...) - incredible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

As much as I love to wave the 'Canada is awesome' flag, we've got the same dark spectre looming over our history as well. Pretty shameful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Canadian_internment

"... At first, it seemed like a big adventure; a long train ride out of the city into the natural beauty of Slocan. Scientist David Suzuki, who was six at the time of the internment, recalls in this clip the duality of the internment experience. He says it was an "enchanted" time when he would spend his days gathering wildflowers, fishing and camping. But, he describes the communal living arrangements as filthy and crowded, his bed crawling with bed bugs. ..." ~ http://archives.cbc.ca/war_conflict/second_world_war/topics/...

Internment deeply effected Dave ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Suzuki to the point he checked his newborn child to see if the eyes had eyelids. Did they look Japanese?

I'm always a little surprised when Japanese people get so excited about America. We nuked them twice, and before that we rounded up anyone that looked Japanese and put them in prison camps.

When the US kidnaps and murders thousands, it's no big deal. When North Korea kidnapped 12 Japanese, it comes up in the news once a week for decades. I don't understand it.

I guess when North Korea starts buying their bonds...

Well we had some provocation for those bad things that we did. And then when the war ended, we put a lot of energy out to rebuild Japan and make life there massively better than it had ever been before.

The last bit is kind of important.

They weren't "prison camps". They had schools on site, sports facilities, etc. Wikipedia notes "Nearly a quarter of the internees left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone." (the zone was the West coast.)

Wikipedia says 20,000 served in the military, mostly in the European Theater for obvious reasons, and I hope you all know of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_%28Unit...) which earned a serious reputation and was the subject of a very favorable movie in 1951 (i.e. before the US was particularly enlightened). 7 Presidential Unit Citations (fine in one month, probably for the Vosges mountains rescue operation, that whole campaign was very tough and fought in terrain that has favored defenders for millennia (http://www.amazon.com/When-Odds-Were-Even-1944-January/dp/03...), 21 Medals of Honor, 41 net DCS, 560 Silver Stars all the way down to 9,486 Purple Hearts for a unit of 3,000 men....

Anyway, the point of all of the above is that this was complicated. The simplistic trope of "we threw them in concentration camps like Nazis" just doesn't hold up to even casual examination.

They were prison camps due simply to the fact that you were not permitted to leave (without permission). It might have been a gilded cage, but it was still a cage.

I think you're really stretching the definition of prison, e.g. it was also a cage that 25% were given permission to leave.

Why not use internment instead?

Internment is a special case of imprisonment - all internment is imprisonment, but only some imprisonment is internment (when it's done to large groups without a trial).

Yes, but prison, the word we've been discussing up to now, has different and much more loaded connotations than imprisonment.

These weren't "camps" they were prisons. Maybe some nicer than others but just try leaving one.

There were also "camps" with barbed wire and towers to watch for people trying to escape so they could be shot.

They interviewed a living survivor of a camp like that on History Detectives where he had painted scenes from the camp on the back of cut up posters.

I am sure there were ranges of camps where more elite families got better treatment.

People also lost their homes/land, their way of life. This was a very bad way to treat anyone, let alone innocent American civilians.

Revisionist history that "it wasn't so bad" is insane.

To be fair, he delivered citations, and you're painting the worst picture that is at all rational. I'd love to see citations defending your point of view as well.

Once something is deemed bad, the most extremely anti-that things are accepted as truth, for no other reason than the complete opposite of wrong MUST be right. Most of the time, it's wrong again, because, as grand parent poster said, things are complicated.

That's like saying Holocaust was quite OK since most Jews survived

I know a group of 80+ year old Japanese-American men. During WWII, one was in an internment camp, two served in the US military, and one was visiting family in Japan and was drafted into the Japanese military.

"It's complicated" is about the best explanation I've ever heard.

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