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Political and legal issues relevant to Beyond Manzanar:

These websites, both private and public, have more information on issues relevant to the Beyond Manzanar artwork. We cannot however take any responsibility for their opinions, their contents, or any of their copyright violations.

Court Cases on the Incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War 2:


General Information on the Incarceration:

Manzanar Concentration Camp:


Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1980:

We focus on the Iran Hostage Crisis in Beyond Manzanar, in parallel with the WW2 mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, as an example of similar threats targeting an entire minority group as the "face of the enemy" in times of crisis.

The hostage crisis began in November 1979, in the midst of the Iranian revolution, when 66 Americans, including embassy staff, were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian students demanding that the US extradite the deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been granted asylum by the Carter administration for cancer treatment. Most of the hostages were held for 444 days, as the crisis dominated the American news daily and led to widespread discrimination and hate crimes against Iranian immigrants in the US.

US Senator S.I. Hayakawa, who during WW2 was a Japanese Canadian citizen and never incarcerated himself, brought the bill S.66 before the US Senate, targeting Iranian nationals for incarceration in the USA "just like we did to the Japanese". Protests by the Japanese American community played a significant role in preventing this bill from proceeding further.





Links to articles in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

(Beyond Manzanar premiered in December 2000. The texts below were written in reaction to the horrific events of the "911" September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA.)

We condemn all terrorist attacks on innocent people. But scapegoating innocent, uninvolved people just because they come from the same ethnic group, and attacking them physically and legally in group retaliation for acts done by a few extremists, will only serve to justify the claims of the terrorists. Instead, we must work together with the communities under suspicion, supporting and sustaining the moderate and democratic voices within them rather than embittering them with displays of American racism and bigotry.

In World War II Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not interned and therefore willingly volunteered in large numbers to join the US Military, anxious to show their loyalty to the US. On the contrary, the mainland Japanese Americans, larger by far in numbers but held prisoner with their families in desolate internment camps, were understandably bitter about being asked to defend a country that dispossed them and locked them up solely for being of Japanese ancestry. The 442nd all Japanese American Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated in World War II, even helping to free the Dachau sub-camps in Germany as their own families languished behind barbed wire in American internment camps. (See Chang, Thelma. "I Can Never Forget: Men of the 100th/442nd," Sigi Productions, 1991)

June 28, 2004 Supreme Court rulings on detentions without trial:

  • "Supreme Court Backs Civil Liberties in Terror Cases", Fred Barbash, Washington Post
    On June 28, 2004, in two crucial decisions on the scope of presidential wartime powers, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's claim that it can hold suspected terrorists or "enemy combatants" on American soil without access to the courts.

  • "Resisting arrest", by Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor
    (Click through an add to get a day pass for the salon website)
    In October, 2003, Fred Korematsu joined a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that the extended executive detentions of "enemy combatants" are unconstitutional. His words bore the moral weight of authority of a man who had taken the internment of his own ethnic group to the Supreme Court in the 1940s. He lost then, but the internment was subsequently declared "not justified" when in the 1980s a document was found "from one of the Justice Department lawyers to the Solicitor General of the United States saying we are telling lies to the Supreme Court."

Personal reactions to 911 from the two of us:

Other articles in reaction to 911:

  • "Guantanamo Bay Prisoners Plant Seeds of Hope in Secret Garden,"
    Andrew Buncombe, The Independent. (April 29, 2006)
    "With their bare hands and the most basic of tools, prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have fashioned a secret garden where they have grown plants from seeds recovered from their meals. For some of the detainees - held without charge for more than four years and who the US say are now cleared for release - the garden apparently offers a diversion from the monotony and injustice of their imprisonment."

  • "Caught in the Backlash," ACLU report (pdf file) on post-9/11 backlash against people perceived to be from the Middle East (November 13, 2002)

  • "A Time for Peace, Not Retaliation" Elijah Wald, TomPaine.com
    If there is one lesson in today's World Trade Center tragedy, it is that tougher security measures will not prevent future terrorist acts. Only peaceful policies will.

  • "Anti-Arab passions sweep the U.S." Janelle Brown, Salon.
    Despite Bush's calls for tolerance, firebombings, shootings and other acts of violence strike Islamic worshippers.

  • "The End of Video Game Wars" Naomi Klein, AlterNet.
    War is most emphatically not a game, but until September 11, most Americans treated it like it was. Perhaps Tuesday's attacks finally ended the era of the video game war.