“Am I an American or Am I Not?” is the title of a traveling exhibit currently on display at the public library in Temecula, California. It has been showing in big cities like Boston and small ones like Clarksdale, Mississippi, and San Leandro, California, where this Militant correspondent saw it. The title of the exhibit is a quote from Fred Korematsu, a U.S. citizen who was one of over 120,000 Japanese Americans rounded up and herded into concentration camps in the U.S. during World War II.
President Franklin Roosevelt claimed internment of all Japanese in the U.S. was a military necessity. But that was nothing but a lie. It was a blatant use of racism to whip up support for Washington’s war against Tokyo to decide which set of capitalist rulers — those in Washington or Tokyo — would control the wealth of the Pacific region.
The exhibit is a good place to learn about the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans. You can find where it is scheduled to be exhibited or view it in digital format online at amianamerican.org.
In 1942 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where most of us lived, were forced into 10 concentration camps in remote deserts or swamps, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers in towers with machine guns. The Japanese Americans were given 72 hours to dispose of their homes, cars and other property and could bring only what they could carry in two bags per person. They lost their farms and crops, fishing boats, small businesses, homes, pets and personal possessions. When they were released after the war, many found their belongings and livelihoods gone and their lives shattered.
Two-thirds of the evacuees were U.S. citizens. The others were immigrants who, by a 1922 Supreme Court decision, were barred from becoming citizens of the United States. The last camp wasn’t closed until March 1946, seven months after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the second imperialist world war.
Fred Korematsu was one of three Japanese Americans who challenged the mass incarceration. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the government on the grounds of military necessity, based solely on the defendants’ race. Their convictions were later overturned.
In the 1970s, inspired by the victory of the powerful civil rights movement that dismantled segregation in the South, Japanese Americans organized a campaign for redress of the injustices they had faced and reparations for all they had lost. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1988, officially apologizing to Japanese Americans and providing a modest cash payment to those still alive.
But the exhibit has a serious weakness. It argues that the underlying cause of the U.S. government’s mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was racism, pure and simple. Was racism involved? Of course. But a more decisive factor was the U.S. capitalists’ need to build support among working people for their entrance into World War II, which became the deadliest conflict in human history, with total deaths estimated over 60 million.
World War II was, at its heart, an inter-imperialist conflict for control over markets, labor and natural resources. The war in the Pacific in particular was fought over who would control the vast resources and potential markets of China and Southeast Asia.
Racism was used to justify the war and disguise its true nature. Whipping up racist hysteria aimed at dehumanizing the “sneaky, dishonest, sly Japs,” was used to try to convince U.S. workers to support the war and fight. Washington sought to divide the working class and to divert workers from seeing who their real enemy was, and still is — the U.S. capitalist rulers.
Nonetheless, “Am I an American or Am I Not?” is more than worthwhile viewing for any worker interested in a better understanding of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II.