A book arrived in the mail from a friend. Several weeks earlier, on a drive up the east side of the Sierra Nevada in California in mid-March, we had stopped at the site of the Manzanar War Relocation Center. It was one of 10 camps where the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese American citizens and Japanese immigrants during World War II.
New snow had fallen, and a bracing wind swept across the desert scrub where once stood 504 barracks that housed more than 10,000 men, women, and children, the tar-paper walls giving little protection from the winter cold or summer heat.
The book my friend sent, “Topaz Moon,” chronicles the detention experience through the art of those affected. Written by Chiura Obata, an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley who was sent with his young family to the Topaz relocation camp in Utah, it is a record of dignity and beauty amid persecution.
It is also deeply resonant today.
The detention policy followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 by imperial Japan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the order under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which enables the government to restrain citizens or nationals of a hostile nation or government. It had been invoked only twice before – during the War of 1812 and World War I.
As Cameron Joseph reports in the May 19 Monitor Weekly cover story, President Donald Trump is now using the law to deport people he says are in the United States illegally and who in some cases, according to authorities, have ties to gangs now listed as terrorist groups. The administration says the law provides a necessary means for addressing an immigration crisis caused by its predecessor.
Some federal judges, however, have barred the administration from using the law to justify deportation. They say that the administration has sent people to be imprisoned in El Salvador without due process.
As Cameron’s story records, that legal battle is central to what may be a pivotal moment in American democracy. The Trump administration says it is pursuing an overdue correction in the constitutional balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary. In the past, however, the use of wartime powers to restrict individual liberty put national security in conflict with the core ideal of American identity.
Ultimately, some 112,000 Japanese Americans were sent to FDR’s camps. Congress would later record the scope of this “grave injustice.” The Civil Liberties Act, passed in 1988, stated, “These actions were without security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented … and were motivated by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
In an accompanying apology, President Ronald Reagan lifted up a higher view of the nation’s identity and idea. “America stands unique in all the world,” he said. It is “the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world.”
Amid the deteriorating relations between his home and adopted countries in the late 1930s, Mr. Obata translated a Japanese poem that captured the spirit of that ideal and the cost of losing it:
’Tis bitter cold this morning,
Thus you and I had better learn to love one another.
You’d better fetch some water at the stream,
Whilst I gather kindling wood.
This column first appeared in the May 19, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.
