Their homes, businesses and vehicles were liquidated. As far as I know, they never got them back or adequate financial restitution.
The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, passed by Congress in 1948 provided $38 million for property losses.
If the Japanese internees were compensated fairly, I stand corrected. I have some doubt about that, since this issue was addressed again in the 1980s. For your information, I opposed the 1980s reimbursements. There's no way to reimburse people in a reasoned verifiable manner 40 years after the fact.
How much did the Japanese government compensate American citizens for forcing them into slave labor camps?
Do you think we should adopt the human rights policies of Iraq, North Korea, Syria or Japan whenever the mood strikes us? The idea is to neutralize any threat to the United States. It is not to inflict equal pain on people who were born in a nation with which hostilities have broken out.
As for your distress over the "inhumane" way the relocation was handled; Somebody had to do something quickly. If the Emporer had told us in 1940 that he was going to attack Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941, there would have been adequate time to come up with a "humane" plan.
Quite frankly, I don't like your tone. I have not defended enemies of American here. I am defending men women and children most of whom were not hostile to the United States. If you can't stomach that, head on off to some hate site and have a ball.
The only families split up, that I'm aware of, were the ones that had members sent to Tule Lake, California. That camp consisted of people who asked to be repatriated to Japan, or answered "no" to a loyalty questionaire, or who the FBI had evidence of disloyalty against.
That may be true. I have seen interviews with grown up Japanese Americans who experienced the relocation camps. I saw one recently. He described the pain of being separated from his father for a number of years, not knowing if he was alive or not. Yep, that's right, I do feel sorry for the little kid who had nothing to do with the war.
19,000 Japanese or Japanese-American citizens asked for repatriation and 8,000 actually went back. 3,500 renounced their American citizenship. 1942 was not the time to be politically correct.
Treating people humanely is not politically correct. It's humane.
14 posted on 02/06/2003 11:57 AM PST by jackliberty
You seem to be looking for a fight where there shouldn't be one. Nothing in my remarks implied that you were defending enemies of America.
And your snide comment about us adopting standards of Japan was a total inversion of my statement. We compensated the people; Japan didn't. We treated the Japanese-Americans humanely; Japan didn't do the same for Americans.
You keep talking about "humane". The relocation camps were a lot more humane than you think; 4,5000 Japanese-Americans left the camps to go to college, $4 million was allocated to help others start businesses. Money from crops left behind were deposited in the peoples' accounts.
And people could leave the camps at any time to live anywhere other than the West Coast.
You're looking at 1942 through the prism of 2000. In 1942, the outcome of the war was not certain; In 2000, the outcome is well known. In 1942, there was espionage and spying that could have tipped the outcome and who was or was not a spy or Japanese sympathiser was not apparent. The government response may have been overboard (in today's prism) but it was as humane as possible.
Listening to stories of separation can be wrenching. Next time you hear one, ask the speaker what his father did to get sent to Tule Lake rather than Nebraska.