The Evacuation Order on My Studio Wall

Friends —

On the wall of my studio hangs an evacuation order from 1942. I put it there as a reminder of how harshly governments can treat their own citizens during a crisis.

My parents, who lived through the war, saw those Japanese internment camps much differently than people do today.

Most of the country did as well. In 1942, 93% of Americans said moving Japanese immigrants off the West Coast was appropriate, and 59% said the same about their American-born children, who were full citizens. Today, just 13% agree.

That gap is what intrigued me. We were taught to see internment as a racist stain on the country’s history, and certainly race was part of it. But I wanted to understand how so many people got to “yes” … and racism isn’t the only answer.

This one is also close to home. The biggest of the temporary holding centers was the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, the town where I grew up. At its peak it held nearly 19,000 people, half of them living in converted horse stalls.

To judge 1942 fairly, you have to understand the context. Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore fell within weeks of Pearl Harbor. Americans had heard what Japan’s army did to the cities it took. And on a tiny Hawaiian island, something happened on the first day of the war that rattled military intelligence for good reason.

And here’s something I didn’t expect. Hawaii was closer to Japan, had a far larger Japanese population, and was the place that actually got bombed. Yet almost nobody there was locked up. The reason tells you a lot about how leaders were thinking.

Then there’s the part many people never heard about. Some of the officials with the best intelligence in the country doubted the threat before any people were moved. And the Army produced a report so damaging to the government’s case for internment that officials burned every copy. But they missed one; it didn’t surface for nearly 40 years, and I took a look at it in this video.

I learned a lot from this one, and I tried to present it fairly. Check it out here.

– Ken

P.S. We also took a look at Rosa Parks last week. Most of us grew up with the story of a tired seamstress too worn out to change her seat. Lately, plenty of people online call the whole thing a staged publicity stunt. Both versions miss that she’d been doing civil rights work for over a decade before she stepped on that bus. And that famous photo of her? It was staged, but not the way critics claim. You can see it here.