Former internees issue a warning

Associated Press

DENVER — John Tateishi was 3 years old when his family was taken from their Los Angeles home to an internment camp 200 miles away after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today he hopes the nation will not punish Arab Americans who had nothing to do with Tuesday’s attacks the way his family was punished 60 years ago.

"Unless the political leadership in this country is determined not to abridge the rights of a certain segment of the population, there’s no question in my mind it could happen again," said Tateishi, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil rights group the Japanese American Citizens League.

Since the attacks, people who appear to be of Middle Eastern heritage have been harassed, threatened and hounded by angry Americans looking for someone to blame. It all sounds too familiar to many of the nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans locked away in camps from California to Arkansas during World War II.

Bill Hosokawa, an 86-year-old retired Denver journalist sent to an internment camp, said he was glad the nation’s leaders have urged Americans not to threaten people "who may be thought to be linked purely because of ethnic or racial background."

"We, as a society, have become much wiser, much more understanding," said Hosokawa, who was among the 11,000 Japanese-Americans interned at the Heart Mountain camp in northern Wyoming.

The government has acknowledged that the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack was based on racial bias rather than a threat to national security. From 1988 to 1999, the government paid $1.6 billion in reparations to more than 82,000 internees and their families.

Seichi Hayashida, 83, of Caldwell, Idaho, was interned in southern Idaho. She said she now understands the reasons behind the relocations, but doesn’t want to see them happen again.

"They couldn’t tell just by looking at you whether you was loyal or not, and we looked like the enemy," Hayashida said.