On the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese Americans and other AAPI activists are asking Americans to remember the negative impact the event had on the Japanese American community.
Actor George Takei and his family were imprisoned at a World War II Japanese internment camp when he was a young boy. Today he tweeted a thread about his experience.
“Today is Pearl Harbor Day in the U.S., a ‘day that will live in infamy’ for the unprovoked attack by the Empire of Japan upon U.S. forces stationed in Hawaii. But it also marked a dark turning point for Japanese Americans, who overnight became the ‘enemy,'” he wrote.
The Densho Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, shared its own Twitter thread discussing the racism that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor. Akiko Kurose recalled the racism she faced just a day after the event.
“When I went back to school that following morning, December 8th, one of the teachers said, ‘You people bombed Pearl Harbor,'” she said in a video produced by the Densho project.
Akiko Kurose later recalled, “When I went back to school that following morning, December 8th, one of the teachers said, ‘You people bombed Pearl Harbor.’” https://t.co/7u4AnWytsG
— Densho (@DenshoProject) December 7, 2022
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