The Internment of Japanese Americans

THE INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE AMERICANS

Japanese Americans to Internment Camps

On 31 March 1942 Japanese American residents along the West Coast of the United States were directed to report to control stations and register the names of all family members. They were then told when and where to report with their families for relocation to an assembly area and then an internment camp. The times for evacuation varied from four days to as much as two weeks. The Japanese Americans were forced under the circumstances to liquidate some or all of their property within that period Many white Americans took advantage of the situation and offered pennies on the dollar to purchase possessions from those soon to be interned.

Personal

Losses. Many Japanese Americans lost their land to foreclosure or were forced to sell at cut-rate prices. Even the U.S. government was not above taking advantage of the situation. Nearly two thousand internees were assured that their cars would be safely stored by the Federal Reserve Bank. The army soon offered to purchase the vehicles at vastly undervalued prices. Those internees who chose not to sell were notified in late 1942 that their vehicles had been "requisitioned" by the army for use in the war effort.

Relocation Centers

This evacuation and internment came about as the result of Executive Order 9066, which was signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The order provided that "the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national defense material, national defense premises, and national defense utilities.…"The army orders enforcing Roosevelt's edict mandated a curfew for Japanese Americans living in the area of internment. For the two months following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the president had been under increasing pressure from Gen. John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command and various state politicians from California, Oregon, and Washington to "do something about the Japs" living in these areas When President Roosevelt issued the order, it was partly because of the anxiety over Pearl Harbor. Asian Americans, not just Japanese, also faced racism on the West Coast.

Manzanar

The first operational internment camp was named Manzanar, and it was located in southern California. The name has come to be identified with all internment camps operated by the government from 1942 to 1945. Over these three years, ten camps opened and eventually held approximately 120,000 people for varying periods in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. The evacuees were only allowed to bring with them what they could carry. The final report of the 1983 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens found property lost to the Japanese Americans through arson, theft, or vandalism was valued between $810 million and $2 billion (in 1983 dollars). The report further placed the total loss of property and income during that period as high as $6.2 billion.

Legal Battles

Not unexpectedly, the roundup and interning of American citizens in camps led to legal fights The first case to rise to the Supreme Court was Hirabayashi v. United States. Gordon Hirabayashi, an American-born citizen of Japanese ancestry and a senior at the University of Washington, intentionally violated both the curfew and the order to relocate, saying that to follow the orders would abdicate his rights as a U.S citizen. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two concurrent three-month sentences. The Supreme Court, which published its decision in the Hirabayashi case on 21 June 1943, ruled only on the constitutionality of the curfew and its restriction to those citizens of Japanese ancestry. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Harlan F. Stone held that Congress and the president could take into account the relative lack of assimilation of Japanese Americans into U.S. society in judging the military risk in allowing freedom of movement for a group whose loyalty "could not be precisely and quickly ascertained." The narrow ruling did not address the larger questions of the legality of the internment.

Korematsu v. United States

The most important case was that of Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a U.S. citizen of Japanese descent. Korematsu was also a worker in a defense-industry job. When the internment began, Korematsu moved to another town, changed his name, and claimed he was of Spanish and Hawaiian descent. He was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison. He was paroled and then interned to a camp in Topaz, Utah. Korematsu's case made it quickly to the Supreme Court, where it was argued in October 1944.

Contradictory Orders

Korematsu argued that the executive order and the Civilian Exclusion Orders issued by the army were conflicting, that, as a defense worker and a Japanese American, he was both forbidden from leaving the exclusion area and forbidden from remaining there The Court decided on 18 December 1944 that a person cannot be convicted for doing the very thing which it is a crime to fail to do. But it also found, in a decision written by Justice Hugo Black, that the outstanding orders here did not contain such contradictory terms. On 27 March 1942 an order was issued which prohibited Korematsu and all others of Japanese ancestry from leaving the area in which they lived, but that order was only in effect until such time that a future order should permit those individuals to leave the area. The future order was issued on 3 May 1942, and it is for this reason that Korematsu was convicted, since he had not followed the 3 May order to leave the area and report to "assembly areas" prior to transportation to "detention centers."

Racism versus Military Necessity

In Black's opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court found that military need made the actions of the government legal:

Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation areas…and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term applies…we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue Korematsu was not excluded from a military area because of hostility to him and his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion on our west coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures.…We cannot—by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight—now say that at that time these actions weren't justified.

Jackson's Dissent

Justice Robert Jackson, who later led the American presence at the Nuremburg war-crime trials, led the dissent:

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here, he is not law abiding and well disposed Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived.

Justice Jackson further noted that the way in which the military orders were written, in his opinion, gave Korematsu only one choice, that being to submit himself to the authorities and undergo examination, custody, and transportation out of the area to be followed by an indeterminate confinement period in detention camps. Jackson also noted that had Korematsu been a German alien enemy, an Italian alien enemy, or a citizen of American-born ancestors convicted of treason, but out on parole, he would not have been subject to the order. Only Korematsu's presence as a person of Japanese ancestry violated the military order. "His conviction for this act, rests solely on the orders of General DeWitt [the military commander of the West Coast]…I cannot say, from any evidence before me, that the orders of General DeWitt were not reasonably expedient military precautions, nor could I say that they were. But, even if they were permissible military procedures, I deny that it follows that they are constitutional. If, as the Court holds, it does follow, then we may as well say that any military order will be constitutional and have done with it."

Certified as Loyal

Despite the finding of the orders as legal, the Japanese American interns were able to be "certified" as loyal. They were then allowed to leave the various camps, usually to jobs in the Midwest or the East Many of the Manzanar emigrants left to work as temporary migrant laborers. During the summer of 1942 thousands of Japanese Americans who volunteered to work as seasonal laborers were credited with saving the sugar beet crop of several western states. On 18 December 1944 it was announced that all relocation centers would be closed before the end of 1945 and the War Relocation Act program would be ended by 30 June 1946.

Belated Apology

In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed a bill formally apologizing to Japanese Americans for their internment in American detention camps. The bill provided that Japanese Americans who had been interned and who were still living would receive a onetime payment of twenty thousand dollars to compensate them in some part for the ordeal through which they had suffered.

Sources:

Camp and Community: Manzanar ami the Owens Valley (Fullerton: California State University, Japanese American Oral History-Project, 1977);

Peter H. Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press,1983).