class 7 respond

The Executive Order 9066 is something I know all too well. It’s something that I have understood fairly recently, despite my knowledge of it ever since I was a child. My grandfather used to tell me stories of his brothers as zero fighters in WWII and my grandmother told me stories of her fleeing Kobe from the Doolittle air raids, all the way to the Kagawa prefecture in Japan. Ironically, even though both of them suffered losses, my grandparents never resented the United States, and always told me that “This is war, and in war we lose ourselves.”. This also applies to the internment camps as well. My grandmother’s friend who had a husband that recently passed was sent to Manzanar during WWII and told me that “Japan would have done the same, if not worse to whites during the war”, as all whites in Japan right when the war started (mostly English, New Zealand or Australian) were sent to islands in the pacific for slave labour or experimented on through means of torture. I learned about the internment camps when I was growing up in Japan through my grandparents, and when I came to the States my high school and college classes were the one that showed me all the horrors of WWII (In Japan they only show the Grave of the Fireflies for the section of WWII, and depending on the school some classes would even deny the war ever happened. My grandfather despised this type of education and took me on annual trips to Hiroshima on the two days the atomic bombs were dropped). Very recently (In fact, this year) I learned through one of my neighbors who went on a road trip, that I had a long lost family member who was sent to one of the internment camps in Topaz, Utah.