Japanese Latin Americans detained during WWII seek redress from U.S.
| Autor | Conaway, Janelle |
During World War II, more than 2,200 people of Japanese ancestry living in Latin American countries --80 percent of them in Peru--were captured against their will and taken to the US, stripped of their homes, their businesses, even their personal identity documents. Some would be exchanged for US citizens who had been taken hostage in war zones in the Far East; others would be held in US internment camps for the duration of the war, like their Japanese American counterparts. Only a small percentage of them would be able to return to Latin America.
In a March hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Isamu Carlos "Art" Shibayama, 86, testified about what it was like for him, as a 13-year-old Peruvian boy, to be interned with his family in Texas--and later, as an adult, to fight for justice in the US, a country that considered him an "illegal alien."
"The government brought us here at gunpoint, so how can they classify us as illegal aliens?" he asked at the hearing, describing an injustice that clearly still rankles. "We didn't do anything."
His daughter, Bekki Shibayama, told the commission that the only "supposed crime" her family had committed was to be of Japanese descent at a time when the US government wanted hostages to swap. Her great-grandparents were taken from Peru and eventually sent back to Japan in exchange for US citizens being held by Axis forces. The part of the family that ended up in the US never saw them again.
"Quite honestly, I cannot say that our family has handled the trauma of these wartime experiences very well," Bekki Shibayama testified. "There's still a veil of denial, and it still haunts us and still makes us feel angry and frustrated whenever we think of the injustices that our family had to face."
A footnote in history
The story of Japanese Latin American deportees in World War II is somewhat of a footnote to the better-known history of the mass imprisonment of some 45,000 Japanese nationals and 75,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in the US. At the National Museum of American History, the exhibition called "Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and World War II"--which opened in February to mark the 75th anniversary of the post-Pearl Harbor executive order that led to the incarcerations--makes only a passing mention of the Latin Americans. And a 1982 report presented to Congress by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians covers the Latin American experience...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu pruebaCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
