A vast number of internees have relatives and ties with Japan. Some Japanese Americans were educated in Japan, preserve traditions and customs, honor Shinto and Buddhist rites, correspond and visit with citizens of Japan, and speak and write the Japanese language. Executive Order 9066 implies that those ties and traditions to the former homeland must remain dormant and non-threatening until all danger of attack has passed and the U.S. is once more free of menace by Japanese bombs.
President Roosevelt's quick action on matters of national security seem, on the surface, to represent the common good, which is an essential aspect of his role as commander in chief of the military. However, Japanese Americans were interned under severe scrutiny — compared to the treatment of Italian Americans and German Americans, who also maintained Old Country ties with enemy nations. No less a threat than potential Japanese saboteurs, people with links to Germany and Italy received no harassment or inquisition equivalent to that suffered by people of Japanese ancestry. The obvious conclusion is that, unlike European Americans, Japanese Americans are racially identifiable. Because their physical features reflected the hated Tojo, fanatical kamikaze, and the Emperor of Japan, Caucasian hysteria viewed Japanese Americans as a highly visible — and hateable — target.
When the war ended, Italian Americans and German Americans faced no great loss of home, possessions, income, or reputation. They returned to the mainstream of Caucasian America. Japanese Americans, who were released 1,000 at a time from internment camps, crept back into freedom as veritable paupers, whipped in spirit and pocketbook. Their sons, many of whom returned from the war scarred by the experience or encased in coffins, received no accolades for unusually demanding service. Not only did former internees grieve for their children, the lost years, interrupted lives, and the humiliation of American-style concentration camps, but they also bore the burden of America's use of atomic force against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two civilian cities where friends and relatives died cataclysmic deaths or survived under the threat of future cancers engendered by radiation.
