Internment of Japanese Americans

The Japanese American internment refers to the exclusion and subsequent removal of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, officially described as "persons of Japanese ancestry", 62% of whom were United States citizens, from the west coast of the United States during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called War Relocation Camps in remote portions of the nation's interior. The government of the United States officially apologized for this action in the 1980s and paid reparations.

A note about dissenting views

Ever since this subject became a topic of historical inquiry, there have been individuals and organizations who have argued that the suspicions against ethnic Japanese which led to Executive Order 9066 were indeed justified and who seek to rebut some Japanese American accounts of hardship during the evacuation and in the camps. Members of the American Legion and war veterans who fought in the Pacific theater are the most vocal proponents of this viewpoint. Another defender of the policy is journalist 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, although she has faced heavy criticism alleging logical leaps and failure to consider some historical evidence. [1]

Among academics, the broad historical consensus is that the camps were indeed a product of wartime hysteria and racism rather than arising from legitimate fears of sabotage. Moreover, many Japanese Americans consider the efforts to justify the wartime actions to be highly offensive, on a par with Holocaust denial among Jews.

Terminology: Internment, relocation, or concentration camps?

Most historical references describe the camps as internment camps, although others favor the name relocation camps.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.

However, many others argue that the phrase relocation camp is a euphemism that does not adequately describe the true nature of the camps. And some assert that because the camps meet some dictionary definitions of concentration camp, this term is appropriate; however, the use of this loaded term should not be construed to mean they were on the same severity as Nazi Germany's Konzentrationslagers or Britain's South African camps during the Boer War.

Most historians use the now-standard term internment camp because it is perceived as relatively neutral.

Whatever name is used, the perimeters of the camps were fenced, armed guards were posted, and all of the camps were in remote, desolate areas far from any population centers. There are documented instances of internees being shot for walking 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 white family or agency.

One of the camps, Tule Lake, was in fact later turned into a prison camp, with watchtowers, fences, and guards. Tule Lake was reserved for those Japanese who were specifically suspected of espionage, treason, or other such disloyalty, and their families. Other families were held at Tule Lake because they requested to be "repatriated" to Japan. A number of pro-Japan demonstrations were held there throughout the war.

Also, many other things besides both internment and relocation are involved, among them: individual and group exclusion from "military" zones, deportation, illegal detainment, de-naturalization, alien enemy registration requirements, curfews, travel restrictions, and property confiscation (including seizures, freezing, bond seizure, and restrictions) for those of foreign birth and/or of "enemy" ancestry.

The individual exclusion zones were particularly onerous, as they were personally targeted, and very swift - allowing very little time to relocate. Government agents continued to follow the excludees they couldn't convict of crimes and warn potential new employers, police, and people of their new towns on how "dangerous" they were.

For example in Korematsu's case the Japanese population had 5 days from May 3, 1942 until 12 noon, May 8 (or 9th) to leave their hometown according to General DeWitt's Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34.

History

During the period of 1939-1941, the FBI compiled the Custodial Detention index ("CDI") on citizens, enemy aliens and foreign nationals which might be dangerous.

On June 28, 1940 the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (or Smith Act) is passed, Section 31 required the registration and fingerprinting of aliens above the age of 14, Section 35 required reports of change of address within 5 days. Registered aliens are to get back their Green Cards, after form processing. Within 4 months 4,741,971 registered at post offices around the country. Of the 1.1 million aliens above the age of 14 who would be classed as enemy aliens, 683,259 were males of which 56,332 were Japanese.

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. Further attacks, such as the submarine shelling of a California oil refinery in 1942 redoubled these suspicions. Also, Japan's rapid military conquest of much of Asia made their military machine seem to 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.

Critics of the exclusion argue that the military justification was unfounded, claiming that there are no cases of military espionage that were attributable to Japanese Americans. David Lowman has, however, asserted 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. Lowman's claims have been controversial with others pointing out that much of the information that the Japanese officials obtained may have come from public sources such as newspapers, and that communications by Japanese consular officials stating an attempt to recruit Japanese-Americans did not necessarily mean that those attempts were successful. However, historical revisionists who rely on Lowman's claims point to his assertion that some of the intercepted messages specifically said that the information had come from Japanese-American spies. One captured Japanese officer who had graduated from UCLA, and spoke fluent English specifically reported attempting to cultivate contacts for such spying, as reported in a letter sent to Congressman Wallop of Wyoming by a serviceman.

Lieutentant 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 "better 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."

Historical revisionists state that approximately 20,000 Japanese-Americans in Japan at the start of the war joined the Japanese war effort, and hundreds joined the Japanese Army. They also state that Tomoya Kawakita, an American citizen who worked as an interpreter and a POW guard for the Japanese army, actively participated in the torture (and at least one death) of American soldiers, including survivors of the Bataan Death March.

In January 25, 1942 the Secretary of War reported that "on the Pacific coast not a single ship had sailed from our Pacific ports without being subsequently attacked". Due to this, espionage was suspected.

In addition to espionage, there was also concern that in the event of an invasion there could be 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 doubted the loyalty of ethnic Japanese. Many, including some born in America, had been educated in Japan, where school curricula emphasized reverence for the Emperor.

In addition, the loyalty of some Japanese Americans to the United States decreased after the government removed them and their families from their homes and placed them in internment camps. Several pro-Japan groups formed inside the camps, and riots occurred for various reasons in many camps, which caused the WRA to move the "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 expatriated to Japan. However, the American Civil Liberties Union successfully challenged most of these renunciations as invalid because of the conditions under which the government obtained them.

When the government circulated a questionnaire seeking army volunteers from the camp population, 94% of military-aged men said they would not serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. However, a sizeable number did volunteer to serve from the camps, including in the famed and highly decorated 442nd regiment which operated in Europe (not Japan, as some believe).

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On December 7, 1941 Presidential Proclamations 2525 (German), 2526 (Italian) and 2527 (Japanese) were signed. Many homes were raided using the CDI and other information, 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 Dec 11). As of 11:00 AM, Dec 9th, 1,801 aliens were in custody, of which 1,221 were Japanese (376 of them in Hawaii) - the author of that memorandum "did not believe there would be very many more arrests of Japanese."

Only 6,056 of the 16,811 foreigners arrested in security measures by the FBI between December 7, 1941 and June 30, 1945 were of non-European descent.

Presidential Proclamation 2537 issued on Jan.14, 1942, 1 million enemy aliens register. Any change of address, employment or name had to be reported to the FBI/DOJ. Enemy aliens were not allowed to enter restricted areas. Violaters of regulations were subject to "arrest, detention and internment for the duration of the war."

Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin D Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, allowed military commanders to designate areas "which any or all persons may be excluded, and with such respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave...". These exclusion zones, unlike internment, were applicable to both citizens and non-citizens. 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).

On March 2, 1942 General DeWitt issued Public Proclamation No. 1, applying to all those of enemy ancestry in areas of the West Coast were required to file Change of Residence Notices. Subsequent proclamations expanded the coverage all of California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Utah, and the southern portion of Arizona.

March 11, 1942 Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian giving it discretionary, plenary authority over all alien property interests. Many assets were frozen, creating immediate financial difficulty for the affected aliens.

March 27, 1942, by Proclamation No. 4, General DeWitt proclaimed as of March 29, 1942 all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were restricted from leaving Military Area No. 1, in order to ensure an orderly migration.

May 9, 1942 most were forced from their homes.

Over 112,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were excluded from regions of the US, however nearly 40% of those excludees were enemy aliens who should have been interned, the remaining 67,000+ were US citizens by birth. The last of these "subversives" was not removed until 11 months after Pearl Harbor, 3 months after the last exclusion order was issued. The leisure with which such orders were issued, and the fact that martial law was not declared, leads to the conclusion that military necessity was not as urgent as represented.

The Japanese internees were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers," where most awaited shipment to a more permanent relocation center. 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 and Washington, and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Only those of Japanese ancestry were offered berths in the relocation centers, whereas the bulk of the population of enemy ancestry effected by exclusion orders faced immediate and mandatory resettlement with minimal assistance.

Many Japanese spent the next three years in one of ten "relocation centers" across the country, which were run by the newly-formed War Relocation Authority (WRA). Although 35,000 of them rapidly left for portions of the US not in the exclusionary zones, others would be held in facilities run by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Army. Federal officials attempted to conduct the massive relocation in a humane manner.

Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were not compensated, nor consulted about. The Native Americans consoled themselves that they might at least get the improvements made to the land, but at the end of the duration such buildings, and gardens were bulldozed or sold by the government instead.

National Student Council Relocation Program, which only gave benefits to Japanese relocatees, placed 4,300 individual scholarships to more than 500 colleges and universities located outside of the exclusionary zone.

Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not subject to the internment policy, despite the fact that they were closer to essential military facilities than most of the Japanese Americans in the western states. The main reason for this was the territory was already virtually under martial law. Also, given that about a third of the population of Hawaii was Japanese American, it is likely that wholesale detention of Japanese Americans in Hawaii would have crippled the local economy.

A key supporter of the internment was California Attorney General Earl Warren. In later years, Warren viewed his early stance on the internment as one of his greatest mistakes. 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.

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 weren't 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 heavily against the claim that the relocation was an essential security measure.

The last internment camp was not closed until August 1948, although all Japanese were cleared 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).

Compensation

During the internment precautions were taken to protect the property of those forced to move. The personal possessions of Japanese were indexed and warehoused, and the owners issued receipts. Internees were told that items requested would be shipped to the camps free of charge. In some cases, Japanese American farmers were able to find white families who were willing to tend their farms for the duration of their internment.

In other cases, however, the Japanese American farmers had to sell their property in a matter of days, for pennies on the dollar. In these cases, the land speculators who bought the land made huge profits. In addition, California's Alien Land Act, which prohibited 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 U.S. Congress, on July 2, 1948 passed the "American Japanese Claims Act ", stated that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred". Approximately $147 million in claims were submitted, 26,568 settlements to family groups totalling more than $38 million were disbursed.

Beginning around 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 their matter. Some white opponents of the redress movement argued that the commission was ideologically biased because 40% of the commission staff was of Japanese descent. 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.

These conclusions largely having become accepted, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totalling $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 veterans of the Pacific theater) argued not only that monetary reparations were inappropriate, but that no apology was necessary.

On September 27 1992: PL 102-371 (H.R. 4551) the Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and an additional $400 million in benefits was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, who also issued another formal apology from the U.S. government.

Conditions in the camps

According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in "tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." Most camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks and were thus poorly equiped for cramped family living. Consider the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming: a barb-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.

Criticisms

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 relocation camps (except Tule Lake) 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.

Other camps

Crystal City, Texas was an internment camp where together with Japanese, Germans, enemy aliens from Latin America, 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.

Japanese Canadians were interned by their government during World War II. Japanese people from various parts of Latin America were also interned in conjunction with the United States. See Japanese Canadian internment.

Legal legacy

A number of 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 Yashui 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 conviction (as well as the Hirabayashi and Yasui convictions) were overturned 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 manifest injustice 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 withheld important and relevant information from the Supreme Court regarding the Army's alteration of evidence (namely, the report by General DeWitt justifying the internment program), including destroying documents in an effort to hide the fact that alterations had been made. The coram nobis cases overturned the convictions in all three original cases, and are regarded as one of the impetuses for the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

It is important to note, however, that the coram nobis cases only nullified the factual underpinnings of the 1944 Korematsu case and its brethren. The legal conclusions in Korematsu -- i.e. its expansive interpreation of government powers in wartime -- were not overturned. 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.

List of internment camps

External links

Documents of Interest

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).