News Hour: Oregon’s Poet Laureate Reflects on Japanese Internment

On Friday’s (10/3/08) PBS’s New Hour, the news program did a story on Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Lawson Fusao Inada, a 3rd generation Japanese-American who :

“Along with more than a hundred thousand other Japanese Americans, Lawson Fusao Inada was sent to internment camps for the duration of World War II. He was one of the youngest Japanese Americans to live in the camps.”

Unfortunately, PBS doesn’t host its video program, but you can listen to Inada’s story here and listen to his poetry, as well as others in a Portland, Oregon park dedicated to Japanese-Americans who were interned.

Whenever I read, watch or listen about a story of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, I am always shocked at one of the great injustices the United States has ever enacted on its own citizens. Let us certainly never forget this so that we will never repeat this again.

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About John

I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
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