207: Japanese Internment: Removal, Relocation, & Reckoning
6/8/20261 hr 6 min
"What I vividly recall is after getting to Tanforan and walking into this horse stable, and Mom… putting down her suitcase and just crying.”
This is the story of Japanese American incarceration.
In February 1942, shortly after the United States enters the war, FDR signs Executive Order 9066, beginning the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes and lives. Some 120,000 civilians—many of them American citizens, none of them charged with a crime—are sent to camps across the American West and South. Their constitutional rights are denied in the name of national security.
Even as families struggle to carry on inside the barbed wire, legal challenges arise. Three Japanese Americans fight their way to the Supreme Court, forcing the nation’s highest court to confront a question it would rather avoid: can the Constitution be suspended for an entire ethnic group in wartime? And when the court finally rules—does the answer change anything at all?
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsGreg Jackson· Host0:00
[mellow music] It's 10:00 AM, December 7th, 1941. After escorting bombers during the second attack wave on Pearl Harbor, Airman First Class Nishikaichi Shigenori is flying away from the Island of Oahu in his sleek, fast, and deadly Mitsubishi A6M, better known as the Zero. But as he soars above the Pacific's blue waters, he notices his fuel is going low, fast. He did take some hits. It must be a punctured fuel tank, and it doesn't take him long to realize that there's no way he's making it back the 200 miles to his aircraft carrier, the Hiryu. It's time to resort to the backup plan, landing on the small and most western of the eight Hawaiian islands, the island of Niʻihau. Nishikaichi spots the small 18-by-6 mile island below. But wait, there are structures. People, even. Not good. In their morning briefing, his superiors said the island was uninhabited, thus making it a good spot to land, bail, and wait for rescue via an imperial submarine if needed. Bad intel then. But at this point, Nishikaichi has no other choice. He's heading down whether he likes it or not, and as he gets close, he takes in another surprise.