Internment

A group of Bainbridge Island Japanese-Americans under army escort at a Seattle dock where they were entrained for the Manzanar, CA internment camp. Friends and relatives, soon to be "evacuated," bid them farewell. Photograph, March 1942. U6343436ACME/CREDIT: BETTMANN-UPI

Today, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a well-known part of history. But the hard reality nobody seems to talk about is that this wasn’t some unique, isolated event. Governments were rounding up citizens from enemy countries and locking them inside camps on every corner of the world. This wasn’t something

You might stay home one more summer. You might head to the cabin. You might even mask up and fly somewhere exotic. But wherever you go, be sure to take a book. Our summer fiction section offers more than 30 suggestions for ’tweens, teens and adults, lovers of mysteries, novels or any good story well told.

For survivors and descendants of the horrors of incarceration during World War II in California, remembering is an act of healing and resistance.

Seventy years ago, Fumiko Hayashida was a face in the crowd, one of 227 Japanese Americans forced to leave Bainbridge Island during World War II. But as she awaited imprisonment with a baby in her arms, a news photographer took her picture. Hayashida died Sunday in Seattle. She was 103.

The actor was sent to a camp at 5 years old — but even then, they didn't separate children from families.

On September 9, Human Rights Watch published a report detailing the persecution of the Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The report describes widespread arrests of Uyghur people in the region by the Chinese authorities, who place those arrested in prisons and so-called reeducation camps. Millions of people in the region have fallen under the constant watch of a state-run video surveillance system, and their social status and even their overall path in life…

Scene of barrack homes at this War Relocation Authority Center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry. A hot windstorm brings dust from the surrounding desert.

The surveillance and detention of Italian Americans after Pearl Harbor is a little-known piece of WWII history.

Almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, most Japanese-Americans were rounded up and transported to concentration camps across the United States. Nearly every Japanese family in my home town of Kent, Washington was removed. Less than half returned following World War II. I am not proud to say that one of the most famous images of Japanese relocation was this photo, taken in Kent, in January, 1942: In our war hysteria, we didn't want any Japanese Americans near…