Japanese American Concentration Camps

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Japanese American Camps

After the Pearl Harbor, a lot of Americans started to fear and suspect Japanese Americans.

They blamed them for the attack and accused them of espionage. On the west Coast, there was

open hostility and vandalism of property belonging to Japanese Americans. This prejudice reached

its peak with the Order 9066 where President Roosevelt ordered that Japanese Americans be

evacuated and relocated to internment camps. This was two months after the attack. This caused

loss of property and homes to many Japanese Americans. Families even broke up as men were

abducted and labelled “potential enemy aliens.” Before the government made an apology in 1988,

it had taken many petitions and almost four decades.

The Executive Order

The 1940 census showed that Japanese Americans were about 127,000. President

Roosevelt, in 1941, hired John Franklin Carter to carry out an investigation on Japanese

Americans. Carter sent Munson to West Coast, and Warren to the Southeast and the borderlands

of Mexico. The report from Munson, in November 1941, showed that there was no unanimous

response from Japanese Americans in supporting Japanese efforts to war. He emphasized that

Japanese Americans were loyal to the U.S. Carter forwarded this report to President Roosevelt

with a memorandum one page long that included a quotation from the report that said that “..for

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the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining

quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs” (Song, Min, and Jean 91).

Following the Pearl Harbor attack and the rise of prejudice towards the Japanese

Americans, the president and his cabinet discussed a policy of removal regarding the population

of Japanese Americans. The then secretary of war, henry Stimson, and Secretary if Navy, Frank

Knox, favored the removal policy, while Attorney General Francis Biddle did not support it as he

felt it violated the constitutional rights of individuals. The president accepted the policy of removal

and on February 19, 1942, he issues Executive Order 9066, which saw relocation and internment

camps created for Japanese Americans.

Deportations started on the 25

of February when the United States Navy ordered that

Japanese Americans vacate terminal Island within a time frame of 48 hours. In March the same

year, the Wartime Civil Control Administration asked all Japanese Americans in Oregon, the D.C.

area, Arizona, and California to show up in 16 concentration centers. They were to brig only what

could be carried in their hands, usually a suitcase. The largest detention center hosted 18,000

people, it was in the Santa Anita Race Track. Here, the people moved into stalls for horses. The

Japanese Americans in the assembly centers were under the War Relocation Authority. This had

been established solely for this purpose. The WRA completed the construction of ten relocation

camps in May 1942 in Arizona, Colorado, Arkansas, Wyoming, Utah, California, and Idaho. It

started transferring Japanese Americans to these camps from the assembly centers.

Although the camps were called relocation camps by the United States government, the

camps that had been newly built had barbed wire, military barracks, search lights and guard towers.

Everett Rogers and Nancy Barlit write that "this terminology implied that the Japanese Americans

were simply being relocated from the West Coast to other parts of the country. This euphemistic

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label, however, would not call for barbed wire, armed guards, and searchlights. The guns

pointed inside" (Rogers and Bartlit 155).

Barlit, in a 2013 interview with the Atomic heritage Foundation states the condition of the

camps, they “were situated in particularly isolated godforsaken places, characterized by unpleasant

weather, physical isolation and difficult living conditions” (Rogers and Bartlit 155). The cause of

the isolation was a security emphasis, where the government wanted to ensure that Japanese

Americans were kept as far away as possible from manufacturing plants and military installations.

There were internment camps that were different from the relocation camps. These were run by

the Immigration and Naturalization service and not the WRA. The Japanese Americans in the

internment camps were. As Bartlit says, most of the people in the internment camps were“teachers,

newspaper editors, or leaders of a Japanese religious or cultural organization” (Rogers and Bartlit

157). They awaited court hearings in any of the four internment camps. They would be sent to

army POW camps if they were thought to be dangerous, and reunited with their families in the

WRA relocation camps if they were not seen as dangerous. Those in the relocation camps had less

legal rights than the Japanese Americans in the internment camps. Those in the WRA relocation

were subject to the President’s Order 9066. In contrast, in the internment camps, the rights of the

Japanese Americans were guaranteed

There were strict curfews and ruled in the relocation camps. The relocation camps offered

employment opportunities and education programs. The Japanese Americans organized some

classes for the Japanese language as well as other programs that sought to maintain their cultural

identity. In Tule Lake Camp, the people strongly identified with their Japanese culture, which

caused them to organize a pro-Japanese group that was involved in a riot, resulting in the sending

of its leaders to internment camps in Santa Fe. This, ironically, contradicted the motivation of

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ensuring Japanese Americans were as far as possible from military instalments. Bartlit wonders

“why they were brought as “dangerous enemy aliens” away from the coast as potential spies and

brought to the CCC Camp, to the gateway to the biggest secret of all of World War II is kind of a

puzzle, it was in the [Santa Fe] city limits. It was not very far from where Dorothy McKibbin had

her office at 109 E. Palace Avenue” (Rogers and Bartlit 159). The WRA hired photographers to

come up with documentaries of the lives of the Japanese Americans at the concentration camps.

After the war ended, the Japanese Americans were let out of the camps. Many went back

home only to find that their goods had been stolen and a lot of their property sold. Over 40,000

Japanese Americans moved from West Coast and went to spend their lives in other places in

America. In the 1970s, political figures of Asian American origin like Senator Daniel Inouye and

Matsunaga of Hawaii and Mineta of San Jose and Matsui of Sacramento, both congressmen, led a

process in which they sought restitution for the relocation and internment camps. Inouye has served

in a 442

all-Japanese American Combat Team. He has then been awarded the Medal of Honor,

which is the highest United States military honor. Matsui and Mineta has grown up in the Heart

Mountain and Tule Lake relocation camps respectively.

In 1981, there was a federal commission appointed to carry out an investigation on Order

9066 and the involvement of the military in the relocation and detention of Americans. It was also

charged with recommending remedies that would be appropriate. The results were published in a

1982 report with that stated “broad historical causes which shaped decisions were race, prejudice,

war hysteria, and failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans

contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at

Japan” (Rogers and Bartlit 163). The report also states that “not a single documented act of

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espionage, sabotage, or 5th column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese

ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast” (Bookman 88).

The Civil Liberties Act was passed by the United States Congress in 1988 and signed by

President Ronald Reagan. All the surviving Japanese Americans, who were 82,219, that had been

interned during that time were sent an official apology letter coming from the president. They were

then awarded each $20,000. The first payments were made to the oldest Japanese Americans in

October 1990. The last payments were made in 1999. On the 29

of June, 2001, a memorial was

constructed in Washington DC. This was to remember the Patriotism of Japanese Americans in

World War II. This came about due to the efforts that the two Congressmen, Matsui and Mineta,

put into ensuring that the efforts of the Japanese Americans were recognized. The memorial has

two cranes, one of the cranes has its wings tied in a barbed wire.

Out of all the ten camps for relocation, Minidoka, Manzanar, and Lake Ture have been

made into National Historic Sites. Rohwer, Granada, Topaz, and Heart Mountain have been made

into National Historic Landmarks. Poston and Gila River have been returned to the control of

American Native communities. Jerome has been turned into private farmlands. Monuments,

museums, and memorials have been built at the sites of many of the camps and there are continued

efforts for education and preservation. A great number of the Japanese Americans who were

interned or kept in the relocation camps wrote stories explaining their experiences in the relocation

camps after the war by publishing books, documentaries, and songs. George Takei, a Japanese

American actor, starred in a Broadway musical that showed the experiences of the Japanese

Americans in the concentration camps. George Takei had been interned at Tule Lake at the time

of the war.

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Cases

Japanese Americans both refused to relocate to internet camps and fought federal orders in

court during the World War II. These American claimed the government to deprive them the right

to walk outside during the night. They urged further that living in their own homes violated their

civil liberties. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, by Japan, the government of the

United States detente over 110,000 Japanese Americans through force to camps. However, Minoru

Yasui, Fred Korematsu, and Gordon Hirabayashi disobeyed orders. They were ultimately arrested

and jailed, cases taken to Supreme Court and finally lost. The 1954’s policy of Supreme Court,

“separate but equal” violated the Constitution. However, striking down Jim Crow in the South

proved restriction in cases related to the confinement of Japanese Americans. The Japanese

Americans presenting cases on high court upon deprived civil rights were forced to wait for

vindication until 1980.

Minoru Yasui v. the United States

Minoru Yasui was the first Japanese American lawyer admitted to the Oregon Bar. He

worked with the Consulate General of Japan in Chicago but resigned after the attack on Pearl

Harbor and returned to Oregon. After his arrival on Oregon, an Executive Order 9066 was signed

by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, authorizing the military to prevent Japanese

Americans from entering definite regions and relocating them to internment camps but he resisted

the curfew intentionally. In the book And Justice for All, he explained that “It was my feeling and

belief, then and now, that no military authority has the right to subject any United States citizen to

any requirement that does not equally apply to all other U.S. citizens” (Tateishi, p. 70)

He was detained moving on the streets past restriction. The presiding judge in the District

Court of United States in Portland stated that the order violated the law. The judge further

sentenced Yasui for a year in jail for forsaking his citizenship of United States by working for

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Japanese Consulate and learning the Japanese language. In 1943, the Supreme Court of United

States ruled that he is a U.S. citizen and the curfew he had violated is valid.

Hirabayashi v. the United States

Hirabayashi was a student at the University of Washington. He obeyed the President’s

Executive Order by cutting his study session short. He considered the curfew to violate his Fifth

Amendment rights and immediately defied it. “I was not one of those angry young rebels, looking

for a cause. I was one of those trying to make some sense of this, trying to come up with an

explanation.” He said in a Press Interview Associated with 2000. He was arrested and convicted

in 1842 ending up in a custody for 2 years. The Supreme Court urged that the command was not

biased as it was the necessity of the military and had to wait until 1980’s to see

justice (Hirabayashi et al, p. 98). He spends the years after World War II pursuing a master's

degree and a doctorate in sociology from Washington University.

Korematsu v. the United States

Fred Korematsu defied the order of reporting to an imprisonment camp by only not willing

to leave his girlfriend. He was arrested in 1942 and fought his case to Supreme Court. The court

opposed, arguing that the internment was a military necessity but not internment of Japanese

Americans (Alonso & Karen, p. 171). Decades later, these three Japanese Americans were luck

Peter Irons gave evidence that officials in the government withheld some documents from the

Supreme Court stating that there was no threat posed by the Japanese Americans in the United

States (Irons & Peter, p. 120) . The official government apologized for internment and

compensated $20,000 to the internment survivors after the Congress passed the Civil liberties Act

in 1988 (Robinson & Greg, p. 87). Yasui, Korematsu, and Hirabayashi died in 1986, 2005 and

2012 respectively.

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Even today, there are controversies regarding Japanese Americans internment following

the Executive Order 9066. Bartlet claim that“$20,000 did not even cover what they had lost in

terms of careers. Their property was often lost, stolen, not protected, twenty thousand—and it was

only given to the people who were still alive who had been in the camp, not their heirs” (Rogers

and Bartlit 163). Some of the veterans of the Manhattan project criticized the internment and

relocation camps. Jacob Beser says, “We have a blot on our history in this country as a democracy

that we will never outlive.” Jacob Beser was on both the planes that stuck the bombs on Hiroshima

and Nagasaki. “We took a hundred and some odd thousand American-born Japanese citizens,

American citizens of Japanese ancestry. We seized their property, we seized their land and we

threw them in concentration camps because some damn fool in California said, “Gee, they might

stab us in the back” (Rogers and Bartlit 169).

Works Cited

"Jacob Beser's Lecture". Manhattanprojectvoices.Org, 2018,

https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/jacob-besers-lecture. Accessed 9

May 2018.

Alonso, Karen. Korematsu V. United States: Japanese-American Internment Camps. Springfield,

NJ: Enslow, 1998. Print.

Bookman, John T. The Mythology of American Politics: A Critical Response to Fundamental

Questions. Washington, D.C: Potomac Books, Inc, 2008. Print.

Hirabayashi, Gordon K, James A. Hirabayashi, and Lane R. Hirabayashi. A Principled Stand: The

Story of Hirabayashi V. United States. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.

Print.

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Irons, Peter H. Justice at War: [the Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases]. Berkeley,

Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California Press, 1993. Print.

Robinson, Greg. A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2009. Print.

Rogers, Everett M, and Nancy R. Bartlit. Silent Voices of World War Ii: When Sons of the Land

of Enchantment Met Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2005.

Print.

Song, Min, and Jean Y.-S. Wu. Asian American Studies: A Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

Univ. Press, 2000. Print.

Tateishi, John. And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps.

1999. Internet resource.

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