ASIAN HATE NOW AND THEN

On the Past & Present

The current wave of Asian hate stemming isn’t new, as Japenese internment during WWII shows

words & photos By GLEN SALAZAR

W

ith the spread of COVID-19 to the United States, there has been a spike in Asian hate across the country. Since the first known COVID-19 case was identified in Wuhan, China in December 2019, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants have been targeted and attacked for their identity. This disease of hate against Asian segments of the American population is not new.

There have been various manifestations of it in the history of the United States. During World War II, one of the most infamous episodes was the vicious hate spewed towards Japanese Americans. The climax of this hate was the forceful internment of the Japanese in America when they were stripped of their rights as Americans and dignity as humans.

After the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese Americans were viewed by their fellow Americans as enemies at worst, spies at best. Consequently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which led to the forced relocation and internmentof JapaneseAmericans who lived on the Pacific Coast. Approximately 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry residing in the continental United States, primarily American citizens, were stripped of their rights and placed into concentration camps. Only 1,200to1,800of theapproximately 150,000 Japanese Americans composing about a third of the Hawaiian population was interned in Hawaii.

The internment of Japanese Americans sparked from racist attitudes of the broader American public toward Asians following the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, the mastermind of the internment, said anyone of “one drop of Japanese blood” should be interned. California classified anyone with a minimum of 1/16 of Japanese blood to have enough to place them into internment. The hatred towards the Japanese and other Asians dates decades before Pearl Harbor.

In the 19th century, several

“I am very proud to be Japanese,” Tamaki Miwa says.

laws and treaties were passed to stop immigration from Japan and China. During California’s gold rush in the mid-1800s, the Chinese were blamed for unemployment. Fear of Asian hordes who would out-compete European Americans for farmland and business led to the restriction of Japanese immigrants’ property and citizenship rights as had earlier occurred against Chinese immigrants. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act became the inspiration for the ImmigrationActof 1924,whichbanned immigration from Japan.

Japanese Americans weren’t the only victims interned. 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were deported from Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru, and were interned in the United States. Many Japanese Latin Americans, two-thirds of whom were Japanese Peruvians, arrived in San Francisco during WWII to be interned in camps on the U.S. mainland.

In her memoir Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston documents the traumatic physical and psychological experience her family dealt with as they were taken from Terminal Island,

near San Pedro, California, and imprisoned at Manzanar, one of ten American concentration camps dotting mostly the West. Despite the endurance of her family and the broader Japanese American internees, Jeanne reminisces that at Manzanar, everyone was afraid of what racism and violence awaited them when they left.

In Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, the U.S. Supreme Court, on Dec. 18, 1944, unanimously ruled that the government could not continue to detain a citizen who is seemingly loyal to the country.

The Endo ruling led to a domino effect culminating in the release of the interned Japanese Americans and the closing down of the internment camps by the War Department. After they departed from the in- “My mom and ternment camps, Japanese Americans encountered step dad also hostile racial prejudice and violence on the West Coast, from being labeled with the got themselves derogatory racial slur “Jap” to facing housing and job discrimination. Moreover, pepper spray Japanese American homes and businesses became and a stun gun,” targets for racist attacks, including gunshots, fires, explosions, and vandalism. Jade Liu says.

Upon release, the toxic environment Japanese Americans encountered continued well past Victory over Japan Day, when Japan formally surrendered to the United States aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.

Flash forward to today, Asian Americans, in particular Chinese Americans, have become targets of racism. In the new world of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese living overseas have become easy targets of xenophobia. In the United States, Asian Americans have become targets for racist violence. Last year, then-President Trump, instead of putting out the fires of racism, sparked new ones, calling COVID-19 the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus,” and the “Kung Flu,” stigmatizing the Asian American community.

While crimes against Asian Americans are on the rise, in California, these crimes spiked at 107% in 2020, according to new data. In the minds of many of the aggressors, Asian Americans are behind the pandemic and should pay the consequences. Of concern are the attacks aimed at elderly and young Asian Americans. On March 17, 2021, in San Francisco, a 75-year-old Chinese American grandmother fought back using a wooden board against a 39-year-old White male assailant who punched her out of the blue as she waited to cross the street. On April 9, 2021, in Los Angeles, a 70-year-old Mexican American grandmother was brutally beaten and dragged across a bus by a 23-year-old Black female attacker who thought she was Asian and yelled anti-Chinese

Manzanar Cemetery is located in Monument, California.

slurs at her. On July 5, 2021, in Las Vegas, a White woman was charged for battery and a hate crime after she approached a Korean American family in a shopping mall and punched a 6-year-old boy in the neck as she said “China” multiple times.

“I haven’t really experienced any racism before or after COVID-19, partially because I don’t really look like Asian,” says Tamaki Miwa Orellana,aJapaneseAmerican chemistry graduate from UC Berkeley, originally from Yokohama, Japan. Nevertheless, she continued, “I am very proud to be Japanese.”

Jade Liu is a Chinese American graduate also from Berkeley and current doctoral student at Indiana University, originally from Changchun, China. “My mom and stepdad also got themselves pepper spray and a stun gun, something I never envisioned them doing,” she says. “The things that we’ve seen in the news are horrifying. I’m honestly not sure I want to stay in the U.S. after graduation right now because of this, but we’ll just see how things go.”

On June 15, 2021, Gov-

ernor Newsom terminated the executive orders that put into effect the lockdowns and restrictions, which were part of the California pandemic response since March 2020. At the same time, we are still in uncharted waters emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the new Delta variant raising concerns of the state and the nation being submerged again in lockdowns and restrictions. Unlike the rapid rolling back of California’s executive COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the current wave of Asian American hate might take some time to ebb. In the long run, the virus of anti-Asian racism might turn out to be much harder to dissipate than Covid-19.