Japanese American internment
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The Japanese American internment refers to the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62 percent 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.
During the war, an appeal reached the Supreme Court contesting the government's authority to intern people based on their ancestry; the court sided with the government. The U.S. government officially apologized for the internment in the 1980s, saying it was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership", and paid reparations to survivors. Some reparations were also paid in 1948, and Congress passed eight compensation-related laws between 1951 and 1978.
President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with United States Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used forthwith to declare most of the Pacific coast as "Military Area Number One", and all people with Japanese, German, or Italian ancestry were then declared "excluded".
Similar internments occurred across Canada as well (See: Japanese Canadians).
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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Most historical references describe the camps as internment camps, although others favor the name relocation camps.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.
In its 1983 report "Personal Justice Denied," the bipartisan, Congressionally appointed Commission on Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians explained its decision to use the term "relocation camp" thus: "The Commission has largely left the words and phrases as they were, however, in an effort to mirror accurately the history of the time and to avoid the confusion and controversy a new terminology might provoke. We leave it to the reader to decide for himself how far the language of the period confirms an observation of George Orwell: 'In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible ... Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.'"
Most historians now use the 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 of Japanese descent who were specifically suspected of espionage, treason, or other such disloyalty, and their families, as well as individuals who were community leaders, such as teachers or priests. 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.
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") was passed. Among many other "loyalty" regulations, Section 31 required the registration and fingerprinting of all aliens above the age of 14, and Section 35 required aliens to report any change of address within 5 days. Within 4 months, 4,741,971 aliens registered at post offices around the country.
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 fairly minor incident of a Japanese submarine shelling 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 some 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.
Authorities also feared 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 also doubted the loyalty of ethnic Japanese because many, including some born in America, had been educated in Japan, where school curricula emphasized reverence for the Emperor.
Upon the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Presidential Proclamations 2525 (German), 2526 (Italian) and 2527 (Japanese) were signed. Many homes were raided using information from the CDI, 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 December 11).
Presidential Proclamation 2537 was issued on January 14, 1942, requiring aliens to report any change of address, employment, or name to the FBI. Enemy aliens were not allowed to enter restricted areas. Violators of these 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 authorized military commanders to designate "military areas" at their discretion, "from which any or all persons may be excluded". These "exclusion zones", unlike the "alien enemy" roundups, were applicable to anyone that an authorized military commander might choose, whether citizen or non-citizen. 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, informing all those of Japanese ancestry that they would, at some later point, be subject to exclusion orders from "Military Area No. 1" (essentially, the entire Pacific coast), and requiring anyone who had "enemy" ancestry to file a Change of Residence Notice if they planned to move.
On March 11, 1942, Executive Order 9095 created the Office of the Alien Property Custodian, and gave it discretionary, plenary authority over all alien property interests. Many assets were frozen, creating immediate financial difficulty for the affected aliens.
On March 24, 1942, General DeWitt began to issue exclusion orders for specific areas within "Military Area No. 1."
On March 27, 1942, General DeWitt's Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving "Military Area No. 1" for "any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order of this headquarters shall so permit or direct."
On May 3, 1942, General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 346, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent "Relocation Centers."
Over 112,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program. Of those, approximately two-thirds were U.S. citizens by birth. The remaining one-third were non-citizens who were legally subject to internment under the Alien Enemies Act. It is worth noting that the laws of the time prohibited naturalization of immigrants from Asian countries, so legal residents not born in the U.S. could not obtain citizenship.
Internees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers," where most awaited shipment to more permanent relocation centers being constructed by the newly-formed War Relocation Authority (WRA). 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, western Washington, and southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history.
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.
Under the National Student Council Relocation Program (supported primarily by the American Friends Service Committee), students of college age were permitted to leave the camps in order to attend institutions which were willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. Although the program initially granted leave permits to only a very small number of students, this eventually grew to 2,263 students by December 31, 1943.
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 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). In 2001, the site of the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho was designated the Minidoka Internment National Monument.
Internment results
Not surprisingly, some Japanese Americans did become less loyal to the United States after the government removed them and their families from their homes and held 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 "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 sizable number did volunteer to serve from the camps, including in the famed and highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team which operated in Europe (not Japan, as some believe).
Conditions in the camps
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." Most camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks and were thus poorly equipped for cramped family living.
For example, the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-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.
The phrase "shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") was commonly used to summarize the interned families' resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions.
Other camps
As early as 1939, when war broke out in Europe and while armed conflict began to rage in East Asia, the FBI and branches of the Department of Justice and the armed forces began to collect information and surveillance on influential members of the Japanese community in the United States. Agents in the Department of Justice’s Special Defense Unit classified the subjects into three groups: A, B, and C, with A being “most dangerous,” and C being “possibly dangerous."
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, Roosevelt authorized his attorney general to put into motion a plan that arrested all of the Japanese on the potential enemy alien lists. Armed with a blanket arrest warrant, the FBI seized all of the men on the eve of December 8th, 1941. These men were held in municipal jails and prisons until they were moved to Department of Justice detention camps, separate from those of the Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps operated under far more stringent conditions and were subject to heightened military guard.
Crystal City, Texas was one such camp where together with Japanese, Germans, Japanese-Latin Americans, 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 enemy aliens.
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.
Hawaii
Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not subject to the strict internment policy, despite the fact that they were closer to essential military facilities than most of the Japanese Americans in the western states. 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. There are some accounts of Japanese Americans from Hawaii being sent to internment camps on the mainland. While the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii was nowhere near as severe as the treatment of the prisoners on the mainland were, there were some internments. The conditions however were much more favorable, as the interned were given more time and warning in order to be sure to give or sell their property properly. Most of those interned were allowed to give their property to family members for safekeeping, unlike most of the other Japanese Americans. Not all Japanese Americans in Hawaii were spared, but they were not treated nearly as severely as those on the West Coast.
Compensation and reparations
Most internees suffered significant property losses. Upon evacuation, the Japanese American internees were told that they could bring only as many articles of clothing, toiletries, and other personal effects as they could carry. The US government promised to find a place to store larger items (such as iceboxes and furniture) if boxed and labeled, but did not make any promises about the security of those items.
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, 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. California's Alien Land Laws of the 1910s, which prohibited most 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 US Congress, on July 2, 1948, passed the "American Japanese Claims Act", stating that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred". Approximately $147 million in claims were submitted; eventually, 26,568 settlements to family groups totaling 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 the matter. Some 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 had been pushed through Congress by Representative Norman Mineta and Senator Alan K. Simpson — the two had met while Mineta was interned at a camp in Wyoming — which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $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 below, 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, the Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, providing 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.
Criticisms, then and now
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.
Critics of the exclusion argue that the military justification was unfounded, citing the absence of any subsequent convictions of Japanese Americans for espionage, as well as the fact that the Army resorted to falsifying evidence in order to bolster its case before the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States.
Lieutenant 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."
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans. Refuting General DeWitt's reports of disloyalty on the part of Japanese Americans, Hoover sent a memo to Attorney General Francis Biddle in which he wrote about Japanese-American disloyalty, "Every complaint in this regard has been investigated, but in no case has any information been obtained which would substantiate the allegation."
Support for the internment, then and now
Ever since this subject became a topic of historical inquiry, there have been individuals and organizations who have argued that the suspicion of ethnic Japanese was indeed justified. Others rebut some Japanese American accounts of hardship during the evacuation and in the camps. Members of the American Legion and some veterans who fought in the Pacific theater have been the most vocal proponents of these viewpoints. Another defender of the internment is Filipino-American opinion columnist 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. Critics have characterized her book as being one-sided, poorly researched, and a logically unsound justification for present-day racial profiling. [1]
Present-day proponents of the exclusion and internment program point to the writings of David Lowman, who asserted in the 1980s and 1990s 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, as the Japanese consulate repeatedly stated in the encrypted messages that it was attempting to recruit Japanese-American spies. Lowman's claims have been controversial; others point out that much of the information that Japanese officials obtained may have come from public sources such as newspapers, and that there is no data indicating the success of these recruitment efforts.
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.
Some present-day supporters of the internment have argued that some Japanese-Americans were indeed disloyal, as seen by the approximately 20,000 Japanese Americans in Japan at the start of the war who joined the Japanese war effort, hundreds joining the Japanese Army. Critics of this viewpoint note that it seems unlikely that they had any choice other than to be conscripted into the Japanese army, given that the United States had already classified all people of Japanese ancestry as "enemy aliens."
Some present-day supporters of the internment also cite the disloyalty of Tomoya Kawakita, an American citizen who worked as an interpreter and a POW guard for the Japanese army, and who actively participated in the torture (and at least one death) of American soldiers, including survivors of the Bataan Death March. Others have responded that attributing the crimes of one man to 120,000 unrelated men, women, and children is at best unfair and probably racist.
Among academics, the 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.
Legal legacy
Several 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. The Army had destroyed documents in an effort to hide the fact that alterations had been made to the report. 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 — specifically, its expansive interpretation 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.
Precedent
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, polls have found a third or more of the US public willing to intern Arab Americans in the way in which Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. The United States has instituted Special Registration, requiring annual photographing, fingerprinting, and interviewing of all male aliens (except permanent residents of the US) from any of a group of twenty-five countries, most of them predominantly Muslim, as well as monitoring of their movements within the US and restrictions of their right to travel. Many people are concerned that Arabs or Muslims in the US could be subjected to internment in the future, given the significant public support for such a practice and the enactment of legislation similar to the Alien Registration Act of 1940.
es:Campos de concentración en EEUU he:כליאת היפנים בארצות הברית ja:日系人の強制収容
