Japanese Internment
Author: Rebekah Nelson
Early in the morning of December 7, 1941, shortly before 8:00A.M.,
the sun began to show itself to the dawn that lay over the island of Oaho,
Hawaii, and to an impending day that would live in infamy.(Fremon 27-28)
Newspaper headlines read, “JAPS START SURPRISE WAR: Surprise Attacks on
U.S. Bases in Pacific inflict Heavy Losses,” the following morning.(Worcester
Telegram 1) Americans may have been led to believe, by reports written
in newspapers and broadcasted over the radio, that the Japanese military
campaign carried out over Pearl Harbor was a malicious, immoral, surprise
attack, but our history tells a different story. In actuality, Americans
did not realize that the Japanese had the capabilities and will to orchestrate
such a raid, which “forced” the United States to enter World War II and
declare war on Japan, Italy and Germany.(Fremon 28) Misinterpreted
intercepted messages warning of the Japanese attack and a compromised American
alertness provided a motive for refusal by military and political officials
of any responsibility in the air raid. Americans were left with the
destruction of eighteen U.S. ships and two hundred aircrafts with a void
of something tangible to blame. Nearly 2,500 men were killed, and
Americans reasoned that spies and enemy agents must have helped the Japanese
in their strike from Hawaiian skies.(Fremon 27) In the days following
Pearl Harbor, people began to suspect that the attacking Japanese had been
aided by the Japanese and Japanese Americans living in Hawaii and along
the west coast of the United States.(Fremon 28)
Long before war was declared on Japan, resident Japanese were
an unpopular and often unwelcome group. They dwelled in private communities,
set apart from the larger population, and their adherence to their ancestral
culture patterns further emphasized their isolation.(Grodzins 2)
Cultural differences made the Japanese a target of popular distaste, and
a scapegoat for the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. Racism, war hysteria,
and fear provided Americans with an excuse to subject the Japanese population
in America to democratic injustices in the form of the Japanese Internment
of 1942.(Stevenson 24) Japanese were herded into assembly camps and
then brought to concentration camps where many lived for an average of
two and a half years, under harsh conditions.(Zich 512) Several anti-Japanese
factions, poorly researched news reports, damning propaganda, corrupt politicians
and false rumors were at the heart of the torturous misery that the Japanese
were to face in the months following the United State’s entry into WWII.
In the first weeks of war, acts of public hostility were sporadic
and their effects were minor in character. The Department of Justice
began to arrest large numbers of (Japanese) individuals who were considered
to be potential threats, but stressed their opposition to repressive acts
against the Japanese as a group. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
California Governor Culbert L. Olson, and several other congressman paid
tribute to the loyalty of their nation’s minorities and asked that they
be treated fairly. Church leaders, social service, and civil liberties
organizations expressed their sympathy for the American Japanese and provided
assistance to those thrown out of work by misinformed, distrustful employers.(Grodzins
19) Many members of the West Coast Japanese Community, despite the
prejudiced views that they were being exposed to, were deeply ashamed by
what their country had done to the U.S. naval bases.(Fremon 24) One
American born Japanese man, Shigeo Wakamatsu, addressed the student body
at the College of Puget Sound saying, “Because I believe in America, and
I trust she believes in me…I pledge myself to do honor to her…to support
her Constitution, to obey her laws, to respect her flag, to defend her
against all enemies…to actively assume my duties and obligations cheerfully,
and without any reservation whatsoever, in the hope that I may become a
better American in a greater America.”(6-8) In May 1942, one month
before Shigeo was scheduled to graduate from college, he was relocated
to a detention camp in the Rocky Mountains.(8) This example shows
that the unparalleled patriotism of Japanese Americans was meaningless
to racist citizens as fear swept the west coast and popular sentiment
changed.
By 1940, the anti-Japanese sentiment that had existed in the
1920s, had virtually disappeared excluding some rural communities where
there was jealousy of successful Japanese farmers. Prior to the outbreak
of WWII, Americans were directing their prejudices against the Filipinos,
who were the latest immigrants to arrive and begin competing in the work
force. Yet, since they were not our enemies in the war, hate reverted
back to the Japanese.(Stevenson 23) Rumors of spying and sabotage
were said to have spread like “California brushfire.”(Fremon 23)
Stories circulated about the treachery of the Japanese and reports were
made that they were transmitting information to the enemy and preparing
to conduct a program of mass sabotage.(Grodzins 2-3) Japanese-Americans
farmers in Hawaii allegedly planted crops in the shape of a huge arrows
to direct the Japanese Air Force to the Pearl Harbor naval base, and American
university class rings were said to have been found on the fingers of downed
Japanese pilots after Pearl Harbor.(Fremon 24-25) It was said that
Japanese-American fisherman were really officers in the emperor’s navy
and they were consequently ordered not to go out fishing. Henry Murakami,
a fisherman, stated, “We put away all the nets, tied the boats, and all
you had to do was stay home and watch what was going on.”(Harris 109-111)
Later, he was taken by the FBI, separated from his wife and children, and
sent to Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, with only a pair of Japanese slippers
between him and the newly fallen snow.(109-111) While prominent members
of Japanese families were being carted away by bus and by train, newspaper
headlines that spoke of sabotage and secret submarines inspired the exclusion
of their remaining family members from daily life.(Stevenson 23)
Nisei, American-born persons whose parents were from Japan,
and their Issei parents faced discrimination as a wall of hatred grew from
unfounded fears of mass conspiracy. On March 31, 1942, broadsides
appeared on notice boards in certain communities on the western seaboard
bearing the title “Civilian Exclusion Order.”(Armor 3) They lost
private businesses and civil service jobs; they were no longer allowed
to enlist in the armed services; and many already in the army and navy
were discharged. Japanese-Americans were given the classification
“IV-C-enemy aliens,” when they were neither in actuality. Yoshiko
Uchida claimed, “It (the classification attributed to his people) was not
because we had done anything wrong, but simply because we looked like the
enemy.”(Fremon 26) At this point, many traditionally anti-Japanese
individuals and organizations realized that the war with Japan offered
an opportunity to further their goals of segregation. Members of
the Western Growers Protective Association and the Grower-Shipper Vegetable
Association were among these groups.(Grodzins 19-20) Politicians,
pressured by their voters, started taking action against the Japanese to
ensure their political status, to ease the mindset of their people, and
to quench their own racist views. Residents of Japanese ancestry
immediately fell victim to government rules. Their bank accounts
were frozen; their safety deposit boxes were confiscated; they were held
to an 8:00P.M.curfew; they could not travel more than five miles beyond
their homes; they could not travel by plane, train, bus or boat; and they
had to turn in all short-wave radios, cameras, binoculars, firearms and
pocket knives.(Fremon 25-26)
Extreme political views from high-ranking officials concerning
what should be done with the Japanese living in America encouraged the
efforts of segregationists. John Rankin, a Mississippi Congressman,
stated his opinion on Japanese patriotism to the United States saying,
“Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot
make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”(Zich 2) He was also quoted
saying; “The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese
barbarism (and) one of them must be destroyed.”(The Politics#1 11)
Tennessee Senator Tom Stewart and Congressmen William F. Novell of Arkansas,
Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, Schuyler O. Bland of Virginia, and
Martin Dies of Texas all shared Ranklin’s opinions.(11) Even President
Roosevelt shared in these ignorant stances. He believed that the
Japanese skull patterns, “being less developed than that of the Caucasians,
might be responsible for their aggressive behavior.”(11-12) On other
occasions, he had been known to join in jokes against Jews, Puerto Ricans,
and Italians. In contrast, some politician, like the Attorney General
to Roosevelt, Francis Biddle, felt that the fears of mass sabotage were
unfounded.(The Politics#5 2) The growing concern of officials in
the California state government, the Army, and the White House resulted
in plans for evacuating and then removing the Japanese from areas where
they posed a threat.(Ward 40-41)
During this time, President Roosevelt entrusted Lieutenant
General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, with the defense
of the Pacific Coast.(The Politics#1 1) In the months after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, DeWitt appeared content to leave the problem of enemy
aliens to the Justice Department, but as the Japanese became the object
of mass hysteria, his views changed.(1) Lt. General DeWitt, along
with State Attorney General Earl Warren became increasingly concerned with
the Japanese-Americans, who made up only one percent of California’s population
and had engaged in no identifiable sabotage.(Ward 41) Henry L. Stimson,
Secretary of War, observed that “We cannot discriminate among our citizens
on the grounds or racial origin,” but his views were thrown to the side
in the race for control of the issue between the War and Justice Departments.(The
Politics#1 1) In this contest, DeWitt became a pawn for a Major Karl
R. Bendetsen, Chief of the Aliens Division, Provost Marshal General’s Office,
and his superior, Allen Gullion, who sought to take control of the enemy
aliens from Attorney General Francis Biddle, strongly desired the removal
of all Japanese from the West Coast. Colonel Karl Robin Bendesten,
who also wished to have control in the issue, pressured the Assistant Secretary
of War, John McCloy, and Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, to take action,
for he felt sure that a Japanese invasion was possible. Influenced
by Bendesten and Gullion, DeWitt and Stimson agreed that the Japanese posed
a potential threat to the United States.(The Politics#1 1)
In a letter that General DeWitt wrote to Henry Stimson on
February 14, 1942, he claimed that, “In the war which we are now engaged,
racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race
is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born
on U.S. soil, possessed of U.S. citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’
the racial strains are undiluted…along with vital Pacific Coast, over 112,000
potential enemies of Japanese extrication are at large today.”(The Politics#1
1) In agreement, Stimson stated, “Their racial characteristics are
such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”(The
Politics#2 13) On February 2, 1942, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director,
wrote in disagreement to DeWitt’s view claiming, “The necessity for mass
evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather
than on factual data. Public hysteria and…the comments of the press
and radio announcers, have resulted in a tremendous amount of pressure
being brought to bear on Governor Olson (Culbert L. Olson of California)
and Earl Warren, Attorney General of the State, and on the military authorities.”(The
Politics#5 7) Later, he criticized the Army’s Military Intelligence
Division as untrained, disorganized, hysterical, and lacking in judgment
because he felt that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had already identified
possible Japanese agents and had eliminated the threat.(7)
In the end, it was Major Bendetsen who designed the plan that
would become Executive Order 9066, transforming the Japanese-American issue
into a more legally defensible military issue, that shrewdly made no mention
of race.(The Politics#2 2) Father Hugh T. Lavery of the Catholic
Marvknoll Center in Los Angeles later stated, in 1949, that, “Colonel Bendestsen
showed himself to be a little Hitler. I mentioned that we had an
orphanage with children of Japanese ancestry, and that some of these children
were one-half Japanese, others one-fourth or less. I asked which
children should we send (to the camps) and Bendetsen said: “I am determined
that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp”…”(Zich
2) Ratification of Executive Order 9066 would allow farms and towns
designated “military areas” by General DeWitt to be cleared and the property
within the area to be confiscated.(Ward 41) While public opinion
expressed the desire to have Roosevelt concentrate on the war in the Pacific
before the one in Europe, his alliance with Winston Churchill put Europe
in the forefront. Nevertheless, in order to please his voters, Roosevelt
sent bombers to Japan and signed the Executive Order 9066, drafted by the
War Department Aliens Division on February 19, 1942, but he warned the
army “to be as reasonable as you can.”(The Politics#1 12) Nisei and
Issei were shocked by the actions of President Roosevelt. Only hours
before the signing of the order, a man of Japanese descent had exclaimed,
“Our greatest friend is a man who is the greatest living man today-President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”(Fremon 31) The American judicial system
was the last hope for the Japanese.
During the onset of the evacuation and the internment of the
Japanese, the Supreme Court was faced with three defining cases.
Hirabayashi vs.United States, 320 U.S. 81 was the first of these cases.
It dealt with the curfew, issued by the commanding general of Western Defensive
Command on March 24, 1942, which directed all persons of Japanese ancestry
to remain in their homes from 8:00P.M. to 6:00A.M. Korematsu vs.
United States, 323 U.S. 214, the second case, contended that the military
program (evacuation) violated the rights guaranteed to American citizens
by the fourth, sixth, eight and thirteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Both cases argued that American citizens of Japanese ancestry were denied
due process of law as guaranteed by the fifth Amendment.(Grodzins 351)
The Supreme Court upheld the legality of the curfew laws and evacuation
itself by quoting the Hirabayashi decision, “We could not reject the finding
of the military authorities that it was impossible to bring about an immediate
segregation of the disloyal from the loyal.”(353-354) Evacuation,
the Court said, was not “beyond the war power of the Congress and the Executive.”(354)
In each case, the Court balanced infringement of civil liberties against
the government’s war power. In Justice Hughe’s opinion, many contingencies
are created during circumstances of modern warfare which may bring it (military
measures) into conflict with civil liberties.(351-352) Hughe’s view
not only supported the outcome of Korematsu vs. United States, but it also
justified the court’s decision concerning the case of Ex parte Endo.
Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, 323 U.S. 283, involving the detention
of loyal Japanese-Americans by the War Relocation Authority, was the third
case brought to the Supreme Court.(Grodzins 351) The Court decided
that the United States actions were legal under the Constitution.
This decision was what allowed the opening of concentration camp gates
on December 18, 1944.(Stevenson 24) Mr. Justice Frankfurter offered
a separate opinion that perhaps best represents the Supreme Court’s position,
stating, “To find that the Constitution does not forbid the military measures
now complained of does not carry with its approval of which the Congress
and Executive did. That is their business, not ours.”(Grodzins 354)
The evacuation program was instituted and executed by the U.S. military
forces with the full mandate of power from both the legislative and the
executive branches of the national government.(2) In effect, the
Japanese had no choice but to sell their belongings and leave their
homes to live in concentration camps.
The evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from the Pacific
Coast in the spring and summer of 1942, was an unprecedented act in the
history of American democracy, perhaps comparable only to the injustices
endured by Native Americans years before. Evacuation notices gave
some Japanese just two days to dispose of nearly all their possessions.
Some were able to leave their property with friends, yet the majority were
left to deal with bargain hunters and profiteers.(Zich 528) Many
lost farms to land speculators who had coveted the emergency legislation.(Ward
42) A Japanese woman, Mary Oda, claims that her family had two weeks
to rid itself of a new, twelve-hundred dollar tractor, three cars, three
trucks, and all their crops. They received thirteen hundred dollars
selling their property, but could not argue because they had to leave.(Zich
528) A number of Japanese, worried about their safety, were relived
when orders for evacuation came. One woman, Margaret Takahashi, later
said that, “When the evacuation order finally came, I was relieved.
Lots of people were relieved because you were taken care of. You
wouldn’t have all this worry.”(Harris 107)
Officially, the government called the Japanese “evacuees.”
None had been charged with any crime, nor would they be in the future,
yet the government claimed that these people were potential enemies to
the U.S.(Armor xxii) Before the evacuees were brought to the permanent
camps, they were herded into assembly centers on abandoned racetracks and
fairgrounds.(Zich 512) Those brought to assembly centers had tags
affixed to their clothing, bearing their family’s identification number.(520)
A racetrack near Pasadena, California was a sight for one assembly center.
Another assembly center in Santa Anita was transformed from manure-speckled
horse stalls into housing for families. Kazuyuki Takahashi, one an
inhabitant of the center, now a doctor, later stated that, “After a couple
of weeks, mushrooms began growing up through the floor.”(Zich 529)
Often, conditions worsened when they were transferred to permanent concentration
camps.
By September 1942, ten camps had been hastily constructed
in the wilds of Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and
Wyoming. Hoping to prove their patriotism, the majority of the Japanese
Americans went to the internment camps “without a whisper.” Many
couples rushed their marriages so that the evacuation would not separate
them.(Zich28-529) One half of the evacuees were under the age of
twenty and many neither spoke nor read Japanese.(Stevenson 22) Almost
one third of the prisoners were Japanese citizens, defined as resident
aliens.(Armor 69) The entire Japanese-American population was evacuated
except for a handful of ill or otherwise incapacitated persons and a smaller
number of irreplaceable workers.(New York Times 1) In all, one-hundred
and ten thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry were evacuated. The
young and the old, the sick and the well, mothers, grandmothers, infants,
orphans, foster-children in white homes, offspring of Japanese-Caucasian
marriages, persons unaware of their Japanese ancestry and aging veterans
were all among the evacuees.(Grodzins 2) All camps were deliberately
isolated from towns and cities of any considerable size.(Armor 70)
One camp, Manzanar, was described as a “lonely crossroads
in Inyo Country, California,” near the rugged eastern Sierra Desert.(Armor
xi) It was made up of wood-framed, tar-paper barracks surrounded
by barbed wire, with armed guards on look out in Sentry towers. Each
barracks consisted of four twenty by twenty foot rooms, furnished with
an oil stove and a bare hanging bulb. Showers were open, latrines
were exposed and there were only five doctors to care for ten thousand
people. Tom Watanabie, who lived in Manzanar, and who lost his wife
and twin girls during childbirth at the camp said that, “What haunted me
was that for years I didn’t know what they did with the bodies.”(Zich 529)
The hardships of life were often emphasized by other severe conditions.
Even in the late spring, nighttime temperatures in the valley dropped to
freezing. Temperatures in the day often soared above one hundred
degrees Fahrenheit, and the prisoners were required to grow their own food
despite the weather conditions.(Armor xiii) As the winter of 1942
set in, pro-Japanese gangs were trying to give rise to a reign of terror.
Two days before Pearl Harbor’s first anniversary, Fred Tayama, a pro-American,
was severely beaten and three Kibei, American born citizens educated in
Japan, were arrested for the assault. The next day a riot erupted
and eleven internees were wounded and two were killed by military police.
It was the worst violence that developed from the conditions of the camps
during the whole evacuation.(Zich 529-530) Japanese tradition had
dictated that individuals should be private, submissive, and hard working,
in effect, leaving many Japanese-Americans to deal with pent up emotions,
violence, and inhumane conditions that they were present with, on their
own.
Rohwer, Arkansas, the sight of another camp, was surrounded
by a mosquito and snake-infested swamp. A camp in Poston, Arizona
got so hot that people jokingly renamed it “Roastin.” Dwellers poured
water on their canvas cots and slept outdoors, trying to keep cool, until
dust storms drove them back inside.(Zich 529) Reverent Perry Saito
later told a writer about the conditions of Tule Lake, “The four of us
slept in one room and each room had only…one army canvas cot and a straw
mattress and a pot bellied stove, no chairs, no tables, no curtains on
the window, no rug on the floor, no place to hang your clothes…”(Axford
60) One woman who lived at a camp in Topaz stated; “People were lost
all the time.”(Stevenson 96) Conditions in every camp were harsh
and unyielding, yet people were forced to remain in them for an average
of over two years, until their “Americanization Process” had been completed,
and the government saw them fit to return into American society.
The return of the Japanese to American communities was a slow
and painful process, hindered by numerous anti-Japanese movements and racist
political leaders. Literally hundreds of anti-Japanese organizations
were formed during and after the Internment. Organizations such as
the California Joint Immigration Committee, the California Federation of
Women’s Clubs, the California Citizens Association of Santa Barbara, the
California Citizens Council of Los Angeles, the American Foundation for
the Exclusion of the Japanese, the No Japs, Incorporated, of San Diego,
and the Home Front Commandos all fell under this category.(Girdner 356-358)
The threatening nature of some of these groups caused many individuals,
both inside and outside and outside of the camps, to fear the worst if
evacuees were released, even the possibility of mass murder. Some
of these groups were economically motivated and some were patriotically
motivated, but fortunately, the most extreme were “more noisy then numerous.”(357-358)
Organizations that defended the rights of American-Japanese were charged
with being under Communist control by anti-Japanese individuals.(364)
However, by 1943, anti-Japanese sentiment, fueled by war time propaganda,
began to reach its crest, and would soon be brought down by stronger “waves”
of sympathy, originating in the entertainment world.
In the entertainment world, Art Linkletter, Frank Sinatra,
Bob Hope and Edgar Rice Borroughs, after visiting with physically shattered
Nisei soldiers (who had fought for the United States) in European hospitals,
publicly praised the American Japanese. A considerable amount of
resistance to the prejudice stand was beginning to be felt.(Girdner 370)
In the 1944 California primaries, a number of incumbent candidates taking
anti-Japanese stands were defeated. Along with the fall of some political
leaders, came the end of the Jerome relocation center in Arkansas in June,
1944 (residents were transferred to other camps). Evacuees were allowed
to leave the detention centers to work on neighboring farms and some selected
evacuees were able to establish new homes in other sections of the country.(371)
As of midnight January 2, 1945, restrictions were officially removed from
the Japanese group that had been excluded from the West Coast, but with
a large number of exceptions.(381) Eventually the politics keeping
the Japanese interned broke down because it could no longer be craftily
justified or hidden from a war-consumed country. One by one, the
camps closed.
Tule Lake, the last of the concentration camps, closed for
good in March 1946.(Zich 533) While some left the camps and settled
in less hostile parts of the country, some others went into the armed services.
Those remaining either renounced their citizenship and moved to Japan,
or made the decision to go back to the West Coast.(Stevenson 24)
A number of people who tried to buy houses on the coast were handed injunctions,
a “restrictive covenant,” threatening them with a thousand dollar fine
and/or a year in jail if they moved in.(Zich 533) Professional patriots,
trying to keep the Japanese from returning, resorted to vandalism, arson
and shooting, but they were unsuccessful in their goal.(Stevenson 96)
The War Relocation Association set up regional offices on the Coast during
the early part of 1945, to help find jobs and houses for the returning
Japanese.(Girdner 355) One third of all Japanese-American truck farmers
on the West Coast found their lands ruined or lost to foreclosure.
Japanese neighborhoods everywhere were gone, their homes and shops taken
over by workers of the war effort who had been flooded into the region.
It is estimated that the evacuees losses totaled four million “1942 dollars.”(Zich
533) Incarceration had fractured families along political and generational
lines and having been branded disloyal without reason, the Japanese suffered
from a gnawing sense of shame, of which they passed to their children.(512)
Because of this, many Sansei, second generation Japanese-Americans
(Nisei offspring) grew up torn between their parents’ unspoken shame and
a strong new American pride in ethnic identity. The Issei and Nisei
had shrouded their wartime experiences from the world because of their
anger, shame and humiliation, leaving their children with their bottled-up
emotions. They spend their lives believing that “shikata-ga-nai”
(nothing can be done), and left their children believing “there’s something
wrong with us.”(Zich 537) Sansei children wished they were not Japanese
and were not proud of their identity. Many turned to drug abuse,
and only now do they understand that they should not be ashamed of their
background.(537)
Following the end of World War II, Japanese-Americans began
to take legal action, trying to clear their names and their race of any
wrong doing attributed to them in the past. In 1948, Congress appropriated
thirty-eight million dollars to settle Japanese claims, but processing
was so snarled that the internees accepted an average of a dime on the
dollar. One woman who carried the ashes of her dead husband, son,
and daughter around for six years, unable to afford a proper funeral, finally
settled on one thousand eight hundred dollars just to see them buried.
In 1952 the Japanese won the repeal of California’s alien land laws, and
Congress granted the Issei’s right to citizenship. Social barriers
soon fell and the Nisei men and women found that Japanese values had become
marketable commodities in America.(Zich 533-536)
The most momentous of the legal actions was finally getting
Congress to establish a commission in 1980 to investigate the facts and
circumstances surrounded the Executive Order 9066. For the first
time, Japanese-Americans came forward and publicly recounted their experiences
in the camps. After hearing the testimony from seven hundred and
fifty witnesses, the commission concluded that the Executive Order 9066
was not justified by military necessity, that a “grave injustice” had been
done to those interned, and that the historical causes behind the order
were “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
The commission recommended the appropriation of 1.5 billion dollars as
compensation to the victims who had lost property and wages during the
internment. The Sensai who had not turned to drug abuse moved to
set their ethnic record straight, and in 1980, five Sansai attorneys crafted
a legal brief outlining the constitutional violations surrounded the camp
experience.(Zich 538) In 1983, these attorneys and a team of more
then one hundred volunteer lawyers and law students forced the reopening
of the three convictions that the Supreme Court had upheld in 1943 and
1944. In the case of Fred Korematsu, who was tried for resisting
internment, a U.S. district court judge in San Francisco overturned the
conviction, declaring that our institutions must “protect all citizens
from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”(Zich 538)
Today little remains of the relocation camps that deprived
the Japanese of liberty and property without due legal process but the
memories of those detained, some photographs, and documents.(Stevenson
24) At Manzanar, there lays a graveyard with a single bold monument.(Armor
xv) Looking back on this black page in our history, we are now able
to recognize that the relocation of Japanese-Americans was a shocking suspension
of the civil rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.(Stevenson 24)
The children’s children of the Issei have now risen among the ranks of
American society and been “awarded” the media catchphrase “model minority.”(Zich
537) But, let us not forget how war can transfigure powerful nations
into factions fraught with hatred and prejudice. If World War II
truly was a test of America’s commitment to democratic ideas, then America
failed. Too often the United States is seen as the epitome of democracy,
individual rights and freedom. Sometimes what others do not see,
and what Americans themselves do not understand, is that America is far
from perfect. We are a fallible nation that often sleeps in a blissful
ignorance. When we are afraid, we merely pull the pillow over our
heads and wait until the “danger” is hidden from view. The Japanese
Internment is a shameful period in American history. This war was
a time when we as a nation should have stayed vigilant about what truly
sets our nation apart.
Works Cited
*Armor, John, and Peter Wright. Manzanar. New York: Random House, Inc., 1988.
*Axford, Roger W. Too Long Silent: Japanese Americans
Speak Out. Lincoln: Media
Publishing and Marketing, Inc., 1986.
*Fremon, David. Japanese-American Internment. New Jersey:
Enslow Publishers, Inc.,
1996.
*Girdner, Audrie, and Anne Loftis. The Great Betrayel.
New York: Macmillan
Company, 1969.
*Grodzins, Morton. Americans Betrayed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.
*Harris, Mark Jonathan, Franklin Mitchell, and Steven Schechter.
The Homefront:
America During World War II. New York: G.P. Putnam’s
sons, 1984.
*Stevenson, Janet. “Return of the Exiles.” American Hertitage
June 1969: 22-25, 96-
99.
*”Surprise Attacks o n U.S. Bases in Pacific Inflict Heavy Losses.”
Worcester Telegram
8 December 1941: A1.
*The Politics, Japanese Internment. Comprised of writings extracted
from #1-Geoffry S.
Smith, #2-Michi Weglyn, #4-Stetson Conn, #5-reports from Commission
on
Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, and #6-Dillon
S. Myer. [online]
Available @ http://www.geocites.com/Athens/8420/politicians.html
*Ward, Nathan. “Separate and Unequal.” American Heritage
February/March 1992:
40-42.
*”West Coast Finishes Removing Japanese.” New York Times 8 June 1942: A5.
*Zich, Arthur. “Japanese Americans: Home at Last.” National
Geographic April 1986:
512-538.