Ota and Basye

The thing Ota said that stood out to me was how quiet the Japanese kept this. It's interesting to me that their beliefs were that just taking the blame moving on would be the best course of action to become accepted. It is interesting to compare this to the way African Americans responded to racism, because it's an almost entirely different response. The Japanese had no Frederick Douglass or W.E.B DuBois to make fiery speeches about the issues they faced. Instead of open protest, the Japanese just quietly endured. Obviously, the two situations are very different as well as African Americans had been discriminated against since the earliest times in American history, where Japanese only started immigrating relatively recently, and the camps were the only large-scale discrimination. Even so, the outcomes were very different. Where slavery and discrimination are a central issue in American history, the discrimination against the Japanese was just one of many issues relating to a single war. African Americans demanded their rights in the next two decades after World War Two, and they got them. On the other hand, the web activity we did said that the Japanese never got a formal apology until the 1980s, when many of those in the camps were already dead. But, there is also an up side. Aside from the camps, Japanese Americans never had to go through the worst years of discrimination, those where the government approved of it just as much as the people. The camps certainly were a major offense, but that seems small when compared to the long years of the Jim Crow era and slavery before that. Relatively speaking, the Japanese Americans have been overlooked in terms of discrimination. It makes me think about what really is the better way to win rights: to boldly and loudly proclaim them or to endure and become overlooked? I don't know which is the right answer, but it's an interesting question.

With Basye, I was struck by her description of the reactions of the people in Pasadena at seeing a wounded soldier for the first time. My thought was that if that was the image the people had seen going into the war instead of Uncle Sam staring them down and telling everyone he wants YOU, people might have had second thoughts. If not World War Two, then World War One for sure. Comparatively, World War One was much less justified, although World War Two had its own set of problems. It also strikes me how terrible and heartless these people could be to write letters to the newspaper asking for these war heroes to be "taken off the streets." If I had seen a person like that, I would be horrified as well, but I would also understand that he looks that way because he felt the same patriotism everyone else felt, and he just ended up with the short end of the straw. People might have had a different opinion had they seen the other patient, the one who had a picture of how he looked before the war and how he hoped to look again someday. With that, people would get a sense that he is a human being as well and deserves to be treated as such.