PROF. GREG ROBINSON TO DISCUSS LATEST BOOK, 'A TRAGEDY OF DEMOCRACY', ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 24

Respected historian and author Greg Robinson will read excerpts from his latest book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, and will discuss what newly discovered materials he found and how it affects his view of history at a public program set for Saturday, October 24, starting at 2 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

While the story of the unconstitutional mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry by the U.S. government during World War II is being taught in more schools today than ever, the reasons behind the decision to forcibly remove Japanese Americans have been surfacing gradually over the seven decades since the war’s end. Professor Robinson takes a broader view as he examines not only the illegal confinement of Japanese Americans, but the forced removal of over 22,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Canada, over 5,000 in Mexico and the kidnapping of Japanese Latin Americans from their homes to be incarcerated in the United States.

Robinson’s view of all of these human rights violations was clarified by new documents heretofore unreleased and unavailable that make the government’s thinking more transparent. "It changes your view of official policy toward Japanese Americans, for example," Robinson explained, "if you consider that the Army and Justice Department were already preparing to hold masses of enemy aliens—and building a set of what they called 'concentration camps' for them—months before the United States entered the war."

A Tragedy of Democracy looks at the events in the United States, Canada and Mexico after Pearl Harbor and makes the case that they influenced each other. "For example, in Canada the Army and Navy chiefs opposed mass removal, but it was ordered nonetheless," said Robinson. "This tells us something about the importance of military opinion in the decision making process in those countries. In Mexico ethnic Japanese were ordered off the west coast in the beginning of January 1942, more than a month before Washington took similar action and several months before Mexico even declared war on Japan. If the Mexicans did this so quickly, why did the Americans wait?"

In examining these issues, Robinson connects the past to the present when looking at democracies during a crisis. "What is most troubling about their confinement is the failure of democracy under pressure," observed Robinson. "The leaders of a group of free governments dedicated to fighting and winning a war against tyranny singled out tens or hundreds of thousands of their own citizens and long-term residents on racial grounds, removed them arbitrarily from their homes, and in most cases ordered them into internal exile and confinement."

Greg Robinson, a native of New York City, is associate professor of history at l'Université du Québec à Montréal and author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. He has spoken at the Japanese American National Museum several times and was featured at the National Museum’s 2008 national conference, "Whose America? Who’s American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice", in Denver, Colorado.

This program is free to National Museum members or with admission. For more information or to make a reservation, call the Japanese American National Museum at (213) 625-0414, or go to www.janm.org.