The Enemy Alien Files:In Search of Truth and Justice
"My father, who died in 1990, always believed that actually the US took us in, when the Peruvians kicked us out. And he was very grateful for the US generosity. A sense of justice and fairness is one critical American ideal that my father admired. But I wonder now what my father would think if he knew what we know now, the reason why we were taken from Peru."
-- Kazuo Matsubayashi, Japanese Peruvian internee
During WWII, the internment of 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry—both US citizens and immigrants—was upheld by the US Supreme Court. Decades later, it was exposed that the US government lied to the Court; there was in fact no military necessity for the mass internment of the Japanese Americans.
"[We] remaining internees, much as we would like to keep these experiences locked away…owe it to others to publicize the whole story so that what we suffered never happens again.”
-- Eberhard E. Fuhr, German immigrant who grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was interned at age 17.
The US Supreme Court has also never ruled directly on the constitutionality of the WWII policies and actions targeting “enemy aliens” of Japanese, German and Italian ancestry in the US and from Latin America. However, legal scholars are increasingly raising due process and human rights violations.
"The right to redress an international wrong is recognized by scholars as a fundamental principle of customary law. Recognition of this right clearly pre-dates WWII, and it has been incorporated into both treaties and international legal opinions….The failure to compensate for such violations is in itself a violation of international law.”
-- Karen Parker, Esq., international human rights expert.
The need to understand what happened to former WWII internees, their families and communities during the war years and what its relevance today has given rise to much research, scholarship, development of educational materials, educational projects, dialogue, and cultural expression.
And since the days of internment, there have been challenges to the WWII government actions and policies that have been played out in the courts, halls of Congress, in the media and in the classrooms. This struggle for truth, acknowledgment and justice has been key to breaking through the silence of this traumatic past, to forging sense of identity and heritage, and to participating in the democratic processes.