Looking Back at Japanese Internment to Understand Today's Islamophobia

With the debate over immigration heating up political rhetoric, comparisons have been drawn between Trump's proposal to ban Muslim entry and identify Muslim Americans and the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s.

Here to discuss the history of internment in America is historian Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, an expert consultant on Japan-related projects for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. who teaches at Punahou School in Honolulu and now the author of Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds (Harper, 2016).

Sakamoto's book is a sprawling family history that tells the story of a Japanese man (raised in Seattle) who was put in an internment camp during World War II and eventually became a valuable interpreter in the U.S. army. Her story is a reminder of how dangerous ethnic and cultural stereotypes can be.