NOWHERE TO GO: ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIMES IN 1945 AND TODAY

ABSTRACT

Higuchi asserts that Iyekichi Higuchi prepared to leave the Heart Mountain camp for Japanese Americans in May 1945 to return to San Jose, California, look for a home for his wife and two at-home children, and to find a job. He had been forced to sell his 14.25-acre home in San Jose three years earlier when the federal government had forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast because of hysteria about the alleged security threat they posed in the days following the 7 December 1941, Japanese attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. What faced those returning Japanese Americans mirrors the hate crimes now facing Americans of Asian descent who are blamed for spreading the COVID-19 virus that originally started in China to the United States. Since the pandemic took over in March, thousands of Asian Americans have been accosted in public spaces, spit on or assaulted and told to go back where they came from, even if that was not Asia at all.