Reopening Wounds, Revising History : Rewriting the truth of the internment of Japanese-Americans during the war

Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) wants to rewrite some World War II history according to his own quirky vision. Worse yet, he wants his inaccurate and dangerous version of what happened to Japanese-Americans in those dark days included in textbooks used by California schoolchildren.

In a resolution that could be voted on today by the Assembly, Ferguson claims that national security and military necessity were the reasons that 120,000 Japanese-Americans were swept away from their homes on the West Coast and shipped to internment camps. The resolution also incorrectly states that “it is simply untrue that Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camps during World War II . . . . “

Ferguson’s attempt to revise history doesn’t alter historical fact. Congress in 1988 voted for reparations in acknowledgement that Japanese-Americans had been locked up because anti-Japan sentiment in this country reached a fever pitch.

The vote for reparations followed a 1982 report by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. It concluded that internment “was not justified by military necessity and the decisions which followed from it--detention, ending detention and ending exclusion--were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.”

Just last year, the Assembly passed a resolution that called for instructional materials used in California schools to give “accurate and objective versions of the Japanese-American internment experience.”

Setting the record straight in educational materials used in California is no small matter because these textbooks provide the national standards used by textbook publishers and educators throughout the United States.

California and Texas are the only two states that have an extensive textbook-review policy, so they are the models for educational materials. Thus, Ferguson’s attempt to rewrite history is not only a foolish effort, but a potentially harmful one.