The Mass Internment of Japanese Americans and the Quest for Legal Redress

Charles J. McClain, Charles McClain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780815318668
• eBook ISBN: 9781136516443
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In 1942 U.S. military authorities, invoking a presidential order and an Act of Congress, forcibly evacuated over 110,000 persons of Japnese ancestry, most of them U/S. citizens, from their homes on the West Coast to what in fact were prison camps inland. The essays and articles in this volume explore this most extraordinary episode in American constitutional history.

Notes and Documents

The Decisions to Relocate the North American Japanese: Another Look

Roger Daniels

The author is professor of history in the University of Cincinnati.,

IN A LITTLE over two months after the outbreak of the Great Pacific War in December 1941, both North American democracies—the United States and Canada—began the process of rounding up and incarcerating, in one way or another, persons of Japanese ancestry who happened to live in the coastal strip between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean in the province of British Columbia and in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California. The similarity in the actions of the two nations is not surprising. For over half a century each country had been dealing with small Asian minorities on the West Coast in quite similar ways, and, in each society, Asians had played the same kinds of economic roles. First Chinese and then Japanese arrived to become, figuratively, hewers of wood and drawers of water, or, if one prefers to be literal, builders of railroads, performers of stoop labor and domestic chores, and, particularly in British Columbia, fishermen. In each nation economic and racial hostility arose first among workingmen and their allies and then spread across most of western society.

The years 1940-1941 saw enclaves of Japanese clustered in coastal regions of each country. In the continental United States there were just over 125,000 ethnic Japanese, more than eighty-eight percent of whom lived on the Pacific slope. In Canada there were 23,000 who were even more highly concentrated: fewer than five percent lived outside of British Columbia. In both nations Japanese represented fewer than one-tenth of one percent of the total population, and even on the West Coast their proportion was not high: 1.2 percent of the population in the American Pacific states and 2.7 percent of the population of British Columbia.¹

Japanese were clearly second-class residents in each country. In Canada, Japanese immigrants could and did become naturalized citizens under colorblind federal statutes, but could not vote in the province of British Columbia, where almost all of them lived, because provincial law forbade Asians, regardless of citizenship, from voting. Only about a quarter of the Japanese Canadian population were Japanese nationals. In the United States, federal naturalization statutes, dating back to 1870, prohibited Asians from being naturalized, but, since under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution “'all persons” born in the U.S. were citizens legally entitled to suffrage and other rights, native born Japanese American adults had the franchise and were beginning to use it. About two-thirds of the American Japanese were citizens. In each country the overwhelming majority of the native-born generation, children of marriages first consummated in the years around 1920, were minors. In 1942, as is well known, these differentials in citizenship status were of little significance, as, in each nation, citizen and alien, adult and child, male and female, were all herded out of the coastal zones and into the interior. The only criterion was ethnicity: all Japanese had to go.²

In the United States the instrument of evacuation was the United States Army since President Franklin Roosevelt had delegated authority, on February 19, 1942, in Executive Order 9066, to the Secretary of War and his subordinates. In Canada, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King used an Order in Council, P. C. 1486, issued five days later, which delegated power to the Minister of Justice who utilized the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as his instrument. In each nation, a special civilian administrative body was created to warehouse and manage the evacuees: the American War Relocation Authority and the Canadian British Columbia Security Commission. Also in each country, the places of evacuation were similar in their isolation, but the techniques of restraint used were different. Canadian Japanese were initially segregated largely by sex, with able-bodied men sent to various work camps, and women, children, and older men sent to "housing centres" in the interior valleys of British Columbia where the physical restraints were imposed largely by geography—the same kind of exile that had been used by the Czarist Russian government. In the United States, incarceration was overt: Japanese family units were shipped off to ten isolated sites where flimsy barrack-like buildings were erected and then surrounded by barbed-wire, watch towers, and armed guards—the kind of restraint usually called “concentration camps” but which the federal authorities insisted were “relocation centers.”

Thus the two governments in early 1942 treated Japanese Americans and Canadians in quite similar ways. A mistrusted yet innocent ethnic minority clustered geographically in enclaves on the Pacific Coast of each nation was uprooted from its homes and placed in alien and largely hostile environments on the basis of a wholly fictitious military necessity that was a mere fig leaf for a racism that had been endemic against Asians for nearly a century. The means used—the military in one nation, the national police in the other—were closely related, while the places of incarceration were almost equally isolated and unpleasant even though the conditions of confinement were clearly more restrictive in the United States. And, it must be noted, the Canadian government, unlike the American, did not kill any of the people it incarcerated. Both countries, in spite of a show of fairness, simply cheated their Japanese residents out of much of their real and personal property, often to the advantage of Caucasian citizens who were allowed to buy at prices well below the market value.

Faced with these similarities the historian of North America is forced to ask if all these similarities were simply fortuitous. Was there joint preplanning? Were the similarities due to mimesis? Or were basic attitudes and institutions on either side of the forty-ninth parallel so related that similar reactions naturally ensued?

None of those who have written about the evacuation, including me, has previously found any evidence of preplanning.³ It is now clear, as I shall shortly demonstrate, that there were discussions between the two governments before the war about “doing something” with West Coast Japanese if war came. These discussions, which might be called planning, were not unrelated to the actions eventually taken against the Japanese in both countries. The real question is, perhaps, whether these discussions had any demonstrable impact on the decisions eventually taken, or whether they are merely further evidence of a similar set of mind, a kind of international conditioned reflex.

The major evidence for preplanning comes from the records of the Permanent Joint Board of Defense, a mixed Canadian-American group established as one of the results of the Ogdensburg, New York, meetings between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister King on August 17–18, 1940. The board had a predominantly military membership with a civilian chairman and secretary from each country. The surviving member, Canadian civilian Hugh L. Keenleyside, remembered in 1979:

informal discussion about Canadian and American plans for dealing with persons of Japanese racial origin who were living on the Pacific Coast took place from time to time between members of the Joint Board on Defence. There was no formal debate on the subject, and certainly no prior agreement between the Governments on what should be done, nor I believe was there any kind of informal agreement reached.⁴

Some twenty years earlier, Keenleyside had written:

a vigorous effort was made by certain members of the Board to put through a resolution urging the Governments to deport or to place in custody those “elements in the population of Japanese racial origin.” More moderate counsels prevailed and the Board merely expressed the belief that watchfulness was essential and that "a coincidence of policy" between Washington and Ottawa would be useful. The eventual action was similar in the two countries and reflects credit on neither. Canadian behaviour was particularly discreditable because the numbers involved were small and the individuals, unlike the Germans or Italians resident in Canada, easily identifiable, their previous behaviour had been above reproach, and the way in which the Japanese- Canadians' property was liquidated was both callous and mean. The whole operation was a cheap and needless capitulation to popular prejudice fanned by political bigotry or ambition or both.⁵

The leading American authority on the Joint Board, Colonel Stanley W. Dziuban, author of the volume on U.S.-Canadian military cooperation in the U.S. Army's official history of World War II, says absolutely nothing about any Joint Board discussions of possible actions against resident Japanese even though he had a manuscript version of Keenleyside's article at his disposal. He prints an appendix of thirty-three formal recommendations which the board made between August 26, 1940, and September 1, 1945, none of which deals with resident Japanese.⁶

Happily, papers once classified are now open so that we can look behind these secondary accounts. After the Joint Board's twenty-third meeting, held in Montreal on November 10–11, 1941, the following was the fifth item entered into its journal:

In the course of its review of the defense position on the Pacific Coast, the Board gave attention to the problem caused by the existence in Canada and in the United States of elements in the population of Japanese racial origins. The opinion was expressed that an effort should be made to see that, in the event of hostilities with J...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• Notes and Documents: The Decisions to Relocate the North American Japanese: Another Look
• Racial Discrimination And The Military Judgment: The Supreme Court's Korematsu and Endo Decisions
• Mr. Justice Murphy and the Hirabayashi Case
• II Genesis, Exodus, And Leviticus Genealogy, Evacuation, And Law1
• Book Review: “Other Non-Whites” IN AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY: A REVIEW OF JUSTICE AT WAR
• Fancy Dancing In The Marble Palace
• Justice, War, And The Japanese-American Evacuation And Internment Book Review of—Justice At War: The Story Of The Japanese American Internment Cases
• Moving for Redress
• The Japanese American Cases—A Disaster
• The Case of Korematsu v. United States: Could it be Justified Today?
• Wartime Power of the Military Over Citizen Civilians Within the Country
• Collins versus the World: The Fight to Restore Citizenship to Japanese American Renunciants of World War II
• Japanese Relocation And Redress In North America: A Comparative View
• Redress Achieved, 1983–1990
• The Japanese American Coram Nobis Cases: Exposing The Myth Of Disloyalty
• Review Essay: At the Bar of History: Japanese Americans Versus the United States
• Forging A Legend: The Treason Of “Tokyo Rose”*
• The Pardoning of “Tokyo Rose”: A Report on the Restoration of American Citizenship to Iva Ikuko Toguri
• Acknowledgments