Incarceration of Japanese Americans

Incarceration of Japanese Americans. The forced removal from the West Coast in the Spring and Summer of 1942 of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, more than two‐thirds of them native‐born U.S. citizens, and their subsequent incarceration in ten desolate concentration camps has been called America's “worst wartime mistake.”It is better understood as the culmination of a long history of discriminatory treatment of Asian immigrants and their descendants by the federal government, going back to such measures as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. After 1870, Asian immigrants were defined as “aliens ineligible to citizenship,” a category from which other forms of discrimination stemmed. By 1924, all Asian immigrants, except for Filipinos who were then “American nationals,” were barred from immigrating to the United States.

When Japanese military forces attacked Pearl Harbor and other American bases on 7 and 8 December 1941, some 126,000 persons of Japanese ancestry or birth were living in the continental United States, all but a few thousand on the West Coast. According to plan, federal security authorities immediately interned some 11,000 enemy aliens, about 8,000 Japanese, 2,300 Germans, and a few hundred Italians. Although many if not most of those initially interned posed no threat to the United States, their confinement proceeded according to the statute and involved a rudimentary due process of law.

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, by contrast, was lawless. Pressured from both within and outside the federal government, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942, providing the initial authority for mass incarceration. It did not affect the few thousand Japanese Americans not living on the West Coast, and of the 150,000 Japanese Americans in Hawai'i, only a few thousand were rounded up.

Although the removal was carried out by the U.S. Army, a separate wartime agency, the War Relocation Authority, operated the ten camps located in sparsely populated parts of California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. Without a dissenting vote, Congress passed ex post facto legislation to enforce the president's action; the mass incarceration was also hailed by the press and the general public. Many legal scholars anticipated that the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down Roosevelt's order and the actions that stemmed from it, but the justices refused to do so in the so‐called Japanese‐American cases of 1943–1944 (Korematsu, Hirabayshi, and Endo), although the Endo case (December 1944) did end the government's authority to incarcerate or otherwise limit the freedom of “loyal” American citizens. The last of these camps closed in March 1946.

In isolated incidents at three camps, soldiers shot and killed their fellow Americans. In general, however, the camps were run humanely; most inmates lived in family groups, and attempts were made to create communities behind barbed wire. As early as the Summer of 1942, some Japanese Americans were released to do farm work or attend college, and a few with language skills were recruited by military intelligence. In 1943, Japanese‐American male citizens were encouraged to enlist in the U.S. Army, and in 1944 many were actually drafted for military service from behind barbed wire. Some 3,600 young men were inducted into the army from the camps, and more than 20,000 others served.

The vast majority of Japanese‐American inmates did what officials told them to do, but a few challenged the government unsuccessfully in the courts. A significant minority participated in peaceful protests, including resisting the draft. For the latter offenses 263 young men were tried, convicted, and sent to federal prisons.

After a presidential commission in 1982 identified “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” as the underlying causes of the incarceration, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which awarded 81,974 individuals $20 thousand each and apologized to them for the nation, as did President Ronald Reagan and George Bush. In 1999 a memorial to the ordeal of the Japanese Americans was approved for a small park near the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
See also Asian Americans; Immigration Law; Korematsu v. United States; Nativist Movement; Pearl Harbor, Attack on; Racism; World War II: Domestic Effects.

Bibliography

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment ofCivilians , Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 1982, reprint 1997.
Peter Irons , Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese Internment Cases, 1983.
Roger Daniels, ed., American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941–1945, 9 vols., 1989.
Arthur Hansen, ed., Japanese American World War II Evacuation History Project, 5 vols., 1990–1992.
Roger Daniels , Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, 1993.
Sandra C. Taylor , Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz, 1993.

Roger Daniels