INTERNMENT OF JAPANESE AMERICANS DURING WORLD WAR TWO
However some historians may argue that the internment of Japanese Americans by the United States government and their subsequent treatment in camps was a relatively humane response to a security dilemma, when compared with the treatment of Allied prisoners of war by the Japanese armed forces during World War Two. The legacy of the internment is mixed. A small minority of Japanese Americans were repatriated both voluntarily and forcibly to Japan at the time of the end of World War Two. Most Japanese Americans however stayed in the United States, often settling in different parts of the country and continued to raise awareness of the wrongs done to them by the United States government, becoming involved in civic movements against arbitrary detention laws, and working to preserve the internment camps such as Manzanar.
Significance of the Inquiry
As the United States has been fighting a war against terror over the last decad against an enemy who belong to a particular religious and ethnic group, issues of the civil rights of Americans who share that religious faith and ethnic origin have become a matter of controversy. The detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, increased checks at airports based on racial and religious profiling, and general suspicion in society about the loyalty of Muslim Americans in the war against terror, provide a similar context to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two. The specific questions for inquiry can be framed in the search for historical lessons which can be applied to Americas present day scenario. Why were Japanese Americans incarcerated Why were German Americans and Italian Americans not detained to the same degree as Japanese Americans Did the detention of Japanese Americans ruin the relationship between this community and the mainstream of American society for the ensuing generations Furthermore what was the final impact of having internment camps on the United States. This paper will examine the deep racist attitudes of the American decision makers which was informed by fear, ignorance and pseudo science. The main reason why Japanese Americans were detained whilst German Americans and Italian Americans were not is largely answered by the prevalence of racism in society combined with the economic and legal status of the Japanese American community at that time. Ironically the detention of Japanese Americans did not completely ruin the relationship between the community and the United States post World War Two. The Japanese American community became involved in civil rights movements to overturn laws which allowed for arbitrary detention, raising awareness of their history in the mainstream media and political space. After a period of twenty years a growing acceptance within the United States political establishment of the wrongs committed during World War Two led to an apology and a minimal amount of financial compensation to the victims. In fact the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two and the subsequent reform of civil rights laws to prevent a recurrence has strengthened the American civil rights regime.
Research Findings
Almost 120 000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were Americans were forcibly relocated from their homes mainly on the West Coast and moved to camps after the attack on Pearl Harbour. They were sent to 10 internment camps spread across the United States. This was despite the fact that Japanese Americans were fighting in the United States Armed Forces in Europe and providing manpower in military industries in the United States. The War Relocation Authority created ten relocation centres in Arkansas, Colarado, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and California in 1942. 2000 Japanese Americans who were deemed especially dangerous were rounded up after Pearl Harbour and placed in internment camps in North Dakota, Texas, Montana and New Mexico.
In 1988 the United States government apologized to the survivors of the internment authorizing a payment of 20 000 to each individual. The internment of Japanese Americans demonstrates how fragile adherence to the United States Constitution can be during a time of conflict.
President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19 1942 signed executive order 9066 which authorized the forcible removal of all ethnic Japanese from the Pacific Coast of the United States. The loyalty of Japanese Americans was called into question by the United States government and mainstream society. It was thought that the risk posed by even a small number of potentially disloyal Japanese Americans outweighed the suffering which would be imposed on the majority of innocent loyal internees. Internment proceeded despite no proven instance of espionage or anti United States activity by Japanese Americans.
Many Japanese Americans were involved in the agricultural sector and lost all they had due to the fact that Japanese aliens were prohibited from owning land in 1941, and those individuals born in Japan were denied US citizenship, often forcing them to sell land and possessions to white Americans at below the market value. Once the fear of a Japanese invasion had subsided by January 1945 Japanese Americans were released from internment and given 25 and a one way ticket to anywhere in the United States. Internees who sought to recover their losses through the Evacuees Claims Act 1948 were paid at an average of 10 cents on the dollar. The sufferings and civil rights violations of the Japanese Americans were relatively minor when compared to the history of African Americans and Native Americans, and they were not subject to physical torture like Allied Prisoners were in Japanese Prisoner Of War camps.
German Americans were interned during World War One by the United States government. However by the time of World War Two there was a school of thought which was prevalent within the United States establishment that Asians were incapable of being assimilated into the mainstream of American cultural life. Four internment cases came before the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the convictions of Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui for violating a curfew only applicable to people of Japanese ancestry. The Court upheld in a 6-3 vote the conviction of Fred Koramatsu for remaining in a prohibited coastal area. The Court also ruled that Congress had not authorized the detention of loyal citizens, but did not rule on constitutional challenges to internment.
President Ford in 1975 issued a proclamation that the internment was wrong. The Congress in 1980 formed the Commission on War Time Relocation and internment of Civilians. On the basis of evidence presented and the report Justice Denied in 1983 the convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu were vacated in the US District Court.
It was the attack on Pearl Harbour and the Japanese victories in 1942 which created an environment in which Japanese Americans were singled out for internment rather than Gerrnan Americans or Italian Americans who were interned although in much smaller numbers. Due to the initial humiliation of the United States Armed Forces at the hands of the Japanese on the battlefield and visible racial distinctions from the Anglo American majority the Japanese Americans became an easily identifiable minority. Germans Americans and Italian Americans were in much greater numbers and had been settled and assimilated over a longer period of time and had political representation to defend their interests. Internment could happen to anyone with as little as one sixteenth Japanese ancestry.
General DeWitt who finalized the internment orders defined the military necessity of internment in purely racial terms The Japanese Race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted. The rise of Japan as a military and industrial power in the late 19th century and immigration of Japanese to the United States fostered fears of yellow peril and Japanese invasion of the United States. Immigration from Japan to the United States slowed after 1908 due to the Gentlemans Agreement brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt. However Japanese migrants were allowed to bring family members which lead to the proliferation of arranged marriages in which the bride would be brought over from Japan for the Japanese male already in America. This stoked greater fear among white Americans of rising Japanese birth rates and the Immigration Act 1924 stopped all further immigration from Japan. Asian immigrants remained aliens ineligible for citizenship according the naturalization regime after the civil war. A policy re affirmed by the Supreme Court in Ozawa v United States in 1922. Japans military expansionism itself was based on ideas of racial unity and purity of the divine Yamoto race fighting a war against the white colonialist of Asia.
Investigations by Secretary of the Navy Henry Knox credited fifth column activity by resident Japanese with subverting military readiness of the United States Armed forces in the event of Japanese attacks. Racial assaults on Japanese Americans grew as fear of invasion increased. Attorney General Earl Warren testified at the Congressional Tolan Committee hearings in San Francisco that it was precisely because there was no proof of sabotage or espionage by Japanese Americans it was likely that such activities would occur in the future in surprise attacks as at Pearl Harbour. Journalist Walter Lippman wrote a series of influential articles proclaiming the dangers of imminent attacks by the Japanese Imperial Army on the American Pacific coast line. Ironically the 150 000 strong Japanese American population of Hawaii, the scene of the Pearl Harbour attack, was not subject to the same level of internment as Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast of mainland America.
By 1941 President Roosevelt in the face of deteriorating relations with Japan and the prospect of war between the two nations commissioned a secret intelligence report on the loyalty of ethnic Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the West Coast. The report was written during November 1941 by Curtis Munson of the United States State Department. The report concluded that the vast majority of Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States, with only the Kibei, a small group born in America but educated in Japan whose allegiance could be questionable. However the report did emphasise the ease with which key infrastructure could be sabotaged. Roosevelt did rely upon the opinions of Smithsonean curator Dr Ales Hrdalicka who advised the president that Japanese brutality and cruelty was a racial trait which could be linked to skull size. The arrest in 1941 in Los Angeles of Itaru Tachibana unearthed names of purported alien and citizen agents.
Internees were allowed seasonal leave and by 1942 a more liberal scheme of permanent leave was allowed for selected trustworthy internees to resume employment or education outside of the restricted Pacific coast zone. Nisei (American born Japanese) were recruited into the armed forces. Together with the Jap Crow 100th infantry regiment battalion of Hawaii, the 442nd regimental combat team fought in Italy. Between military service and discharge from the camps about 50 000 internees had left the camps before their final disbandment.
Loyalty screening was based around the question of whether the internees would be willing to serve in the United States armed forces and abandon all loyalty to Japan. However for the Issei (born in Japan) who were not allowed to become naturalized United States citizens, they would be rendered stateless or without nationality if they answered positively. In addition the Nissei, US citizens, perhaps out of anger at being incarcerated and perhaps out of family loyalty to the older generation who were not US citizens also answered no. However this often led to community and family divisions. In fact by 1946 some 8000 Issei and their children had been repatriated to Japan. Riots occurred in the detention centres. Trigger happy guards shot a man who was simply walking near the perimeter of a compound. Conflict broke out between pro US and pro Japan factions.
There was a distinction made between the enemy who were Nazis and the German people and the German nation at large. However no such distinction was made in the case of the Japanese Americans who were defined exclusively by their race, rather than their political affiliation. Internment of Germans and Italians took place thus on an individual basis. An individual German or Italian was deemed to be loyal or disloyal, rather than being presumed to be disloyal purely on the basis of their race.
Release of internees was based upon demand for agricultural labour. Students were scattered around the country to prevent any build up of population density of Japanese Americans in any particular student body. The dispersal program altered the demographic base of the Japanese American community away from ethnic clusters on the west coast to a more even distribution throughout the country including the east coast.
Japanese American internment in Hawaii was negligible. The Japanese in Hawaii had become locals, occupying the full spectrum of positions in the labor market in professions such as law and medicine, government officials, as well as blue collar transport and agricultural labour. The economy of Hawaii would have been debilitated without such Japanese labor. Whilst on Hawaii the racial distinction between Japanese and Germans and Italians was less pronounced, military rule required all these groups to alienate any potential weapons.
Efforts toward the end of the war to enlist some internees in the United States Armed forces had mixed results. By the end of the registration process only 1200 Nisei volunteers had been enlisted, well below the 3000 expected. By the end of the war 26000 Japanese Americans from both the mainland and Hawaii had served in the United States Armed Forces.
At the time of the United States declaration of war there were fewer than 300 000 Japanese Americans around half of whom lived in Hawaii. Around 23 hundred German nationals were interned as were a few hundred Italians. War time internment had been prevalent in the United States since the War of 1812. During the early days of World War Two there was a dawn to dusk curfew for Germans, Italian and Japanese. However the increasing panic and hysteria created by Japanese victories in the Pacific and Asia created a groundswell of public opinion in the media for the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
In order to implement the Roosevelts Presidential Order a new federal crime was invented, that of failing to leave a restricted area when directed to do so by a military order. The statute was passed by the Senate by unanimous consent. After which the military could proceed with mass relocations. The Army with the help of the Census Bureau divided the West Coast area to be evacuated ordering Separate Civilian Exclusion Orders for each zone or area. Japanese Americans were ordered to bring basic personal belongings with them, only that which could be carried. They did not know where they were being sent, or for how long they would be detained. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbour American born Japanese were illegally reclassified as aliens for the purposes of the military draft. However as the war in the Pacific intensified during 1942 the US military recognized the urgent need for translators and some 5000 Japanese Americans served in a military intelligence capacity. 293 young men internees were indicted for draft resistance while in camp, and 261 were convicted and served time in Federal penitentiaries.
The Japanese American community largely accepted the policies of the United States government with a sense of passive resignation. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) advocated collaboration with US government policies. However there were some protests which occurred mainly through the legal system with young Nisei adults challenging the validity of the internments in the courts. The first case was decided a year after the internment process began. The case of Harabashi, a young college student who refused to obey curfew orders, was dismissed by the Supreme Court as lacking merit. Korematsu in 1944 challenged the United States decision to expatriate him purely on the basis of his ancestry. However despite some dissent the Supreme Court ruled against him, clearing the way for his deportation. However in the third case Endo challenged through a writ of Habeaus Corpous her detention in a camp in the Utah desert. In this case the Supreme Court affirmed the principle that the US government could not detain its own citizens without specific charges, and affirmed that Endo could not be stopped from returning to her home in California. By the time of the Endo case internees were being discharged through education or labor programs. However some of the older generation of Japanese Americans were so traumatized by the experience and economically insecure that they did not want to leave the camps, even when formally released.
Some internees did opt for a type of resistance, of non cooperation with government orders, and 5766 Nisei applied for expatriation to Japan and renunciation of their American citizenship. This occurred mainly in the Tule Lake Camp for disloyals where there was a state of chaos for several months. Some internees reconsidered their decision, and the courts later held such renunciation invalid if done whilst imprisoned. However of the 4724 Japanese American who were expatriated during or after the war 1116 adult Nisei, and 1949 American citizen children accompanied their parents back to Japan.
The internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two served as a historical memory which post war particularly in the 1970s and 1980s served to bolster civil rights legislation to prevent a recurrence of injustice. President Richard Nixon on September 25 1971 signed a bill which repealed the Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security McCarran Act 1950. Passed at the height of cold war hysteria and suspicion, the McCarran Act allowed for the President through the Attorney General to detain any person suspected of engaging in espionage or sabotage in the event of war or invasion of the United States. The law was known popularly at the time as the concentration camp law. In repealing the law President Nixon specifically invoked the memory of the injustice of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. During the 1960s Sanseis (third generation Japanese Americans) together with prominent Nisais collaborated with other ethnic minority groups such as African Americans and Chinese Americans to repeal Title II. They launched a media campaign to raise awareness of the issue of internment and recount their experiences during World War Two and warn the general public that the same could happen again to other minorities. Japanese Americans testified in the Congressional hearings to repeal Title II during 1970. The repeal of Title II and mainstream recognition of the injustice done to Japanese Americans through internment was seen by some at the time as an indirect apology for wrongs committed.
Primary Research Findings
The narrative of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two can be understood through the experiences of Fred Koramatsu, at the time a young 23 year old Japanese American working as a welder at the Bay Area shipyards in San Francisco. Although Koramatsus parents were interned Koramatsu himself chose to be an objector and took means as extreme as plastic surgery to avoid detection and detention. However he did not elude authorities for long and was arrested and branded as a traitor by the media. Civil rights lawyers saw Koramatsus detention as an opportunity to test civil rights laws before the courts and with his co-operation appealed against his detention. Bail was furnished and Koramatsu released from jail, only to be incarcerated again in a detention centre. Whilst the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, Korematsus case did not turn out to be validating for the civil rights lobby as the Court upheld by 6-3 Korematsus detention. The case is generally seen as a nadir in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court.
Korematsu was alienated twice, first from mainstream American society and then by his own Japanese American community. The Japanese American community largely complied passively with the United States government detention orders and rather than hailing Korematsu as a champion of civil rights, branded him a trouble maker for the community as a whole. The general reaction of most of the Japanese American community after the war at a personal level was that of silence, of wanting to forget. Korematsu himself lived a quiet life for close to thirty years after the war, not even discussing his experiences with his own daughter. However his case re surfaced in the 1980s. Rather than accepting a pardon, he fought for his original conviction to be overturned, and became a public critic of the war time internment process. In 1988, President Clinton awarded Koramatsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his last years Korematsu became an outspoken voice against the detainment of suspected terrorist in Guantanamo Bay, demonstrating the deep historical linkages, between the two scenarios.
Analysis
This paper has sought to relate the experience of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two to the present day scenario of suspension of civil rights norms during the war on terror. Whilst the civil rights of Muslim Americans have not been infringed to the extent of Japanese Americans during World War Two, and Muslim Americans have not been targeted in the mainstream media as Japanese Americans were, the tendency to question the loyalty of non white Americans and the suspension of civil rights norms still exists. Japanese Americans largely acquiesced with their detention, and spoke very little of it after the war. Their relatively small numbers, combined with a lack of large scale migration from Japan after the war meant that the issue remained restricted to a very small ethnic minority who largely wanted to forget their past victimization and move forward. However the internment of Japanese Americans and its subsequent historical memory has entered the consciousness of mainstream America and always acts as a reminder of the fragile nature of the ideals and provisions of the United States Constitution during war, and the pressures which this places on ethnic minorities who trace their roots to lands of the enemy.
Japanese Americans were singled out during World War Two on the basis of their race combined with their weak economic position, lack of political representation, and tenuous position according to immigration laws. This can be contrasted with the relative immunity of German Americans and Italian Americans who due to their white skin, European ancestry and high degrees of cultural assimilation and political representation were never questioned about their loyalty to the United States. As such the Japanese were a visible minority much like many Muslims in the United States today, who are distinguishable by the racial characteristics and other markers such as dress and language. The pressure on these minorities will always be greater than other white immigrant communities who are better able to become invisible during times of conflict.
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