Existing comment:
In 1943, General John DeWitt, who had recommended that Japanese and Japanese Americans be taken into custody, prepared a report explaining the government's action. The report indicated that his motivations were based more in racism than in military necessity; higher-ups quickly revised it and burned what they thought were all the copies. But in 1978 Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who had spent four years in American incarceration camps, identified a marked-up copy of the original report in the National Archives. Armed with this and other documents, she and fellow activists successfully petitioned the government to hold hearings. |