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• 1 media/shoes ps.jpg 2016-08-18T11:49:12-07:00 Japanese-American Citizenship and Internment During World War II 25 Monica Sone, Issei Daughter image_header 2017-07-12T12:28:25-07:00 Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter. Little, Brown and Company, 1953, 147. Monica Sone recounts her experiences following the Japanese bombing of the United States’ naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Sone was 23 years old; her parents were Japanese immigrants living in Seattle, Washington. In order to ensure against “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense,” Executive Order 9066 allowed the Secretary of War and military commanders designated by him to define military zones and to exclude people of Japanese descent from them. Following the order, the Sone family were interned, leaving their property behind. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided reparations of $20,000 for survivors of the internment camps, and the Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1993 supplemented appropriations for reparations. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush said, “In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.”
  
              “I suppose from now on, we’ll hear nothing but the humiliating defeats of Japan in the papers here,” Mother said, resignedly.
  
              Henry and I glared indignantly at Mother, then Henry shrugged his shoulders and decided to say nothing. Discussion of politics, especially Japan versus America, had become taboo in our family for it sent tempers skyrocketing. Henry and I used to criticize Japan’s aggressions in China and Manchuria while Father and Mother condemned Great Britain and America’s superior attitude toward Asiatics and their interference with Japan’s economic growth.  During these arguments, we had eyed each other like strangers, parents against children. They left us with a hollow feeling at the pit of the stomach. . . .
  
              In February, Executive Order No. 9066 came out, authorizing the War Department to remove the Japanese from such military areas as they saw fit, aliens and citizens alike.  Even if a person had a fraction of Japanese blood in him, he must leave on demand. . . 
  
              In anger, Henry and I read and reread the Executive Order. Henry crumpled the newspaper in his hand and threw it against the wall. “Doesn’t my citizenship mean a single blessed thing to anyone?”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Questions to Think About and Discuss
  1. What words would you use to describe the reactions of the various members of the Sone family to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and to Executive Order ?
  2. What are the differences between the way Monica and Henry saw the conflict between the United States and Japan and the way their parents understood it?
  3.  How does Henry define his citizenship? Why is it important to him?
  4. In what ways do you think reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II are or are not valuable?