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CHAPTER 14 - SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS
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Despite America's efforts to assuage the wrongs committed against her citizens, the harmful sting of Executive Order 9066 continues even today. The reason an innocent man could be convincingly tried and convicted in the award-winning novel Snow Falling on Cedars - recently made into a major motion picture - is the great hostility Americans felt toward the Japanese. The reason Japanese-American relocation proceeded without a contemporary hew and cry against it is because of what had happened at Pearl Harbor, Okinawa and other battles in the months immediately preceding Executive Order 9066. Were military leaders really convinced Japan could invade the American west coast? Perhaps they were, given the stinging defeats the United States had sustained in the Pacific before February 19, 1942. Those defeats may have been part of the reason Allan Navins expressed the view held by many Americans in 1946: Probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese. But imposing unjust laws - even when the point of the laws is to address legitimate military concerns - is nothing more than legal tyranny. And even a great country, built on strong democratic constitutional principles, can succumb to hysterical injustices against its own citizens - especially when there is no outcry by the rest of us. |
