On a recent outing my wife and I took in a touring exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution titled “Righting a Wrong.” Within the modest confines of a single room at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, the exhibit conveyed an epic tragedy: the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants as suspected traitors during World War II.
The exhibit made clear that not one such person was ever proved to be disloyal. To the contrary, more than 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military during the war. Those who remained inmates in our country’s de facto concentration camps formed communities with their own newspapers, sports teams and arts programs.
The national disgrace of Japanese incarceration has long been acknowledged through bipartisan consensus. In 1976 the Republican President Ford revoked Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order that had authorized the wartime imprisonment. Twelve years later, an even more conservative Republican president, Ronald Reagan, signed into law a bill authorizing reparations payments to the 60,000 formerly incarcerated people of Japanese descent who were still alive. One of the displays in the Smithsonian exhibit quotes Reagan at the signing ceremony:
