BACKGROUND
Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States Government in 1942 of about 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese living along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps." Relocation and internment occurred in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan's rapid military conquest of a large portion of Asia and the Pacific made its military forces seem unstoppable to some Americans. All those of Japanese decent who lived on the West Coast of the United States were interned, while in Hawaii, where the 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, an estimated 1,200 to 1,800 were interned. Of those interned, 62% were American citizens.
Japanese-Americans awaiting "relocation," Dorothea Lange - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, May 8, 1942.
Original caption: "Hayward, California. Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags are used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township. He raised snapdragons and sweet peas. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration."
AFTER PEARL HARBOR
The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 led military and political leaders to suspect that Imperial Japan was preparing a full-scale attack on the West Coast of the United States. American public opinion initially stood by the large population of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Many Americans believed that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable. However, six weeks after the attack, public opinion along the Pacific began to turn against Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, as the press and other Americans became nervous about the potential for fifth column activity. Though the administration (including the President Franklin D. Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage on behalf of the Japanese War effort, pressure mounted upon the Administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese Americans.
Civilian and military officials had concerns about the loyalty of the ethnic Japanese after the Niihau Incident which immediately followed the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a civilian Japanese national and two Hawaiian-born ethnic Japanese on the island of Ni'ihau violently freed a downed and captured Japanese naval airman, attacking their fellow Ni'ihau islanders in the process.
Evidence suggests that the internment was racially motivated rather than a military necessity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942. It allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, except for those in internment camps.
CAMPS AND CONDITIONS
While this event is most commonly called the internment of Japanese Americans, the government operated several different types of camps holding Japanese Americans. The best known facilities were the Assembly Centers run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA), and the Relocation Centers run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which are unofficially referred to as "internment camps." The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called Internment Camps, which were used to detain those suspected of actual crimes or "enemy sympathies." German American internment and Italian American internment camps also existed, sometimes sharing facilities with the Japanese Americans. The WCCA and WRA facilities were the largest and the most public. Scholars have urged dropping such euphemisms and refer to them as concentration camps and the people as incarcerated.
According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, internees were housed in "tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind." The spartan facilities of the camps met international laws, but still left much to be desired. Many camps were built based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. Many were surrounded by barbed-wire with unpartitioned 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 assigned destinations, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for the desert winters in some camps, for example, which often reached temperatures below zero Fahrenheit. Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers.
An Issei doctor was appointed to manage each facility, and additional healthcare staff worked under his supervision, although the USPHS recommendation of one physician for every 1,000 inmates and one nurse to 200 inmates was not met. Overcrowded and unsanitary conditions forced assembly center infirmaries to prioritize inoculations over general care, obstetrics and surgeries; at Manzanar, for example, hospital staff performed over 40,000 immunizations against typhoid and smallpox. Food poisoning was common and also demanded significant attention. Those who were interned in Topaz, Minidoka, and Jerome experienced outbreaks of dysentery.
Educational facilities were set up for nearly 30,000 incarcerated children. Camp schoolhouses were crowded and had insufficient materials, books, notebooks, and desks for students. These ‘schoolhouses’ were essentially prison blocks that contained few windows. In the Southwest, when temperatures rose and the schoolhouse filled, the rooms would be sweltering and unbearable. Class sizes were immense. At the height of it attendance, the Rohwer Camp of Arkansas reached 2,339, with only 45 certified teachers. The student to teacher ratio in the camps was 48:1 in elementary schools and 35:1 for secondary schools, compared to the national average of 28:1.
POST-INCARCERATION LOSSES AND PREJUDICE
In the 1944 case Korematsu vs. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders, while noting that the provisions that singled out people of Japanese ancestry were a separate issue outside the scope of the proceedings. The Ex parte Endo case of the same date unanimously declared that loyal citizens of the United States, regardless of cultural descent, could not be detained without cause. In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of U.S. citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not — thus paving the way for their release.
Many internees lost irreplaceable personal property due to restrictions that prohibited them from taking more than they could carry into the camps. These losses were compounded by theft and destruction of items placed in governmental storage. Leading up to their incarceration, Nikkei were prohibited from leaving the Military Zones or traveling more than 5 miles (8.0 km) from home, forcing those who had to travel for work, like truck farmers and residents of rural towns, to quit their jobs. Many others were simply fired because of their heritage.
Japanese Americans also encountered hostility and even violence when they returned to the West Coast. Concentrated largely in rural areas of Central California, there were dozens of reports of gun shots, fires, and explosions aimed at Japanese American homes, businesses and places of worship, in addition to non-violent crimes like vandalism and the defacing of Japanese graves. In one of the only cases to go to trial, four men were accused of attacking the Doi family of Placer County, California, setting off an explosion and starting a fire on the family's farm in January 1945. Despite a confession from one of the men that implicated the others, the jury accepted their defense attorney's framing of the attack as a justifiable attempt to keep California "a white man's country" and acquitted all four defendants.
To compensate former internees for their property losses, the U.S. Congress, on July 2, 1948, passed the American Japanese Claims Act, allowing Japanese Americans to apply for compensation for property losses. By the time the Act was passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the 1939–42 tax records of the internees, making it extremely difficult for claimants to establish that their claims were valid. Japanese-American families filed 26,568 claims totaling $148 million in requests; only about $37 million was approved and disbursed.
JAPANESE-AMERICAN VIEWS
Beginning in the 1960s, a younger generation of Japanese Americans, inspired 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 incarcerating their parents and grandparents during the war. They focused not on documented property losses but on the broader injustice and mental suffering caused by the internment. The movement's first success was in 1976, when President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the internment was "wrong," and a "national mistake" which "shall never again be repeated."
In 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to study the matter. On February 24, 1983, the commission issued a report entitled Personal Justice Denied, condemning the internment as unjust and motivated by racism and xenophobic ideas rather than factual military necessity. The Commission recommended that $20,000 in reparations be paid to those Japanese Americans who had suffered internment.
In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. Government. The legislation said that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.