Japanese American internment
Japanese American Internment refers to the forcible relocation of approximately 120,000
Japanese and
Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were
United States citizens, from the
West Coast during
World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called "War Relocation Camps" in remote portions of the nation's interior. The American camps were only meant to isolate the Japanese, in contrast to the
Nazi concentration camps which existed to eliminate their captives.
President
Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with
Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Twelve days later, this power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington. Some U.S. residents of
German and
Italian descent across the country were also arrested and interned when deemed to be security risks on an individual basis (rather than as an entire community). In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion, removal, and detention, arguing that it is permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity."
Some compensation for property losses was paid in 1948, but most internees were unable to fully recover their losses. In 1988, President
Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the internment, on behalf of the
U.S. government. The official apology said that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership", and beginning in 1990, the government paid
reparations to surviving internees.
Similar
internments occurred across
Canada as well.
(See: Japanese Canadian internment)There were several types of camps run by the
War Relocation Authority (WRA). Assembly Centers were temporary facilities that were first setup in fairgrounds and other large public meeting places to assemble and organize evacuated residents before they were transported to Relocation Centers by bus or train. Relocation Centers were camps that housed evacuated residents for the duration of the war, or until they decided to relocate other parts of America outside the exclusion zone. The term Internment Center is synonymous with Relocation Center for all practical purposes. The WRA also ran a Segregation Center at Tule Lake. A Segregation Center housed residents who were not allowed to leave the camp because they were known security risks. Segregation Centers also housed the families of individuals who were security risks because the WRA did not believe it was appropriate to break up family units.
Historical references describe the camps as
internment camps, although others favor the name
relocation camps. Others, more critical of this action, refer to them as
detention camps or
concentration camps.
Those who believe
relocation is a more appropriate term argue that (1) the official designation at the time was
relocation center; (2) the camps were not, strictly speaking, prisons; and (3) an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 camp residents did eventually settle outside the exclusion area.
In its 1983 report, "Personal Justice Denied," the Congressional appointed Commission on Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians explained its decision to use the term "relocation camp" thus: "The Commission has largely left the words and phrases as they were, however, in an effort to mirror accurately the history of the time and to avoid the confusion and controversy a new terminology might provoke. We leave it to the reader to decide for himself how far the language of the period confirms an observation of
George Orwell: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness."
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Japanese American Dispersion in Western United States |
Most historians now use the term
internment camp because it is perceived as relatively neutral, while accurately describing the camps. Over the years, the phrases internment camp and relocation center have taken on a meaning beyond the raw definition of each phrase, in the same way
concentration camp has a special meaning.
One of the camps,
Tule Lake, was reserved for those of Japanese descent who were specifically suspected of espionage, treason, or other such disloyalty, and their families, as well as individuals who were community leaders, such as teachers or priests. Other families were held at Tule Lake because one or more members had requested to be repatriated to Japan. A number of *
pro-Japan demonstrations were held there throughout the war.
The roots of the internment run back to the turn of the 20th century. Tensions between Caucasian and Japanese immigrants in California had begun to increase in the 1890s, then a series of laws were passed, aimed at discouraging Japanese immigration, prohibiting land ownership by Japanese and even denying entry to Japanese women seeking to join their husbands in America.
During the period of 1939â€"1941, the
FBI compiled the
Custodial Detention index ("CDI") on citizens, "enemy" aliens and foreign nationals who might be dangerous based principally on census records. These definitions of "enemy aliens" did not include those of German and Italian descent.
On
June 28,
1940, the
Alien Registration Act was passed. Among many other "loyalty" regulations, Section 31 required the registration and fingerprinting of all aliens above the age of 14, and Section 35 required aliens to report any change of address within 5 days. Within 4 months, 4,741,971 aliens registered at post offices around the country.
The
attack on Pearl Harbor on
December 7,
1941 led many to suspect the Japanese were preparing a full-scale attack on the West Coast of the United States. Further attacks, such as the fairly minor shelling of a
California oil refinery in 1942, ostensibly by a Japanese submarine, redoubled these suspicions. Although it was later disproven, the "Japanese" attack swayed public opinion. Also, Japan's rapid military conquest of much of
Asia made their military machine seem to some Americans frighteningly unstoppable. Civilian and military officials had concerns about the loyalty of the ethnic Japanese on the West Coast and considered them to be a security risk, although these concerns often grew more out of racial hatred than actual risk.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who administered the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers that "A Jap's a Jap" and testified to Congress, "I don't want any of them [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty...It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty...But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map."
Authorities also feared sabotage of both military and civilian facilities inside the United States. Military officials expressed concerns that California's
water systems were highly vulnerable, and there were concerns about the possibility of
arson —
brush fires in particular.
Administration and military leaders also doubted the loyalty of ethnic Japanese because many, including some born in America, had been educated in Japan, where school curricula emphasized reverence for the
Emperor. These
Kibei were painted as a direct threat, a possible
fifth column.
Internment was popular among many white farmers who resented the Japanese American farmers. These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the
Saturday Evening Post in 1942: "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men ... If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don't want them back when the war ends, either."
Upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Presidential Proclamations 2525 (Japanese), 2526 (German) and 2527 (Italian) were signed. Many homes were raided using information from the CDI, and hundreds of aliens were in custody by the end of the day, including Germans and Italians (although war was not declared on Germany or Italy until December 11).
Presidential Proclamation 2537 was issued on
January 14,
1942, requiring aliens to report any change of address, employment, or name to the
FBI. Enemy aliens were not allowed to enter restricted areas. Violators of these regulations were subject to "arrest, detention and internment for the duration of the war."
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San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 1942, newspaper headlines. |
Executive Order 9066, signed by
Franklin D. Roosevelt on
February 19,
1942, allowed authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded." These "exclusion zones", unlike the "alien enemy" roundups, were applicable to anyone that an authorized military commander might choose, whether citizen or non-citizen. Eventually such areas would include both the East and West Coasts, and about 1/3 of the country, and were applied to all of those of Enemy Alien Ancestry (of which the Japanese were a minority). American citizens of German and Italian ancestry were excluded from the classification of "enemy race", which was due largely to political concerns. The German and Italian communities represented a significant voting block, and those ethnic groups had become more assimilated into American culture. The Japanese people represented only a small minority, making internment feasible. Those of German and Italian ancestry were actually praised by President Roosevelt for their "loyalty" as to relieve any anxiety that those groups might also be interned.
On
March 2,
1942, General DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 1, informing all those of Japanese ancestry that they would, at some later point, be subject to exclusion orders from "Military Area No. 1" (essentially, the entire Pacific coast), and requiring anyone who had "enemy" ancestry to file a Change of Residence Notice if they planned to move.
On
March 11,
1942, Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, and gave it discretionary, plenary authority over all alien property interests. Many assets were frozen, creating immediate financial difficulty for the affected aliens.
On
March 24,
1942, General DeWitt began to issue exclusion orders for specific areas within "Military Area No. 1."
On
March 27,
1942, General DeWitt's Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving "Military Area No. 1" for "any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order of this headquarters shall so permit or direct."
On
May 3,
1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 346, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers."
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This U.S. soldier of Japanese descent and American citizenship waits at a train station in Florin, CA. He, along with nine other servicemen, were granted furloughs from their service to return to the U.S. to assist with their families' relocation and internment. August 10, 1942 |
Over 112,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program. Of those, approximately two-thirds were U.S. citizens by birth. The remaining one-third were non-citizens who were legally subject to internment under the
Alien Enemies Act. It is worth noting that the laws of the time prohibited naturalization of immigrants from Asian countries, so legal residents not born in the U.S. could not obtain citizenship.
Internees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers," where most awaited shipment to more permanent relocation centers being constructed by the newly-formed
War Relocation Authority (WRA). Some of those who did report to the civilian assembly centers were not sent to relocation centers, but were released upon condition that they remain outside the prohibited zone until the military orders were modified or lifted. Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese
aliens would eventually be removed from their homes in
California, western
Oregon, western
Washington, and southern
Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in
U.S. history.
Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were neither compensated nor consulted. The Native Americans consoled themselves that they might at least get the improvements made to the land, but at the end of the war such buildings and gardens were instead bulldozed or sold by the government.
Under the National Student Council Relocation Program (supported primarily by the American Friends Service Committee), students of college age were permitted to leave the camps in order to attend institutions which were willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. Although the program initially granted leave permits to only a very small number of students, this eventually grew to 2,263 students by
December 31,
1943.
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Japanese Americans boarding a train bound for one of ten American concentration camps |
In early 1944, the government began clearing individuals to return to the West Coast; on
January 2,
1945, the exclusion order was rescinded entirely. The internees then began to leave the camps to rebuild their lives at home, although the relocation camps remained open for residents who were not ready to make the move back. The fact that this occurred long before the Japanese surrender (see
V-J day), while the war was arguably at its most vicious, weighs against the claim that the relocation was an essential security measure. However, it is also true that the Japanese were clearly losing the war by that time, and were not on the offensive.
The last internment camp was not closed until August 1948, although all Japanese were cleared from the camps sometime in 1945.
One of the WRA camps,
Manzanar, was designated a National Historic Site in 1992 to "provide for the protection and interpretation of historic, cultural, and natural resources associated with the relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II" (Public Law 102-248). In 2001, the site of the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho was designated the
Minidoka Internment National Monument.
Some Japanese Americans did question their loyalty to the United States after the government removed them and their families from their homes and held them in internment camps, although such cases were isolated incidents and did not reflect the larger sentiment of the Japanese-American people, who remained loyal to the United States. Several pro-Japan groups formed inside the camps, and riots occurred for various reasons in many camps, most notably Tule Lake, which caused the WRA to move "troublemaker" internees to Tule Lake (see below). When the government asked whether internees wished to renounce their U.S. citizenship, 5,589 of them did so. Of those who renounced their citizenship, 1,327 were repatriated to Japan, although many of these deportees were not accepted by the Japanese Government. However, the
American Civil Liberties Union successfully challenged most of these renunciations as invalid because of the conditions under which the government obtained them. These conditions were described as "coercion, duress, and mass compulsion" by
Marvin Opler, a WRA official who had observed some of the renunciation hearings and supported the restoration of citizenship to the expatriated Japanese Americans. It is interesting to note that many of the deportees were Issei (first Generation Japanese immigrants) who often had difficulty with English and often did not understand the questions they were asked. Even among those Issei who had a clear understanding, Question 28 caused the most apprehension. Japanese immigrants were denied US citizenship at the time, so when asked to renounce their Japanese citizenship, answering "Yes" would have made them stateless persons. Faced with possible deportation to Japan, the Issei largely refused to renounce their only citizenship.
When the government circulated a questionnaire seeking army volunteers from among the internees, 94% of military-aged male respondents said they would not serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Most of those who refused, however, tempered that refusal with statements of willingness to fight if they were restored their rights as American citizens. How, they asked, could any government dare ask them to fight for freedoms for others, freedoms which that same government had taken away from them?
However, a sizable number did volunteer to serve from the camps, including in the famed and highly decorated
442nd Regimental Combat Team which operated in
Europe (not Japan, as some believe). This unit was the most highly decorated in United States military history. [
1] Most notably, the 442nd was known for saving the 141st or the "lost batallion" from the Germans. The 1951 film
Go For Broke! was a fairly accurate portrayal of the 442nd, and starred several of the RCT's veterans.
According to a 1943
War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in "
tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." The spartan facilities met International laws, but still left much to be desired. Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. In other areas, the internees had to build the barracks-like structures themselves.
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Dust storm at Manzanar War Relocation Center |
To describe the conditions in more detail, the
Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern
Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily
per capita for food rations. Because most internees were evacuated from their West Coast homes on short notice and not told of their destination, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for
Wyoming winters which often reached temperatures below zero Fahrenheit. Many families were forced to simply take the "clothes on their backs."
Armed guards were posted, and all of the camps were in remote, desolate areas far from population centers.Internees were typically allowed to stay with their families, and were treated well unless they violated the rules. There are documented instances of guards shooting internees who reportedly attempted to walk outside the fences. However, some camp administrations eventually allowed relatively free movement outside the marked boundaries of the camps. Nearly a quarter of the internees left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone. Eventually, some were authorized to return to their hometowns in the exclusion zone under supervision of a sponsoring American family or agency whose loyalty had been assured.
The phrase "
shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") was commonly used to summarize the interned families' resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions. Although that may be the view to outsiders, the Japanese people knew that, in order to prove themselves as "loyal citizens", they must do what was asked of them by their government.
As early as 1939, when war broke out in Europe and while armed conflict began to rage in East Asia, the FBI and branches of the Department of Justice and the armed forces began to collect information and surveillance on influential members of the Japanese community in the United States. Agents in the Department of Justice's Special Defense Unit classified the subjects into three groups: A, B, and C, with A being "most dangerous," and C being "possibly dangerous."
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, Roosevelt authorized his attorney general to put into motion a plan that arrested all of the Japanese on the potential enemy alien lists. Armed with a blanket arrest warrant, the FBI seized all of the men on the eve of December 8th, 1941. These men were held in municipal jails and prisons until they were moved to Department of Justice detention camps, separate from those of the Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps operated under far more stringent conditions and were subject to heightened military guard.
Crystal City, Texas, was one such camp where together with Japanese,
Germans, Japanese-Latin Americans, and other people were interned as well. During the war, tens of thousands of Germans and Italians were also detained; most of whom were foreign nationals or otherwise seen as subversive enemy aliens.
During World War II, governor
Ralph Lawrence Carr of
Colorado was the only elected official to publicly apologize for the internment of American citizens. The act cost him reelection, but gained him the gratitude of the Japanese American community, such that a statue of him is erected in Sakura Square in Denver's Japantown.
Canadian citizens with Japanese ancestry were also interned by the Canadian government during World War II (see
Japanese Canadian internment). Japanese people from various parts of
Latin America were brought to the United States for internment, or interned in their countries of residence.
Although there was a strong push from mainland Congressmen (
Hawaii was only a US territory at the time, and did not have a voting representative or senator in Congress) to remove and intern all
Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants from Hawaii, it never happened. In fact, only about 2,500 were interned, either in two camps on Oahu or in one of the mainland concentration camps.
The vast majority of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents in Hawaii were not interned because the Government had already declared martial law in Hawaii and this allowed it to significantly reduce the risk of espionage and sabotage by residents of Japanese ancestry. Also, since these individuals comprised over 35% of the territory's population, it was not economically prudent to remove them. They were laborers in the
sugar cane and
pineapple fields and canneries, and also merchants, restaurant owners, etc. In fact, scholarly research has shown that government and military officials realized that removing and interning all people of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii would completely destroy the territory's economy. This was a major factor in their decision that no mass removal and internment program was instituted.
There were two internment camps in Hawaii, referred to as "Hawaiian Island Detention Camps." The Hawaiian camps primarily utilized tents and other temporary structures and few permanent structures.
One camp was located at
Sand Island, which is located in the middle of
Honolulu Harbor. This camp was prepared in advance of the war's outbreak. All prisoners held here were "...detained under military custody...because of the imposition of martial law throughout the Islands... ."
The other Hawaiian camp was called Honouliuli, near Ewa, on the southwestern shore of Oahu. This camp is not as well-known as the Sand Island camp, and it was closed before the Sand Island camp in 1944.
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Most internees suffered significant property losses. Upon evacuation, the Japanese American internees were told that they could bring only as many articles of clothing, toiletries, and other personal effects as they could *
carry. The
US government promised to find a place to store larger items (such as iceboxes and furniture) if boxed and labeled, but did not make any promises about the security of those items.
In some cases, Japanese American farmers were able to find families who were willing to tend their farms for the duration of their internment. In other cases, however, Japanese American farmers had to sell their property in a matter of days, usually with great financial loss. In these cases, the land speculators who bought the land made huge profits. California's
Alien Land Laws of the 1910s, which prohibited most non-citizens from owning property in that state, contributed to Japanese American property losses. Because they were barred from owning land, many older Japanese American farmers were
tenant farmers and therefore lost their rights to those farm lands. To compensate these losses, the
US Congress, on
July 2,
1948, passed the "American Japanese Claims Act", stating that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred." Approximately in claims were submitted; eventually, 26,568 settlements to family groups totaling more than $38 million were disbursed.
Beginning in the 1960s, a younger generation of Japanese Americans who felt energized by the
Civil Rights movement began what is known as the "Redress Movement", an effort to obtain an official apology and reparations from the federal government for interning their parents and grandparents during the war.
The movement's first success was in 1976, when President
Gerald Ford proclaimed that the evacuation was "wrong."
In 1980, under
Jimmy Carter, a commission was established by Congress to study the matter. Some opponents of the redress movement argued that the commission was ideologically biased because 40% of the commission staff was of Japanese descent, and that some members of the commission had previously expressed opinions against the internment. In addition, opponents of the redress movement criticized the commission because the panel did not include military or intelligence experts. On
February 24,
1983, the commission issued a report entitled
Personal Justice Denied, condemning the internment as "unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity". Members of the redress movement and their allies considered the report a necessary recognition of the great injustice of the internment program. Opponents of the redress movement criticized the report for focusing on the civil liberties of Japanese Americans rather than the alleged security risks posed by Japanese Americans.
In 1988, U.S. President (and former California governor)
Ronald Reagan signed the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which had been pushed through Congress by Representative
Norman Mineta and Senator
Alan K. Simpson — the two had met while Mineta was interned at a camp in
Wyoming — which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion dollars. The question of to whom reparations should be given, how much, and even whether monetary reparations were appropriate were subjects of sometimes contentious debate.
People who believed the internment program was justified (as described above, primarily members of the
American Legion and US military veterans of the Pacific theater) argued not only that monetary reparations were inappropriate, but also that no apology was necessary.
On
September 27,
1992, the Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, appropriating an additional $400 million in order to ensure that all remaining internees received their $20,000 redress payments, was signed into law by President
George H. W. Bush, who also issued another formal apology from the U.S. government.
The internment is widely condemned today, often attacked as racist. People frequently cite it as a precedent for large-scale violations of civil liberties, and a warning sign of what might happen again. However, others defend it as a harsh necessity in a bitter and desperate war.
Former
Supreme Court Justice
Tom C. Clark, who represented the US Department of Justice in the "relocation," writes in the Epilogue to the book
Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (written by Maisie & Richard Conrat):
The truth is—as this deplorable experience proves—that constitutions and laws are not sufficient of themselves...Despite the unequivocal language of the
Constitution of the United States that the
writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, and despite the Fifth Amendment's command that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, both of these constitutional safeguards were denied by military action under Executive Order 9066....
Some estimate that by the time the last of the relocation camps closed on
December 1,
1945, the Japanese Americans had lost homes and businesses estimated to be worth, in 1999 values, 4 to 5 billion dollars, and that deleterious effects on Japanese American individuals, their families, and their communities, went beyond monetary damages.
Critics of the exclusion argue that the military justification was unfounded, citing the absence of any subsequent convictions of
Japanese Americans for espionage, as well as the fact that the Army resorted to falsifying evidence in order to bolster its case before the
Supreme Court in
Korematsu v. United States. In response, pro-internment author
Michelle Malkin has argued that the absence of any esponiage convictions is immaterial because the government may have possessed unspecified secret evidence of espionage that it was not able to introduce in court; however, her argument has not met with much success among professional historians.
Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle, a naval intelligence officer tasked with evaluating the loyalty of the Japanese American population, estimated in a 1941 report to his superiors that "more than 90% of the Nisei [second generation] and 75% of the original immigrants were completely loyal to the United States." A 1941 report prepared on President Roosevelt's orders by Curtis B. Munson, special representative of the State Department, concluded that most Japanese nationals and "90 to 98 percent" of Japanese American citizens were loyal. He wrote: "There is no Japanese 'problem' on the Coast ... There is far more danger from Communists and people of the Bridges type on the Coast than there is from Japanese."
FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment of Japanese Americans. Refuting General DeWitt's reports of disloyalty on the part of Japanese Americans, Hoover sent a memo to Attorney General
Francis Biddle in which he wrote about Japanese-American disloyalty, "Every complaint in this regard has been investigated, but in no case has any information been obtained which would substantiate the allegation."
California Attorney General
Earl Warren originally supported the internment, but later in life came to regret this support. He wrote in his autobiography:
"I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens. Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken." Ever since this subject became a topic of historical inquiry, there have been individuals and organizations who have argued that the suspicion of ethnic Japanese was indeed justified. Others rebut some Japanese American accounts of hardship during the evacuation and in the camps. Members of the
American Legion and some veterans who fought in the Pacific theater have been vocal proponents of these viewpoints. Another defender of the internment is
Filipino American opinion columnist
Michelle Malkin, who authored a 2004 book entitled
In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror. Critics have characterized her book as being one-sided, and a logically unsound justification for present-day
racial profiling. [
2]
Present-day proponents of the exclusion and internment program point to the writings of
David Lowman, who asserted in the 1980s and 1990s that the decryption of the
MAGIC codes suggested to the military and political leaders at the time that there was a substantial spy network of Japanese Americans feeding information to the Japanese military, as the Japanese consulate repeatedly stated in the encrypted messages that it was attempting to recruit Japanese American spies. Lowman's claims have been controversial; others point out that much of the information that Japanese officials obtained may have come from public sources such as newspapers, and that there is no data indicating the success of these recruitment efforts.
In April of 1984,
John J. McCloy was the ranking surviving individual who participated in the decision to relocate the Japanese Americans in the winter of 1941â€"42, when he was Assistant Secretary of War. He wrote a letter expressing his dissatisfaction with the hearing held to consider redress and compensation for Americans held in internment camps, defending the internment and claiming that the redress would be "a great injustice to the American taxpayer."
McCloy also claimed that the Japanese Americans "...were permitted to go anywhere else in the country they saw fit to go at the expense of the government. They were not 'interned.'" This denies the fact that they were placed under armed guard, behind barbed wire, and surrounded by guards who in fact did shoot and kill. He went on to once again attempt to connect all Nikkei to the attack on Pearl Harbor, saying "I believe it would be most unjust to all Americans, indeed, to all nationalities who suffered as a result of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, to have those who were affected by the President's order be further compensated for their removal from the sensitive military areas of the West Coast. ... Generally speaking, I would say that our Japanese/American population benefited from the relocation rather than suffered, as did so many others of our population as a result of the war. The so-called investigation which sought to obtain unconscionably large unproven lump sums for added compensation for the relocation which had been given when evidence was fresh and witnesses were alive and in a position to testify was really outrageous. No serious attempt was made to recreate the conditions that the Japanese attack created on the West Coast, nor, the reasonableness of the steps that the President ordered to meet the devastating attack."
Some present-day supporters of the internment have argued that some Japanese Americans were indeed disloyal, as seen by the approximately 20,000 Japanese Americans in Japan at the start of the war who joined the Japanese war effort, hundreds joining the Japanese Army. Additionally, two Japanese Americans on
Niihau freed a captured Japanese pilot and assisted him in his machine-gun attack on
Native Hawaiians there.[
3]
Critics of this viewpoint note that it seems unlikely that Japanese Americans in Japan had any choice other than to be conscripted into the Japanese army, given (1) that it was near-impossible for them to return to the U.S. from Japan, and (2) that the
United States had already classified all people of Japanese ancestry as "enemy aliens."
Some present-day supporters of the internment also cite the disloyalty of
Tomoya Kawakita, an American citizen who worked as an interpreter and a POW guard for the Japanese army, and who actively participated in the torture (and at least one death) of American soldiers, including survivors of the
Bataan Death March. Kawakita was imprisoned in
Alcatraz Island for his treason.
Despite all this, it must be noted that the FBI had no documented proof of espionage or sabotage by any Japanese American or Japanese national in the United States, except for a small group of ineffective Japanese nationals who were arrested long before Pearl Harbor and were deported (the Tachibana ring).
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Several significant legal decisions arose out of Japanese American internment, relating to the powers of the government to detain citizens in wartime. Among the cases which reached the Supreme Court were
Yasui v. United States (1943),
Hirabayashi v. United States (1943),
ex parte Endo (1944), and
Korematsu v. United States (1944). In
Yasui and
Hirabayashi the court upheld the constitutionality of curfews based on Japanese ancestry; in
Korematsu the court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order. In
Endo, the court accepted a petition for a
writ of habeas corpus and ruled that the WRA had no authority to subject a citizen whose loyalty was acknowledged to its procedures.
Korematsu's and Hirabayashi's convictions were vacated in a series of
coram nobis cases in the early 1980s. In the
coram nobis cases, federal district and appellate courts ruled that newly uncovered evidence revealed the existence of a huge unfairness which, had it been known at the time, would likely have changed the
Supreme Court's decisions in the Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu cases. These new court decisions rested on a series of documents recovered from the
National Archives showing that the government had altered, suppressed and withheld important and relevant information from the Supreme Court, most notably, the Final Report by General DeWitt justifying the internment program. The Army had destroyed documents in an effort to hide the fact that alterations had been made to the report. The
coram nobis cases vacated the convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayashi (Yasui passed away before his case was heard, rendering it moot), and are regarded as one of the impetuses for the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
It is important to note, however, that while the
coram nobis cases totally undermined the
factual underpinnings of the 1944 Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases, the
legal conclusions in Korematsu, specifically, its expansive interpretation of government powers in wartime, were not overturned. They are still the law of the land because a lower court cannot overturn a ruling by the Supreme Court. In light of this fact, a number of legal scholars have expressed the opinion that the original Korematsu and Hirabayashi decisions have taken on an added relevance in the context of the
War on terror.
*
*
Manzanar War Relocation Center*
Tule Lake War Relocation Center*
Heart Mountain War Relocation Center*
Minidoka War Relocation Center*
Topaz Relocation Center*
Poston War Relocation Center*
Gila River War Relocation Center*
Granada War Relocation Center*
Rohwer War Relocation Center*
Jerome War Relocation Center*
Fort Lincoln, North DakotaTopaz, a 1945 documentary of the internment filmed by
Dave Tatsuno in the
Topaz Relocation Camp in Utah.
Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston of her time spent in
Manzanar. Jeanne, who was seven at the time of the relocation, had never lived around Asians other than her own family.
To The Stars, autobiography of actor
George Takei, including description of his time spent in
Rohwer and
Tule Lake internment camps, and the difficulties faced by his family as a result of the forced relocation.
Back Home by
Bill Mauldin(1947, Sloane), pages 165 - 170. Mauldin, the artist most famous for his "
Willie and Joe" cartoons in the Army's
Stars and Stripes newspaper, learned of the internment camps when meeting members of the
100th Battalion and the
442nd Regimental Combat Team, both composed of Nisei volunteers, who were fighting in Europe. Following the war, Mauldin was an outspoken critic of the treatment given to the Japanese-Americans, both during and following the war. Several of his cartoons of the period, featured in this book, sharply address this issue.
*
Chinese Exclusion Act (United States)*
Gentlemen's Agreement*
Snow Falling on Cedars, a David Guterson novel (made into a 1999 film) about a murder trial case in the fifties with a japanese defendant. It shows the deep xenophobia toward people with japanese ancestry, and the internment camps.
*
InternmentArchives.com -- Online archive of primary source documentation regarding relocation*
Asian-Nation: Japanese American Internment*
Friends of Minidoka*
1992 signing*
Large number of documents*
Alien registration*
The Smith Act*
EO 9066*
Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar by Ansel Adams From the American Memory Collection of the Library of Congress*
The Japanese Camps in California by
Mark Weber, in
The Journal for Historical Review (Spring 1980, volume 2, number 1, page 45)
*
Teaching about Japanese-American Internment*
Letters from the Japanese American Internment Correspondence between a librarian and internees.
*
Japanese American National Museum Q & A*
Japanese-American Internment Camps in Idaho and the West: 1942-1945*
The Internment of San Francisco Japanese*
Executive Order 9066 and the Residents of Santa Cruz County*
Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project (Video oral histories along with historical photographs and documents)*
National Japanese American Memorial Foundation*
National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism in Washington, DC*
60 years after his landmark Supreme Court battle, Fred Korematsu is fighting racial profiling of Arabs*
University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections â€" Social Issues Photographs 500 historical images from Western United States and the Pacific Northwest region covering political and social topics such as women's issues, labor and government, and ethnic groups with special emphasis on the Japanese internment camps in the Northwest during World War II.
* Civilian Restrictive Order No. 1, 8 Fed. Reg. 982, provided for detention of those of Japanese ancestry in assembly or relocation centers.
* House Report No. 2124 (77th Cong., 2d Sess.) 247-52
* Hearings before the Subcommittee on the National War Agencies Appropriation Bill for 1945, Part II, 608-726
* Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (pg 309-327), by Lt. Gen. J. L. DeWitt. This report is dated June 5, 1943, but was not made public until January, 1944.
* Further evidence of the Commanding General's attitude toward individuals of Japanese ancestry is revealed in his voluntary testimony on April 13, 1943, in San Francisco before the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee to Investigate Congested Areas, Part 3, pp. 739-40 (78th Cong., 1st Sess.)
* Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, 78th Cong., 2d Sess., on H. R. 2701 and other bills to expatriate certain nationals of the United States, pp. 37-42, 49-58.
* 56 Stat. 173.
* 7 Fed. Reg. 2601
* House Report No. 1809, 84th Congress, 2d session, 9 (1956).
* Opler, Marvin in Tom C. Clark, Attorney General of the United States and William A. Carmichael, District Director, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Department of Justice, District 16 vs. Albert Yuichi Inouye, Miye Mae Murakami, Tsutako Sumi, and Mutsu Shimizu. No. 11839, United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. August 1947.
