Compensation to Internees

Shumway complains that the “newly refined thinking to prior actions vis-a-vis the Japanese-American internment and compensation to internees could rekindle prejudices.” The internment of Japanese-Americans cannot and should not be compared to “arrestees, pre-Miranda or schoolchildren (separate but equal) before Brown vs. Board of Education. As a patriot and citizen had Shumway been denied his rights under the Constitution and been ousted from his home and placed in an internment camp to be housed in a horse stall, would he have volunteered his services into the U.S. Armed Forces while his parents and family were still incarcerated behind barbed wire fences?

He talks of veterans groups who fought in the Pacific theater and American civilians here and abroad who suffered grievous losses; he forgets that we, too, are Americans who fought in the Pacific theater and suffered grievous losses including the loss of our constitutionally guaranteed civil rights.

KIYOKA KURUMADA

Culver City