fuonlyknew

Why I referred to the Japanese Internment Camps During WWII as Concentration Camps

I was born in Oregon in 1951. That was just a few years after World War 2. My father was only slightly involved in the war as it ended just after he enlisted, thank goodness! However, Fort Steven on the Oregon Coast was the only place in the continental U.S. that was shelled during the war. He would take me and my siblings to see the fort and tell us about the war. However, one element of the war that he never told me about was the rounding up of the Japanese Americans on the west coast and shipping them in cattle cars to Internment camps inland.

I learned about the internment camps when I became friends with Japanese kids whose parents and/or grandparents had been sent to them. I learned even more when I went to visit a college friend who lived just a few miles over the Oregon/California border from the camp at Tule Lake.

When I started researching for my book, “The Sand Pounder,” I read a book titled, “Beyond the Camps,” written by an author friend by the name of Denny Dressman. His book detailed the personal experiences of numerous Japanese Americans who, once released, settled in Denver where I now live.

As I added together all the stories that I was told from these various sources, I was shocked and saddened by how our government treated these people. While the Japanese families that I wrote about in my book are fictional, the experiences I relay through my writing really did happen to others. The Internment camps were supposed to be designed to keep the Japanese safe but that certainly wasn’t the way it was handled. I realize that fear can make people do strange and horrible things.

I hope we can learn from history. As Winston Churchill paraphrased the famous quote from Santayana

“Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”