50 YEARS LATER, INJUSTICE OF INTERNMENT STILL STINGS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992                   TAG: 9201260093
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SEATTLE                                LENGTH: Medium
50 YEARS LATER, INJUSTICE OF INTERNMENT STILL STINGS
Sharon Aburano still winces at the irony of her high school teacher's 1942 lecture on the Bill of Rights. It was a fine topic, but the wrong audience.
Aburano and her teen-age classmates were imprisoned at the time, among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans confined to internment camps during World War II. They had been accused of no crime, but in the nervous months following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, their heritage was enough to call their loyalty into question.
"Here we were behind barbed wire," Aburano recalled recently, "and the teacher was telling us about civil rights - the right to due process, the right to a fair and speedy trial."
They got none of that. Instead, Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast became victims of racism, wartime hysteria and greed in an episode that some scholars consider the most serious violation of constitutional rights in U.S. history.
President Franklin Roosevelt signed the order allowing the internment on Feb. 19, 1942. Today, as the 50th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 nears, it has become a rallying point for Japanese-American groups.
Roosevelt's order didn't mention Japanese-Americans. It merely authorized military officials to declare security zones and exclude anyone they deemed a threat. Shortly afterward, American citizens with at least one-sixteenth Japanese blood were barred from living, working or traveling on the West Coast.
By commemorating the wartime discrimination, the groups hope to portray the internment camps as a blatant symbol of the prejudice that Asian-Americans still face in more subtle forms.
They grant that times have changed for the better since 1942. But they are concerned that racial conflicts may be rising again. Asians and Pacific Islanders are the fastest-growing group of U.S. immigrants, and Japan, while no longer the enemy, looms as America's strongest economic rival.
The fear, said U.S. Rep. Norm Mineta of California, himself a former internee at the Heart Mountain, Wyo., camp is that Asian-Americans "are becoming the targets of Japan-bashing sentiment."
The commemorations also serve another purpose: bringing together Japanese-American communities.
"My mother was in a camp, but she didn't talk about it," said David Takami, 34. "All she'd say was it was the most humiliating experience in her life. That would end the discussion."
Takami has written a history of Seattle's Japanese immigrants. It's designed to accompany an exhibit on the internment camps at Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum, a grass-roots history project that started with a handful of people and now has grown to include more than 50 volunteers.
"This is sort of replacing what my mother never told me," Takami said. "We're learning so much from the Nisei, the older people."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB