A Quote by Michiko Kakutani

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.

Michiko Kakutani

Quote Topics

Among Camps Coast Descent Family Internment Internment Camps Japanese Mother People War Were West West Coast World World War World War I World War II

Quote Author

Michiko Kakutani
American - Critic
Born: January 9, 1955

Our country undergoes periodic episodes of extreme intolerance and fear of foreigners, refugees in particular. Not only were people of Japanese descent placed in internment camps during World War II, but so were some Italians and Germans.

Richard Cohen

After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.

Naomi Klein

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.

Tom Brokaw

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.

Xavier Becerra

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.

Helen Thomas

There is also the issue of personal privacy when it comes the executive power. Throughout our nation's history, whether it was habeas corpus during the Civil War, Alien and Sedition Acts in World War I, or Japanese internment camps in World War II, presidents have gone too far.

Dick Durbin

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.

Neal Katyal

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.

Adina Porter

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

Phil Donahue

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.

George Takei

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

Rand Paul

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.

Lea Salonga

If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Mona Charen

The use of torture on suspected terrorists after Sept. 11 has already earned a place in American history's hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during World War II, and the excesses of the McCarthy era.

Jacob Weisberg

By the end of 2001, between 100,000 to 150,000 Algerians had died in the civil war, as well as 120 foreigners. The cost to the economy ran into billions of dollars. And all this in spite of a tough, 120,000-strong army backed by 80,000 police.