U.S.-Japan Tensions Bring Back Old Fears : Prejudice: Japanese-Americans commemorating the 50th anniversary of the internment camp order worry that history could be repeating itself.

Sumi Seo Seki, 68, spoke somberly to Leland Saito on Saturday, telling him how the government forcibly shuttled her family from their San Pedro home and made them live in a stable at Santa Anita Park racetrack and later sent them to an isolated internment camp in Arkansas.

“I want you to remember what we went through,” she told Saito, 36, referring to the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Seki, of Long Beach, and Saito puzzled over a wall of suitcases that once held the belongings of internees such as Seki at a Little Tokyo commemoration Saturday of the 50th anniversary of the order that created the camps throughout the West and South. They looked at the letters written by children to fathers who were separated from their families by the FBI. It chilled them to see a replica of the bare rooms the internees were housed in.

Like many others at the ceremonies, which included internees, politicians and Japanese-American World War II combat veterans, Saito and Seki were asking questions about contemporary U.S.-Japanese relations. “Is the U.S. so much different today? Could this happen again?” Saito asked Seki.

They concluded that it could, saying that the seeds are being sown daily with Japan-bashing amid soured Japanese-American trade relations worsened by the recession.

“The atmosphere now is very reminiscent of late 1941,” said Frank Emi, 75, who was interned in the camps and later spent time in federal prison for refusing to serve in the Army. “The same type of hostility is springing up, not from the top government administration but from opportunistic politicians and a lot of these industrialists.”

Mayor Tom Bradley made similar comments as he addressed a gathering of 400 at the Japan American Theater. “We have heard in the last few weeks some of that same kind of vicious, unthinking statements that persisted in 1942,” Bradley said. He was referring to the controversy over Los Angeles County transportation officials awarding and then revoking a rail car contract with a Japanese firm.

Bradley, who had opposed canceling the contract with Sumitomo Corp. of America, said the attitudes of those who called for the cancellation represented “the same kind of hysteria . . . the same kind of mindless hatred” that occurred during World War II when Japanese-American men, women and children were put into the internment camps.

“Let us not forget that connection,” Bradley said.

Councilman Michael Woo also decried the “unscrupulous politicians and overpaid executives” who have engaged in race-baiting over the U.S.-Japanese trade relations.

And at a news conference later in the day, leaders of the Southern California Japanese-American community said they were equally concerned about American-bashing by Japanese officials as they were about Japan-bashing by U.S. politicians.

“We haven’t realized the apex of this and that’s what frightens me,” said J.D Hokoyama, executive director of the Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. “We need to be in the forefront to call for an end to this bashing. Unfortunately, we haven’t learned a whole lot in the last 50 years.”

Hokoyama said the Japanese-American community was elated by 1988 federal legislation that resulted in a formal apology to those who were interned and provided them with tax-free payments of $20,000 each. But he also said the current wave of prejudice “makes you realize that you can’t legislate away what people are feeling.”

Seki said the feeling that stays with her as a former internee is one of hurt. For that reason she attends ceremonies such as Saturday’s event. In 1981, Seki appeared before a congressional hearing in Los Angeles to publicly tell her internment story.

“It cleanses the old wounds that have hurt for 50 years,” she said before the start of a play that covered half a century of one Japanese-American family’s struggles with internment issues.

Throughout the day at the Japan America Theatre and the cultural center next door, Japanese-American World War II veterans such as Seki’s husband, Don, who lost his arm to machine-gun snipers, told their war stories. And there were seminars on the role of religion in the camps, about the resistance movement among internees, and on dealing with the psychological effects of internment.

Meantime, young and old alike gathered around microfiche readers to scroll through lists of Japanese names to see if their families and relatives were listed in the records from the 10 major internment camps.