 After Pearl Harbor there was just a tremendous sense of shock. The United States had never been attacked in this way. It had sought to remain neutral. The U.S. government and the Japanese government were still negotiating up to the very eve of that devastating December 7th, 1941 morning. And so Congress investigated and they heard from military leaders who had told them, among other things, that Japanese Americans might be dangerous. That there was a risk facing them from the possibility that all of these people, never mind that many of them had never been to Japan, had been born in the United States, that they didn't know Japanese, didn't know Japanese culture, that they were as thoroughly assimilated as anyone else. Nonetheless, there was a sense that, well, now that there's war, perhaps we can't trust these folks. Now some of that was just the product of racial prejudice that had been there all throughout. If you go back and look at the politics of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s in the U.S. West, especially in California, there were efforts all along to say that we don't want any more Japanese. We want to keep those who are here from acquiring land. We don't want them to naturalize as citizens and so on. Directed not just against people of Japanese descent, not just against people of Asian background more generally, but all throughout the 1910s and 20s, there was an effort to restrict migration to close the door. People said that there were too many white ethnics coming. There were too many who were European in background, but they were from Southern Europe or Eastern Europe. They were Catholics. They were Jews. They weren't old stock, real Americans or wouldn't become real Americans. So there's all of this background and what happened is that the leaders in Congress and the White House decided that they would authorize the United States Army to take those measures that they deemed appropriate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 and that allowed Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of the Western Defense, to start issuing orders. Those began with curfews, freezing bank accounts, having people fired from jobs if they worked for the civil service or if they worked with defense contractors, and then ultimately signs started to go up on telephone poles with instructions to all people of Japanese ancestry. And it said that in two days, there's 48 hours notice in some instances, you had to report to an assembly center. You could only bring what you could carry and that's ultimately what led to the camps. Now what's interesting is there's this rich archival history, all of these documents now that we can access. And what those documents show is something truly astonishing. They show that other than General DeWitt and a few others, that the FBI, that other military leaders including in Hawaii, that they all had assessed this, they had investigated, they looked at this and not with our judgment now looking back, but with their judgment then, at the time, with war raging, with a sense of panic, they had concluded the Japanese-Americans did not present a risk. And they had actually counseled, they had written memos internally saying, this is a silly thing to do, this is foolish, we will come to regret this. The very first civilian head of the war relocation authority was someone named Milton Eisenhower. He was the general's brother. He was a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. He was asked to run the camps. He did it for only a few months and he quit and he said, he said, I predict that these camps will be regarded as a mistake and indeed history has borne him out. So what's truly astonishing is if you go back and look at the record that was compiled at the time and what's so important about that is it shows that it's not a later judgment. It's not with hindsight. It's not with the benefit that we have of everything that's emerged since then, of our sense of multiculturalism and diversity. It's not about politics and it's not in peacetime when things are more comfortable. It's easy for us to condemn what people decided in the past. What's so important about these documents is you can go back and look at them from that time period and see that already wiser heads in Washington, California and elsewhere were saying, this is a crazy thing to do. Why would you round up all these people? This is an example of how the United States with its democratic system can correct itself because even though a mistake was made in the 1980s, what happened is Congress saw that this was a problem and in 1988, based on all of these findings, they passed a different law, the Civil Liberties Act. What that law did was it said we were wrong. We're sorry. It went further. It said to the people who were interned, whose property was taken, whose liberty was lost, who were stripped of equality and dignity. It said, if you are now still alive, we will pay you reparations, $20,000 per person. Now, most people who have calculated this have figured out that it is not enough to compensate for the actual loss, but that's not what's important. What's important is the symbolic aspect of this, that our government as a democracy can correct itself, can look back and say, we made mistakes then, we can do better.