RE: Japanese spies / concentration camps
august > April 18th, 2022, 08:45 PM
Yep. All of the above. With extra, nearly unique additions:
- physical differences - a child of recent German or Italian immigrants physically looked similar to a child of families of English or French or African heritage who had been in the US for centuries. So, ignorant assumptions based on surface appearance, or racism.
- Japanese immigrants had been in the US for only a few generations, and most people didn't know any of them. So an American might have grown up in Steuben or DeKalb County, had a teacher named Schultz or Schwartz, played with a kid named Amelia Earhart or Ike Eisenhower or Richard Kleindienst or John Ehrlichman or Bob Haldeman, or listened to records by Enrico Caruso or Luisa Tetrazzini, or had an Italian parish priest or bishop, or a neighbor named Antonin Scalia or Samuel Alito. So again, the idea that Japanese were somehow "other."
- the Italians and Germans had been fighting with the French and English for several years without any major attack on the US. (For that matter, the Romans, Teutons, Gauls and Britons were fighting over land 2000 years earlier without any attacks on the Cherokee or Sioux. 😉 ) So when Pearl Harbor happened, all Japanese were blamed, just as plenty of ignorant people blamed all Muslims or Middle Easterners (which ended up meaning Christian Egyptians and Lebanese, Indians, Sikhs etc. too) for 9/11.
As for what Japanese might believe about honor....the average American in 1941 could barely read, let alone know what foreign cultures believe.