Japanese Internment

12 Key excerpts on "Japanese Internment"

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  And Justice for All

  An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps

  • John Tateishi(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Washington Press

    (Publisher)

  Nevertheless, the gates to the camps were finally opened, and Japanese Americans began to return to the West Coast, thus bring-ing to an end one of the darkest episodes in our nation's constitu-tional history. The Japanese American internment was an experience un-paralleled in the history of the United States. A group of American citizens and their alien parents became the innocent victims of a racist policy that ignored all the protections of individual rights which are intrinsic and essential to the very principles of constitu- INTRODUCTION / XXVii tional government. But in that time of national crisis, emotion, political expediency, and economic greed prevailed, and the Con-stitution was grossly violated. All three branches—the executive, legislative, and judicial—failed the trust reposed in them and em-braced West Coast prejudices that were infused with racist assump-tions. The exclusion and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was an injustice felt at the deepest personal level by those who experienced it, but for all Americans, it remains a betrayal of the principles upon which this nation was founded. This page intentionally left blank AND JUSTICE TOR ALL AMERICA'S CONCENTRATION CAMPS

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  The Shifting Grounds of Race

  Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles

  • Scott Kurashige(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 5 Japanese American Internment Both popular and scholarly treatments of Japanese American intern-ment have tended to focus on either the federal government’s role in order-ing and implementing the mass incarceration or the experience of Japanese Americans behind barbed wire. These research projects and writings played a key role in debunking the once widely accepted claim that the internment was justified by “military necessity” while revealing the deep level of suffering and trauma that Japanese American internees endured. In this regard, they served to support the long and ultimately successful campaign for redress and reparations from the federal government. Nev-ertheless, we still lack a thorough understanding of how local actors built the anti-Japanese movement, how Japanese Americans deliberated in the period between Pearl Harbor and the start of internment, and how the internment shaped the postwar Japanese community. For Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, relocating Japanese Americans into concentra-tion camps became a matter of “common sense.” His masterful and ne-farious accomplishment was to shift the primary focus of suspicion from the immigrant and alien Issei to the American-born and citizen Nisei, transforming a highly problematic witch hunt for “disloyal enemy aliens” into an indiscriminate concentration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. This chapter explores how the drive for internment reordered the inter-nal politics of the city’s Japanese community, as it was forced to confront both state repression and popular racist animosity posing as patriotism. Thrown into a state of fear and chaos, Japanese Americans struggled to formulate an effective response or even obtain accurate information. On December 7, 1941, the FBI began detaining immigrant leaders, initiating a process that prematurely elevated Nisei of the Japanese American Citi-zens League (JACL) to fill the leadership vacuum.

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  Emergency Presidential Power

  From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror

  • Chris Edelson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of Wisconsin Press

    (Publisher)

  82 6 the internment of japanese americans during world war ii A s Americans on the East Coast worried about landings by German saboteurs, Americans on the West Coast worried about a possible invasion and wondered whether they had to fear Japanese Americans who might ally with the invading enemy. Elected officials, including Earl Warren, who was then California’s attorney general, began speaking of “relocating” people of Japanese descent into the interior of the country, where they could not assist potential invaders. 1 While the threat of Japanese attack and perhaps even invasion was based in part on the reality of the attack on Pearl Harbor, 2 concerns about Japanese Americans were based on generalized fears, not specific proof. As David Cole notes, “there was never any evidence to support the concern that the Japanese [Americans] living [in the United States] posed a threat.” 3 In fact, like other Americans, Japanese Americans rushed to enlist in the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor. 4 However, longstanding prejudice ulti- mately led to the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans. In order to understand how and why Japanese Americans on the west coast were interned during World War II, it is important to understand the history that predates the war. When Japanese immigrants first came to the United States in the late nineteenth century, they did not face the full fury of nativist prejudices—partly, perhaps, because they were confused with Chinese immigrants, who had preceded Japanese immigrants to the United States and were initially the focus of ugly prejudice and stereotyping that described them as a “yellow peril” bent on overrunning the West Coast. 5 However, by the turn of the century, anti-immigrant activists were 83 the internment of japanese americans during world war ii making room for animus directed specifically against Japanese Americans.

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  Asian America

  Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850

  • Roger Daniels(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Washington Press

    (Publisher)

  Not only were they identified with the enemy but almost all facets of their lives were changed, and changed for the worse. In the course of a few months' time, their world was disrupted. The overwhelming majority of them were in some kind of federal custody as hostages of a war they had never made, as victims not of the enemy but of a government most of them had learned to call their own. I have, elsewhere, described in considerable detail both the decision making process that brought about the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and the nature of that incarceration, so it will only be briefly treated here. First and foremost, it must be understood that whatever significance the relocation, as it is usually called, might have for American history in general, it remains the central event of Japanese American history. Before the war, after camp—these and similar phrases punctuate the life history of almost every main-land Japanese American family. It is now quite clear to all but a few diehards and self-serving survivors among its architects and executors that the relocation was wrong. As President Gerald R. Ford stated on February 19, 1976: We know now what we should have known then—not only was [the] evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans. Although the stated reason for the evacuation was military necessity, it is now known that politicians and not generals were its prime movers. Had General George C. Marshall and our other top military planners been in charge, Japanese America would have been left largely undisturbed. Our military leaders knew that a full-scale invasion of North America was beyond the capabilities of Japanese 25. Freeman Mss., UWA, quoted in letter, Miller Freeman to L. P. Sieg, President, University of Washington, January 2.9, 1942. Asian Americans and World War II 2.01 forces, although hit-and-run naval raids were a possibility.

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  Rightlessness

  Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II

  • A. Naomi Paik(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  Japanese Internment camps United States (various locations) May 1942–March 1946

  On 14 February 1942, two months after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entered the Second World War, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass evacuation and imprisonment of all ethnic Japanese persons living on the West Coast, including 80,000 U.S. citizens. The Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA), the federal agency hurriedly created to manage the evacuation, gave these 120,000 citizens and residents as little as two weeks to settle their affairs. Properties were sold short; businesses shuttered. The WCCA then transported this suspect group of people—now called “internees”—en masse to nearby assembly centers, some of them in whitewashed horseracing or fairground facilities. In these cases, families took the place of horses. From assembly centers, internees were then removed to one of ten internment camps located in the deserts of the West or in the swamps of Arkansas.

  The War Relocation Authority (WRA), another civilian government agency established to administer internment, built the camps within a few months. The camps ranged in size, holding anywhere from 7,000 to nearly 19,000 inmates. They were organized into housing blocks that each contained rows of barracks, a mess hall, a communal hall, laundry facilities, and men’s and women’s bathrooms. The camps also contained administrative buildings and housing for soldiers, as well as buildings that served as hospitals, schools, religious sites, canteens, and post offices. The barracks each measured about 120 feet by 20 feet, and were divided to house up to six families. Each apartment contained a single light fixture, a stove for heating, and a cot for each resident. Hastily constructed out of cheap materials and covered with tar paper, this housing offered little privacy or shelter from the extreme weather. The windows and doors often did not fit their frames; large gaps grew between the planks of wood as time wore on.

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  Life Behind Barbed Wire

  The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawaii Issei

  • Yasutaro Soga, Kihei Hirai(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  And even among these few individuals, most were voluntary internees hoping to reunite with their husbands and or fathers. It is impor-tant to understand at least one important lesson stemming from the dif-ferential treatment of this group — that alternatives to mass internment or incarceration do exist and that such actions should not be predicated simply on the basis of ethnicity or race. It is conceivable that a call for similar actions might arise toward a group if another fanatical-based attack introduction 15 occurs in or to the United States. When fear and prejudice are directed at a vulnerable group — a group that few can claim friendships with or knowl-edge about—then the result may again mirror the catastrophic actions taken on the U.S. West Coast against their Nikkei population. Hawai‘i demonstrated that knowing people before a shattering event occurs can affect the process generated to deal with difficult situations. Castigating an entire group on the basis of religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, race, or other social categories rather than on individual behavior could again result in draconian measures taken in the name of “national security” and “military necessity.” To this point, George Santayana offers an appropriate remark: “Prog-ress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness . . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it . . . . This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned noth-ing from experience.” 19 The lessons that can be learned from Hawai‘i and its treatment of their Nikkei population offers an acceptable alternative to the World War II internment and incarceration instituted in the Territory of Alaska and on the mainland United States.

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  Asian Americans

  Contemporary Trends and Issues

  • Pyong Gap Min(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Reminiscent of the Jewish experience with the Nazis, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forced to abandon their properties and other possessions, as they were only allowed to bring the staples they could carry with them (Inada, 2000). They were then transported in over-crowded busses and trains for hours without knowing their destinations. As reported in Hansen’s (1991) work, the severity of the economic and psychosocial devas-tations associated with leaving home quickly was only matched by the harsh conditions Japanese Americans faced during the internment. They were initially taken to prisonlike “Assembly Centers.” Crowded and unsanitary tarpaper bar-racks and horse stalls, without privacy or plumb-ing, surrounded by barbed wires, became their temporary homes, where they were only provided with services barely adequate for survival (Cooper, 2000). Within a few months, incarcerated Japanese Americans were transferred from the temporary camps to 10 permanent WRA camps in uninhabit-able remote areas, such as deserts or swamps on the West Coast. At these permanent camps, the detainees found themselves in unsanitary living quarters consisting of overcrowded small rooms with cots, with no other furniture or plumbing, which caused many detainees to become ill (Kessler, 1993). Still, the incarcerated attempted to make the best of the situation. Some families were blessed with babies, among whom was Carole Doi, who later married another child detainee, Jim Yamaguchi. It drew an ironic picture when Americans were elated in 1992, when Kristi Yamaguchi, the daughter of these Japanese American internment survivors, won the gold medal for the United States in figure skating at the Olympics in Albertville, Norway, outskating Midori Ito—a competitor from Japan (Kule, 2005). After the Internment Shortly after the move to the permanent WRA camps commenced, a wave of lawsuits were filed on behalf of the incarcerated (e.g., “Korematsu v. U. S.,” 1944; see Mayer, 1995).

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  Okinawan Diaspora

  • Ronald Y. Nakasone(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 Japanese Latin American Internment from an Okinawan Perspective Wesley Ueunten I tell this painful story in remembrance of my family so others will know how devastating this event was for us. Although I was just a young girl at the time, I knew that what happened to us was a grave injustice, and it should never occur again in a civilized world. I hope with all my heart that no group will ever have to undergo such an experience.—Carmen Higa Mochizuki et al. v. United States of America Japan had lost the war and so we decided to stay in the U.S. until we could go back to Peru. Peru did not readily let us go back there and when the camps closed and we had to go out and work, my husband and I were already in our 50s and could not speak a word of English. To make matters worse, we had with us a granddaughter who was still a small child. I felt that it would be regrettable to leave this earth without telling the real story of our expe-riences in struggling with a life that was just better than death. Although I am nearly uneducated and ashamed of my writing, I decided to write things down.—Kamisato Kami, Ij A uchi de ikinuita People . . . really lucky people travel smoothly through life, but life is really full of rough waves. My life was really full of rough waves.—OH-1 As a sansei Okinawan growing up on Kauai, I had few places to turn when I became interested in my Okinawan heritage. 1 At home, we had George Kerr’s History of an Island People (1958), which I read cover to cover. Of course, we had my baban (grandmother). When she was temporarily bed-90 ridden after a fall, we would play Okinawan music tapes, and she would move her hands in the unique Okinawan clicking motions. I would try to mimic her hand movements. Observing my clumsy attempts, my mother suggested that I learn Okinawan dance from the Yamasatos in Kapa‘a. I spent many weekends with Mr. Toshio Yamasato (fig. 8) learning the dances that he had learned as a young man in Okinawa.

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  Captured

  The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941-1945

  • Frances Cogan(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  Inside the Gate The Nature of the Japanese Administration of the Civilian Internment Camps When Ethel Chapman got down from the truck at Silliman, when Alice Bryant and her husband heard the gates shut behind them at Bacolod, or when Jay Hill, Grace Nash, and others found themselves dumped unceremoniously in the dusty center of Santo Tomas, where was it exactly that they found themselves — and more important, in vjlnail Neither a POW nor a temporary transit camp, the internment camps almost defied offi-cial classification. Even today, if one tries to locate documents relating to civilian internees in the Philippines during World War II, the researcher usually finds records indexed with those of prisoners at Camp O'Donnell or Cabanatuan, as if the civilian internees were some form of honorary 108 4 Inside the Gate 109 POW (see, for example, Paul S. Dulls The Tokyo Trials: A Functional Index).1 Although it may seem a niggling point to arrive at a sound classification for the kind of internment civilians suffered, such legalism can have tremen-dous ramifications. Depending on its title, under which rules or interna-tional conventions would the camp supposedly operate? Did, for example, the Hague Convention or provisions of the International Red Cross or even Geneva apply to those who were clearly not combatants? Did the requirement that prisoners receive an Imperial Japanese soldiers ration seem adequate for nursing mothers, children under twelve, Spanish-American War veterans in their seventies, or teenagers? Should middle-aged couples be forced to do field labor, exist in jail cells, or suffer interrogation? Obviously, ordinary stan-dards of military reciprocity wouldn't suffice. Neither would ordinary rules of administration. Administration on its surface seems a dusty, tedious subject filled with, per-haps, management techniques, accounting procedures, and chains of com-mand.

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  The Collision of Political and Legal Time

  Foreign Affairs and the Supreme Court's Transformation of Executive Authority

  • Kimberley L. Fletcher(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Temple University Press

    (Publisher)

  Courts, at times, tacitly trust the good faith of execu-tive officials to justify excusing civil-liberties concerns with the legal positions that government officials have devised. 161 Even though Korematsu , in the immediate sense, did little to ease the situation of those interned, the Court unanimously determined in Endo that the government had no right to detain any loyal citizen without charge; due-process rights must be afforded to those detained. The end result was that “the government could no longer legally confine any loyal Nisei.” 162 World War II was fought to preserve freedom and democracy, yet it insti-gated one of the greatest suppressions of civil liberties in our history. America was fueled with hysteria, and FDR authorized the internment of tens of thou-sands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s finding in favor of the president and Congress when rights principles were violated. The management and direction of internment and evacuation were reconstituted to serve the administration’s political agenda: securing the nation from imminent attack from within. The judicial branch’s interpretation of the national emergency undermined rights principles in each of the internment cases. And the breadth of executive power ultimately depended on the justices’ appraisal of the emergency and not on Congress’s use of the political process (see Chapter 6). CONCLUSION: AN UNCERTAIN PATH When rights and polity principles collide, the Supreme Court asserts its au-tonomy to determine when military actions are “reasonably” based. To safe-guard the nation, the Court determined that racial distinctions needed to be drawn to meet the exigencies of the time and that it was in the position to evaluate the politically charged decision making of the executive, Congress, and the military.

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  Transnational Japan as History

  Empire, Migration, and Social Movements

  • Pedro Iacobelli, Danton Leary, Shinnosuke Takahashi, Pedro Iacobelli, Danton Leary, Shinnosuke Takahashi(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In their precarious existences lies both the importance of these unfortunate souls, and their contribution to our understanding of contemporary Japan. For looking at their lives, the hardships they endured during and after the war, a historian can reconsider what has seemed as simple and straightforward—Japan’s march toward democracy, peace, and prosperity in the postwar years. Thanks to their contribution we can see that the experiment of nation-building that was the US Occupation of Japan did not always run as smoothly as those who orchestrated it had hoped, that ruptures between the past and the present were never too clean-cut, and that the vestiges of empire showed their heads even amidst the optimism of the postwar decade. Notes 1. One example of this entanglement’s lasting importance is the yet unre- solved territorial dispute over four Kurile Islands (known in Japan as the Northern Territories Issue). The postwar history of the bilateral relations in English has been preoccupied, in my view, with this issue. In this The “Siberian Internment” and the Transnational History 91 chapter, I attempt to emphasize the role of historical memory in bilateral relations and argue that geopolitics alone cannot account for the decades of mistrust between the two nations. Negative emotions were fuelled by the Cold War, but the memory and legacy of the Siberian Internment has been crucial in imagining the USSR and Russia in postwar Japan. On the role of memory in postwar Japanese society, see Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 64–98. 2. The phrase “distant neighbors” is from the title of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Jonathan Haslam, and Andrew Kuchins, eds., Russia and Japan: An Unresolved Dilemma Between Distant Neighbors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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  The Safety of the Kingdom

  Government Responses to Subversive Threats

  • J. Michael Martinez(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Carrel Books

    (Publisher)

  222

  Through all the fits and starts, the vacillation and second-guessing, the administration had reached a decision. Military necessity supposedly required that tens of thousands of persons of Japanese ancestry, many of whom were children, must be rounded up and herded into camps to ensure the safety and security of the US homeland. If their constitutional rights were violated as a direct consequence of this action, so be it. Security trumps liberty in times of crisis.223

  Executive Action and Its Consequences

  On February 19, 1942, the president issued Executive Order 9066 identifying “exclusion zones” and “military areas” “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Although the executive order did not specifically mention a particular nationality, it became the basis for a subsequent decision to exclude persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, essentially all of California and much of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Roosevelt eventually issued Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527 designating Japanese, German, and Italian nationals as enemy aliens.224

  Historians are divided on the reasons why the president ultimately signed the executive order. Perhaps Americans’ deep, long-simmering antipathy toward Asians was a factor. The administration might have feared an imminent attack on the mainland, and the possibility that some Japanese living in the country would provide intelligence to the assailants. Given the increasing popularity of relocating the Japanese, Roosevelt may have allowed political calculations to take precedence over constitutional rights. As is often the case when a traumatic event occurs, Americans reacted viscerally. They sought a clear explanation and a convenient scapegoat for what happened. Only distance and hindsight allow for a dispassionate assessment of what happened, and why.225

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