Japanese Americans Quotes

#1. We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?

Curtis LeMay

#2. I think that American people really know how to pursue fun, they really know how to have a good time. Japanese are somewhat more reserved than Americans, so I'm jealous.

Nobuo Uematsu

#3. Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.

Neil Nakadate

#4. The United States has tried for years to live down President Franklin D. Roosevelt's order during World War II to move Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to inland detention camps on grounds that they might be disloyal.

Helen Thomas

#5. There are all kinds of letters and protests that come from, not surprisingly, Japanese fishermen, the fishermen's wives; there are student groups, all different types of people; the protest against the Americans' use of the Pacific for nuclear testing.

Martha Smith

#6. You know Americans ... Self-improvement. No matter who or what we are, we're always working on ways to become somebody else.

Alan Brown

#7. Through the Australians, and the Japanese, too, I suppose, the Americans get their message across, but not in a heavy-handed way.

Marty Natalegawa

#8. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.

George Takei

#9. The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.

Noam Chomsky

#10. February 19, 1942, is the year in which Executive Order 9066 was signed, and this was the order that called for the exclusion and internment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast during World War II.

Xavier Becerra

#11. Like Americans, the Japanese have a silent mode, but in Japan it can be referred to as "manner mode" (Japanese Cell Phone Culture, n.d.).

Trevor Clinger

#12. Most Americans, like most Japanese, view their dogs, cats, and other animal companions as family members, and rightly so.

Ingrid Newkirk

#13. So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.

Jennifer Lee

#14. If liberals had been in charge of the Arizona memorial, it would probably have featured an exhaustive exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and little about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Mona Charen

#15. The power and depth of Japanese acting certainly inspired me, so I was determined that Hollywood was going to get a taste of that, that Americans were going to get a taste of Japanese action.

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

#16. And, of course, in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans, or Filipinos I should say, and by U.S. troops near the close of the war.

Dana Rohrabacher

#17. Americans really don't understand the Japanese nature, but it's not an easy thing to understand.

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

#18. Because," I said, "the japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of bankrupt militaristic fuckups - after we'd done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.

Kurt Vonnegut

#19. My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.

Mike Honda

#20. I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question.

Daniel Inouye

#21. No one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.

Fred Korematsu

#22. The only reason that there has been no sabotage or espionage on the part of Japanese-Americans is that they are waiting for the right moment to strike.

Earl Warren

#23. I think the Japanese love young, tannic red wines much more than most Americans do. Perhaps it is because Asians have a great fondness for tea, and tea is a very tannic beverage. Therefore a young, tannic red wine is something familiar to an Asian palate.

Robert M. Parker Jr.

#24. I was fortunate to live for 3 years in another country, and although we lived in an American compound, still as a young adolescent I did venture into the world of the Japanese with great interest and enjoyment. But many Americans never left that safe and familiar life among their own people.

Lois Lowry

#25. The Japanese tend to be far more co-operative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings.

Dave Barry

#26. I do think that many Americans have a limited view of what constitutes Japanese cartooning based on what gets translated, so it's great to see an increase in diversity.

Adrian Tomine

#27. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

Michael Ignatieff

#28. We've believed for 50 years that the Japanese are small Americans who wanted to be like us. They are not.

Lester Thurow

#29. I was to Japanese visitors to Washington what the Mona Lisa is to Americans visiting Paris.

John C. Danforth

#30. The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

Dave Barry

#31. The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

Rand Paul