Blog #6

Peter Ota was Japanese, but he was also an American citizen. On December 7, 1941, which was the day that the bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor, his entire family was put into county jail. None of them had done anything, they were just celebrating a wedding, but they were rounded up because of their Japanese descent, and the United States was too scared to risk anything whatsoever. His mother was horribly ill and ended up dying in the sanitarium. They were then sent to a concentration camp in Colorado, and Peter was sent out on jobs. He was drafted into the army while his family was suffering in a concentration camp. Peter heard other soldiers calling him names like "dirty Jap" and was discouraged from his Japanese culture, and he then had to prove that he was American. If he admitted to his past, he would have to admit that he was victimized by America, and that it was his fault.He described that as something him and his family had to hide. He also talks about the differences between today and back then, because he didn't fight back. The truth is, he couldn't fight back, because things were different back then, and that is something he cannot explain to someone who hadn't live through it. Betty Basye had a different story, she wanted to help the soldiers as soon as she could, so she became a nurse. It was sad when she explained that two of the girls had to leave the nursing program that Betty was in, just because they were Japanese. Shouldn't we have more nurses, just in case? More nurses=more aid to the war, why would we get rid of them? It seems absurd now, but back then it was seen as a threat for Japanese people to be in the U.S helping out our country, because maybe they have some insane plan to sabatoge the United States! Anyways, Betty had lost everything in the war. She lost her boyfriend, she lost her kid brother, she felt she had lost her life. The moral of her story is that being a nurse, or having anything to do with the war was almost impossible to resist, because everybody meant something in the war effort. It holds an image in your brain, though, and in your heart.