The internment of Japanese Americans

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2020

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to prison camps after the USA entered World War Two following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Whole families found themselves housed in barracks behind barbed wire fences. Former Star Trek actor, George Takei, was just a child when he was locked up in one of the camps. In 2010 he spoke to Lucy Williamson about his experiences there.

This programme is a rebroadcast.

Photo: Japanese American children on their way to internment camps. Credit: Dorothea Lange/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds.
0:29.2	Hello and welcome to Witness History from the BBC World Service.
0:37.6	This week we're looking at key aspects of the Second World War in the Pacific
0:41.8	which ended 75 years ago.
0:44.9	When the United States first entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Polharva,
0:50.0	the conflict had a devastating impact on Japanese Americans in the US, as Lucy Williamson
0:56.5	reports.
0:57.5	No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion the American people in their righteous might
1:08.0	will win through to absolute victory. It's December 1941 and Franklin D Roosevelt is about to take
1:19.3	America to war. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and desperately attacked by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States
1:42.2	and the Japanese Empire.
1:46.0	Japan had just attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.
1:50.0	It was the strike that brought America into the Second World War, but in the weeks
1:55.8	that followed it wasn't only Japan that was seen as the enemy.
1:59.7	I remember that morning when two American soldiers with bayoneted rifles came stomping up to the
	...

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