In the spring and summer of 1942, the United States, as an ostensible matter of military necessity, incarcerated virtually the entire Japanese American population of the West Coast states. All told, more than 120,000 persons, over two-thirds of them native-born citizens, were con-fined for as long as forty-seven months in what the government called assembly centers and relocation centers, but which many later termed concentration camps. While fear of possible attacks by imperial Japanese forces and of sabotage by Japanese Americans was the proximate cause, a long history of anti-Japanese measures and attitudes made it possible for the public, shocked by the growing dimensions of the U.S. military debacle in the Pacific war, to accept and even approve measures that clearly contradicted American values.
The triggering mechanism for incarceration was Executive Order 9066, drafted in the War Department and signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, seventy-four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The executive order specified no particular group of persons, and some in the War Department would have applied it to enemy aliens and perhaps others anywhere in the United States. It empowered Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and subordinates designated by him to exclude "any or all persons" from areas he might designate and to "provide … transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations … to accomplish the purpose of this order." Read without context, it seems to be a relief measure, but government spokesmen, chief of whom was the future attorney general and U.S. Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, explained to the press that it was aimed chiefly at Japanese, who would be moved away from the West Coast.
Moving Toward Incarceration
Even before the promulgation of the executive order, the lives of the West Coast Japanese, alien and citizen, had been disrupted by a series of wartime government decrees. Apart from an 8 December 1941 proclamation empowering a selective internment of Japanese "alien enemies" conforming to existing statute law, a Justice Department order forbade "alien enemies" and persons of Japanese ancestry from leaving the country. In addition, Treasury Department orders froze the bank accounts of alien enemies and all accounts in American branches of Japanese banks, which immobilized most of the liquid assets of the entire Japanese American community. In addition, a joint Justice and War Department directive in late December effectively nullified the Fourth Amendment as far as Japanese Americans were concerned, as it authorized warrantless searches of any premises housing "alien enemies," which meant, in practice, any Japanese American home.
Sometime after the issuance of Executive Order 9066, government lawyers realized that no federal law required civilians to obey military orders without a declaration of martial law. Therefore, the War Department drafted and Congress—without significant debate or recorded vote—enacted Public Law 503 on 21 March 1942. This measure made it a misdemeanor to violate an order by the secretary of war or any officer designated by him to leave a "military area." On 18 March, Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9102, establishing the civilian War Relocation Authority (WRA) to take charge of "persons designated" under Executive Order 9066.
Carrying Out Relocation and Incarceration
With these legal underpinnings in place, the army, with the clandestine and illegal help of the Bureau of the Census, divided the West Coast states into 108 separate districts, most of which contained about one thousand Japanese persons. General John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of West Coast defense, issued a series of civilian exclusion orders, one for each district, ordering "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien" to "report to a specified place in the vicinity," bringing whatever belongings they could carry, for transportation to an assembly center. Although the government did not confiscate property, except for fishing boats, firearms, explosives, and some radios, most Japanese American families lost, or disposed of at fire-sale prices, the bulk of their personal and real property.
Once in military custody, Japanese Americans were moved first to one of sixteen assembly centers and, from there, to one often relocation centers under the authority of the civilian WRA. The whole mass movement began on 31 March 1942, with 257 persons taken from Bain-bridge Island in Puget Sound and sent to Manzanar in the desert country northeast of Los Angeles. It was not completed until the end of October, with shipments of 655 persons from the Santa Anita Racetrack camp to WRA camps in Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
The assembly centers utilized existing facilities; some families were housed in horse stalls at racetracks and cattle pens at fairgrounds. The inmates were, however, not far from home and could be visited by non-Japanese friends and neighbors. The relocation centers, however—built in slapdash fashion for their current purpose—were located, by design, in desolate places.
Resistance
The overwhelming majority of Japanese Americans simply complied with the successive government orders as their community leaders recommended. Several thousand were able to avoid being seized by moving to territory east of the forbidden zone that comprised California, western Washington and Oregon, and a small part of Arizona before the government closed that escape route in March 1942. A dozen or so of those who remained either challenged the government orders through the courts or tried to avoid its clutches by attempting to assume non-Japanese identities. The legal protesters greatly concerned government leaders, but they need not have worried: the federal judiciary, with a few nonbinding exceptions, simply accepted the government's rationale about military necessity and the inherent untrustworthiness of Japanese Americans.
Three of the legal challenges eventually made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In June 1943, the Court decided unanimously in Hirabayashi v. United States that an American citizen of Japanese ancestry had to obey a curfew order; the Court avoided ruling on incarceration. The two other cases were not decided until December 1944. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court, now divided in a 6–3 vote, ruled that a citizen had to obey the military evacuation orders. Paradoxically, however, in the Ex parte Endo decision handed down the same day, the Court decided unanimously that a citizen of undoubted loyalty might not be held in camp or prevented from returning to California.
Life in the Camps
Life in the concentration camps was severe but generally not brutal, although on three occasions at three separate camps, troops guarding them shot and killed unarmed inmates, most of whom were protesting conditions. The civilian War Relocation Authority, in many ways a typical New Deal agency, tried to treat the prisoners humanely as long as they obeyed the rules. In many ways the administration resembled that of Indian reservations, and, in fact, the WRA head, Dillon S. Myer, later ran the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The WRA rules allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to leave the camps for work, for education, and, eventually, for military service. Some 3,600 young men entered the U.S. Army directly from camps, first as volunteers and then as draftees. Several hundred young men, however, resisted the draft, claiming that since they had been deprived of their liberty, they should not have to serve. The courts disagreed and sentenced 263 to terms in federal penitentiaries.
Redress
After the war the government slowly receded from its actions. In a 1945 ceremony, President Harry S. Truman honored Japanese American soldiers, telling them that "you have fought prejudice and won." In 1948, the Japanese American Claims Act provided limited compensation for certain property losses. Decades later, in 1976, President Gerald R. Ford issued a proclamation revoking Executive Order 9066, declaring that "Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans." Finally, responding to a 1983 recommendation of the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the government in 1988 awarded each of some eighty thousand survivors a $20,000 tax-free redress payment and eventually sent each a check and a letter of apology signed by President George H. W. Bush.
Bibliography
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
Daniels, Roger, ed. American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941–1945. 9 vols. New York: Garland, 1989. A collection of archival documents.
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, and James D. Houston. Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. The best-known memoir of incarceration.
Maki, Mitchell T., Harry H. L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold. Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Myer, Dillon S. Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority during World War II. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971. An apologia by the head of the War Relocation Authority.
Taylor, Sandra. Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz. Berkeley: University of California, 1993. The best account of a single incarceration camp.
