In this article, the author attempts to connect two events--the wartime incarceration of the Japanese Americans and Americans' contemporary regret for that action--in a narrative that also tries to answer the most difficult kind of question that a historian can ask: How does change occur? How did it come about that what had been a popular wartime action, and which in the immediate post-war decades was written off as a wartime "mistake," is now viewed as a serious betrayal of democratic ideals and one for which the American government has officially apologized and paid compensation? Here, the author first outlines the status of Japanese Americans on the eve of Pearl Harbor, sixty years ago, and indicates how they were deprived of their liberty. Then, he notes the various stages through which the reevaluation of the incarceration of the Japanese Americans has passed to assume its present place in the historical canon. (Contains 20 notes.)