Spies, Traitors, Saboteurs Exhibit Opens in Chicago-- Part 1: A Piece of a 9/11 Plane

From the April 20, 2017, Chicago Tribune "Espionage exhibit features intrigue" by Steve Johnson.

"Spies, Traitors, Saboteurs" is a new exhibit at the Chicago History Museum.  It's subtitle is "Fear and Freedom in America."  It looks back into America's past and highlights moments when peace was threatened from within and the nation debated questions of safety and the sacrifice of public liberties.

Some of the events are well-known: the Communist scare of the 1950s, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the nationwide labor rights struggle that included the Haymarket bombing.

Three items in the exhibit:

**  A piece from a plane involved in the 9/11 attacks.

**  A vest packed with explosives.

**  An ammunition cartridge and weapon linked to the assassination of President William McKinley.

--Cooter

Internment Camp Survivor Ordeal

From the May 13th Daily Herald (Chicago's Northwest Suburbs)

Frank Kajikawa was just a teenager when he spent over a year in a prison camp in the United States and his only crime was that he was of Japanese ancestry. His family along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forced from their homes along the Pacific coast and removed to internment camps in the inhospitable interior.

He spoke before a crowd at the Huntley, Illinois, Public Library.

His family was shocked when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941. They were Americans after all, but several months later President Roosevelt signed an executive order forcing his family to move to the Minidoka Camp near Twin Falls, Idaho. They were given two weeks to sell everything. Many families lost everything.

Frank Fujikawa then spent 13 to 14 months at Minidoka, attending school and washing dishes, until he was able to obtain a sponsor and relocate to Salt Lake City.

Then, believe it or not, he got drafted!! He was angry about Minidoka, but proudly served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese American unit that served in Africa and Europe, compiling a very distinguished record and winning 21 Medals of Honor in the process.

A Sad Time in American History. --DaCoot

Some More on Canadian Japanese Internment Camps

I came across a site about Sandon Internment camp in British Columbia by Michael Kluckner, who wrote, "Of all the god-forsaken places to be interned, there was Sandon-- colder and more isolated than the other ghost towns of the Kootenays and Boundary County. Somehow, 933 Japanese-Canadians were shoehorned into Sandon's dilapidated buildings for the duration of he war.

"I believe this was the Buddhist interment centre: Japanese-Canadians of various Christian denominations were located at other camps."

Again, before the Olympics, I was completely unaware of the existence of Canadian internment camps. I'll have to do more research on them.

I wrote about this back on February 13th.

A sad Part of North American History, But Given the Times, Understandable. --Cooter

Canadian-Japanese Internment Camps

Most Americans do not even know about the thousands of Japanese-American who were forced into interment camps during World War II which were actually more prison than anything else. I knew about them, but I had never heard of Japanese-Canadian camps in that country, but I suppose it would have made sense that they had them as well.

Yesterday, I was reading an article about Brian McKeever, a partially-sighted Canadian who will be competing in the Vancouver Winter Olympics. he has been training for the 50 K Cross Country Ski Race (held the last day, Feb. 28th).

He has been training in Sandon, British Columbia in the Canadian Rockies, near where his grandparents were interned in 1942. They had emigrated from Japan to Vancouver and were running a berry farm. After Pearl harbor and Japan's entry in the war, Canada did like the US and forced nearly one thousand Japanese-Canadians living near the Pacific Coast to Sandon, which essentially by then was an abandoned silver mining town.

Said McKeever, "I guess it was a prison camp because it was in a remote valley in the middle of nowhere."

I'll have to do some more research on Japanese internment camps and this one in particular.

A Sad Occurrence, But, Under the Auspices of War.... --Cooter

On Japanese Internment Camps

The Feb. 25 US News & World Report had an article "Preserving the Japanese-American Internment Camps" by Justin Ewers.

This was not one of our country's prouder moments, but under the circumstances that existed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, well, sometimes things happen.

Nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and taken by truck or train to ten remote internment camps. One of these became temporarily the tenth largest town in Colorado.

At the end of the war, they were released. The barracks and mess halls were torn down for scrap and the government got down to the business of not talking about the episode.

In 2006, President Bush signed a bill authorizing $38 million devoted to the preservation of the camps along with dozens of smaller-scale confinement sites. This was the first major federal effort at addressing the situation.

At present, only two camps are dedicated national historic sites. Even worse, the promised funds have not yet been appropriated.

Hey. Government, It's Time to Do the Right Thing!! Cooter