The First Interracial Kiss on (American) Television

[Nerys Myk]

I work for a Japanese company, and work with many Japanese people, and have also worked with many Chinese. I wasn't being insulting or making a joke.

Well, I've lived in Japan and have known a variety of folks who are Asian and I can't say I've noticed the up vs down thing. Though I have noticed a variety of eye shapes among all Asians that doesn't breakdown to Japanese up and Chinese down. The "slant". IIRC, comes from the epicanthic fold.

 

[Tribble Herder]

If the property of the interned Japanese had been held in trust, pending the person in question being cleared of any suspicion, and let them go back to their farms, businesses, etc., history might have been a bit more kind and the scars might not run so deep in those who were interred. But just opening it all up for a massive land grab just made a distasteful exercise (but arguably necessary, due to the nature of the threat and the state of our domestic intelligence capability at the time) that much more repugnant.

 

[Maurice]

^^^Arguably unnecessary.

 

[Tribble Herder]

The case can be made either way for some version of the internment, especially since, at the time, the FBI had no Asian agents, and thus no way to quietly find out who was a loyal American and who was a Japanese agent.

Most of the real crap was what happened around the internment, like families losing property that had been theirs for generations, and the conditions of the camps themselves being pretty atrocious, but in concept, the case can be made that the interment program itself may have been a necessary evil for the greater good of the war effort.

 

[Maurice]

The internment was overreaction, plain and simple: damning citizens and non alike, and at its core utterly racist. The true ugliness of the event was really driven home to me when I visited Manzanar last year.

 

[scotpens]

...the knowledge with them that Japanese and Chinese people have eyes that slant in opposite directions ...

What???? First I've ever heard that.

I have, but only as unthinking, cruel schoolyard humor. A child, usually with no observable Asian ancestry, would say, "My father's Japanese," and raise the outer corners of his eyelids. He continue with, "My mother's Chinese," and lower the outer corners of his eyes. He'd finally follow with, "And I'm both," while raising one outer eyelid and lowing the other, usually while crossing his eyes.

When I was a kid, the local variation on that schoolyard joke was “Japanese . . . Chinese . . . California smog eyes!”

 

[Tribble Herder]

The internment was overreaction, plain and simple: damning citizens and non alike, and at its core utterly racist. The true ugliness of the event was really driven home to me when I visited Manzanar last year.

You're looking at from modern sensibilities and around seventy years of hindsight.

Things looked a lot different when Pearl Harbor was still burning.