Bias of war: recalling the racial hysteria of world war II internment camps, Japanese-Americans try to stop history from repeating itself.

Catherine Fukushima does not have the build of a bodyguard. Yet for the Othmans, an Arab-American family, she is a guardian angel. Fukushima, a Japanese-American, escorts them on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, to ward off the verbal threats and violence directed against some Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S.

For Fukushima, this task bears special meaning. In the months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, her father, grandmother, and 120,000 other Japanese-Americans and Japanese immigrants became the focus of the nation's fears. Because of their race, whole families were ordered to leave their homes and forced to live in prisonlike internment camps. For Fukushima, rising tensions over Arab-Americans brought back memories of her own family's pain. "It touched something I did not even know was there," she says.

The Pearl Harbor attack turned Japanese-Americans into targets of suspicion, fear, and anger, especially along the West Coast, where their communities were concentrated and where some Americans anticipated an impending invasion. Concerned about spying and sabotage, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the military the authority to exclude anyone from anywhere in the U.S. That set up the legal framework for placing Japanese-Americans behind barbed wire in what were called "relocation centers."

The government also reinforced racism against Japanese-Americans and immigrants. "A Jap's a Jap," General John L. DeWitt told a congressional subcommittee in 1943. "There is no way to determine their loyalty." Families, allowed to bring only what they could carry, were forced to sell their homes, shops, and most of their belongings at great loss. They were then trucked to the remote and desolate camps.

Of the Japanese internees, 70 percent were American citizens. More than half were children. Most were housed in crowded, drafty barracks and received inadequate nutrition and health care. The Supreme Court, in legal challenges, supported internment, ruling that "hardships are part of war."

Short of soldiers, the U.S. drafted Japanese-American men in 1944, though they had to take a questionnaire to prove loyalty even as their families were guarded like prisoners of war. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a volunteer unit made up of Japanese-Americans, became one of the most decorated in the European campaign. Japanese-American intelligence units helped speed Japan's defeat in the Pacific.

With public and political support for the camps waning, Roosevelt announced, in December 1944, that the internees would be gradually released. In 1983, the U.S. Congress decreed that the camps were a result of "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Survivors have received $20,000 each in reparations.

Current anti-Arab attitudes have spurred Japanese-Americans to speak out. "We need to be reminders to America that this kind of thinking can get out of hand," says Paul Osaki of San Francisco's Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. "We need to do everything that we wish other good Americans had done 59 years ago."