Fred Korematsu Quotes

My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.

We now know what we should have known then--not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans.

Growing up, I didn't know about the Japanese internment camps until I saw a movie of the week as an adult. I remember going, 'How come that wasn't covered in history class?' Moving to California, you run into people whose grandparents lost everything and their businesses and were put in these internment camps.

But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.

We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.

They didn't incarcerate the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. That's the place that was bombed. But the Japanese-American population was about 45 percent of the island of Hawaii. And if they extracted those Japanese-Americans, the economy would have collapsed. But on the mainland, we were thinly spread out up and down the West Coast.

The thing about World War II is that everyone knows about the concentration camps in Europe - in Nazi Germany and Poland and Auschwitz and the other camps - but, no one really talks about the camps that were here in the United States.

The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

February 19, 1942, is the year in which Executive Order 9066 was signed, and this was the order that called for the exclusion and internment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast during World War II.

I could never understand how we could put 120,000 Japanese behind a fence in World War II. I remember being bewildered about that.

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.

My mother's family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II.

When I was trying to figure out how the government might go about creating the camps in 'The Darkest Minds,' I researched the Japanese internment camps here in the United States, specifically propaganda the government used, and how they capitalized on people's fears.

I did a film called 'Fort McCoy,' based on a true story of one of the few internment camps during WWII that was actually in the United States.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

There was a Japantown in San Francisco, but after the internment camps that locked up all the Japanese, Japantown shrunk down to just a couple tourist blocks.

The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

I was six months old at the time that I was taken, with my mother and father, from Sacramento, California, and placed in internment camps in the United States.

During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.

I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration camps.

I remember reading one of those big history texts in elementary school, and in that whole book there was one paragraph that mentioned that Japanese-Americans were interned. I went home and asked my father, 'You weren't, were you?' He said, 'Yes, I was.' I was shocked.

My father's grandfather was in Heart Mountain.

Most Japanese-Americans have that legacy. The camp experience is something of a calling card between them. They say, 'So, where were you interned?'

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.